Sundays are for booking your Japan Rail Pass and having a trip become a little more real with each passing second. Before you check the cherry blossom forecast, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).
If you're looking for something to play this weekend, maybe hop on Game Pass to play the stylish rhythmic violence of Hi-Fi Rush. It'll be the focus of the first session of the RPS Game Club, so all the hepcats will be bashing baddies to the beat. But I should ask: what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!
HyperX's Pudding Keycaps, a popular choice for upgrading mechanical keyboards to blast out the RGB and improve the typing experience at the same time, are heavily discounted at Amazon US today. This full 104-key set normally retails for $25, but today you can pick them up in black for $15 or white for $20.
Samsung's fast Evo Select Micro SD card has dropped to £40 on Amazon UK, making it a good time to upgrade the storage of your Steam Deck. This card normally retails closer to £50, with a stated UK RRP of £55, but it has dipped as low as £37.99 for a few days over the past year.
Still, this is a very reasonable price for a memory card that's good for up to 130MB/s sequential reads and meets the A2 requirements for random performance.
There’s a minor bombshell tucked into the latest Steam Deck OS preview update, which is mainly about fixing Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty issues. With this update installed, you can enable proper, full-fat ray tracing on the Deck for the first time, specifically in Doom Eternal. Neat!
I've recommended a pretty wide variety of genres over the years, but I didn't expect a brick breaking game to surprise me like Destructure Colon Among Debris. It's not that I dislike them. They've just never really made much impression (possibly because I don't see all that many)
Destructure blends in a hint of shooting, resource management, and leans into the sheer fun of destruction, replacing bricks with "structures" that aren't meant to be anything specific, but give the whole feeling an impression of combat, an assault you're carrying out rather than a reacting, abstract geometry game.
Also it feels and sounds great to hit stuff. That's probably the bigger reason.
I'm going to Japan in a couple of weeks, and I am beyond excited. It's been 15 years since I last visited family in Yokohama, and my last memory is one where I'm miserable and I'm staring out of a cab window going back to the airport. I didn't want to leave. It sounds corny as heck, but I can't wait to sucker punch that memory with a swing that's been building for 5478 days, then jab it full of happy ones. Really, I imagine what will happen is I'll get weirdly emotional as the plane touches down and my mate Simon, who I'm going with, will be like, "Get a hold of yourself you buffoon".
I got LINE recently - a Whatsapp equivalent that's big in Japan - to arrange some meetups with friends and family. Those arrangements have happened, which brings me great joy. But in a surprise plot twist, it meant I got back in touch with a guy called Sam. Now Sam, he's a good bud and we go a long way back. All the way back to the original Gears Of War days. And I think we've arranged, as is custom, to play Gears 6 whenever it arrives. Such is the bizarre way of things.
This isn't technically a review, because who would review a game mode for Total War: Warhammer 3? What’s next, a title screen review? A lengthy personal essay about an attract mode clip? Can my cat get a review? First off, yes. Captain Waffles is a visceral tour-de-force that no fan of the genre should miss. 10/10. Secondly, you should know that Immortal Empires is, as far as Total War: Warhammer goes, the> game mode. More importantly, this ridiculously expansive, years-spanning grand-strategy project exists as tangible proof that sometimes, the limitless hubris of man is actually rad as hell, despite what the ancient Greeks said. Euripides nuts, more like.
Dead Island 2 seems destined to be a competent but unoriginal take on the zombie smashing genre. I am undecided if I find the prospect an entertaining diversion or a mind-numbing waste of time, but a new, extended 14-minute demonstration might help you make up your mind.
The Crucial P5 Plus occupies a unique place in the SSD ecosystem, offering high-end PCIe 4.0 performance while costing less than commonly-cited alternatives like the WD SN850x and Samsung 990 Pro. Today the 2TB size of the drive is down to £163, a 34% reduction that makes it particularly tempting to pick up.