Razer's Nari Essential headset is a nice wireless option, with oversized and super-comfy ear cushions, a THX spatial audio certification and a relatively sturdy design. It retailed at $100, half the price of the ultra-premium Nari Ultimate, but today it's significantly cheaper at Best Buy. You'll pay just $35 for it now, a $65 discount and a great deal for an older but still great-sound wireless headset.
Kingston's 1TB DataTraveler Max USB-C flash drive is an unusual beastie, matching NVMe-SSD-grade speeds with a slim, portable flash drive form factor. This drive is capable of reads up to 1000MB/s, putting it alongside some of the best external SSDs, and it's currently discounted at B&H Photo Video to $80 for a 1TB size - not bad!
Unfortunately this deal is only live for the next six hours, so I hope that you see this post in time!
The Adata XPG SX8200 Pro was one of the best value NVMe SSDs when it launched in 2019 - and indeed, we have the RPS review from erstwhile hardware editor Katharine to prove it. Nowadays, PCIe 4.0 drives are becoming more common and PCIe 5.0 is on the horizon, but the SX8200 Pro - in a newer 2TB size - is still an awesome value for the performance on offer. It's down to £117 at TechNextDay when you use code TND-10, a healthy £35 below the next-lowest price at CCL.
Intel's Arc graphics cards debuted to surprisingly warm reviews late last year, including over at Digital Foundry where I endorsed them as a "pleasant surprise" that were "already cards worth buying" thanks to better-than-expected performance in modern titles. Six months of patches and performance improvements later, and these GPUs look even better - especially as neither AMD or Nvidia has launched mainstream desktop graphics cards from their most recent generation.
Today, the cheaper of the two cards, the Arc A750, is available for £250 plus shipping at Overclockers UK, a steep £80 reduction from their £330 launch price.
Once again, the age ratings don't lie. It was widely reported last year that Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, the 2010 Nintendo DS banger from the creator of Phoenix Wright, had been rated in Korea for release on PC.
It was confirmed last night during the surprisingly PC-relevant Nintendo Direct. A remaster will come to Steam this summer.
When Pacific Drive was first announced during one of Sony's State Of Play streams a couple of months ago, my initial thoughts were, 'Hey, that spooky first-person driving game has some cool sci-fi vibes about it that makes it look like Control on wheels,' and, 'Man, I want to find out more immediately.' Well, thanks to a recent press presentation, I have found out more about Ironwood Studio's survival roadtrip game, and it's a lot more roguelike-y than I was expecting. Here's everything I learned.
Although the demo is relatively short, I’ve really been getting into the roguelike deckbuilding of Dungeon Drafters. I like the colourful pixel art, the classic fantasy enemy archetypes, how spell cards feel super punchy when activated, and I love love love> the magical, fluffy wizard rabbit.
Called The Explorer, this rabbit is not only super cute - his little brown booties are adorable, as is his helmet which has holes so his massive fluffy ears can poke through - but a bonafide badass in magic casting. This rabbit can majorly throw down.
What a week its been! Not a great one if you like zany battle royales, as it turns out. This week on the Electronic Wireless Show podcast we discuss the recent sunetting of Rumbleverse and Knockout City, and how long is a good run for games anyway? But in happier and more ridiculous news, we also get to talk about how massively popular Dwarf Fortress's steam release has been. Good ol' Dwarf Fortress. Plus: the Dreadwolf is leeeeeaaakiiiiing.
Nate's mini-game this week is offering us both dark bargains (I think I did pretty well out of mine), and in a Good Day To Ware Hard James explains why the graphics card market is broken, with a cowboy metaphor. This is a thing now.
A lot (most) of the magic games we're highlighting this week are in some manner lovely and nice, because witches these days tend towards the cottagecore (ily, Little Witch In The Woods!). It's nice that witches have changed in our minds to "unmarried lady who lives alone and is good with herbs and cats :]", when they used to be "unmarried lady who lives alone and is good with herbs and her cat is the devil and she has sex with the devil".
There's still room for witches with some threat to 'em, though, and I love a weird horror game, so you can imagine that when I heard about The Salt Order my interest was immediately piqued. It's a low-poly PS1-style game where an order of witches has tasked you with retrieving a grimoire from a cursed realm of endless trees. You are largely defenceless, except for the ability to draw on the ground with salt. "In many stories that I knew as a child, salt was one of the very powerful magical protective elements against evil spirits," solo dev Khamelot tells me over email. "During invocations, drawing a circle of salt could act as a basic protection. To prevent the spirits from entering one's home, you could put salt in front of the openings of the house."
We’ve all been busy here at RPS picking out our favourite demos in this spring’s Steam Next Fest. Looking at both the popular upcoming demo list and the most wishlisted list, survival crafting game Voidtrain sits comfortably in second place on both. I decided to download the demo and see what the fuss was about, and wow>, is Voidtrain completely wild.
I thought Voidtrain might be relatively new, but it's actually been knocking around for a couple of years. It’s been in early access on the Epic Games Store since 2021, and after announcing a Steam release for October 2022, the game got indefinitely delayed. Voidtrain's Steam page currently has a vague release date of sometime in 2023, but the demo is a good reason enough to check it out while the team is still tightening some loose screws.