The Light Brigade has no direct relation to the British light cavalry unit made famous in the poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (which, if you head over to the poem's Wikipedia page, you can hear Tennyson himself read out via a phonograph recording from 1890 – Cool Factz!) But there is one bit of connective tissue, namely that charging into the fray is generally a bad idea. In the case of the game, that's because The Light Brigade is VR roguelike, one that blends Souls-like dark fantasy with World War II-era weaponry, with you playing a spiritually immortal but physically fragile warrior responsible for saving the world.

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JBL are well known for their speakers and other audio products, so it's not really a surprise that their Quantum series of gaming headsets tend to offer pretty excellent sound, with an apparent focus on immersion and simulated surround. What is a surprise is that the company's Quantum 600 wireless headset is down to $59.99 on Woot, a nice $90 reduction from its current Amazon price of $149.99.

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Happy birthday, anniversary, launchiversary, or whatever you want to call it to the Steam Deck. Valve’s handheld SteamOS games machine has successfully evaded hardware flop status, currently sitting fourth in Steam’s own top sellers list a full year after it began shipping. That’s well deserved, too: the Steam Deck was a fun little alternative way to play PC games when it released, and through a combination of added features, ongoing improvements to game compatibility, and simply a wider choice of great games, it’s a better device now than it’s ever been.

I was originally going to look back on the Steam Deck’s first 12 months with my eyes only, but what fun is a party of one? Thus I invited Valve designer Lawrence Yang and engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais for their takes on the Deck’s past, present, and future.

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2020’s Mars Horizon was a space flight management game where you were in charge of constructing bases, building rockets, and leading missions into the black abyss. Nate (RPS in peace) liked it quite a bit for its “masterfully crafted strategic dilemmas,” despite his findom relationship with the game. Now Mars Horizon is getting an expanded sequel, taking us to the outer reaches of the Solar System. Mars Horizon 2: The Search For Life is releasing sometime in 2024 on PC.

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Paradox pulled a nifty trick when they supplanted EA's urban city builder with their own, and they're now hoping to strike twice with Life By You, a competitor to The Sims, complete with all the top-down interior design and people management you’d expect. We only have a very brief glimpse at Life By You, but developer Paradox Tectonic and former Sims boss Rod Humble are holding an announcement event on March 20th - so, we’ll see more of the life sim later this month.

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It was only a few days ago that we reported on a UK sale of the Alienware AW3423DWF ultrawide gaming monitor based around Samsung's incredible 34-in QD-OLED panel, and now its American cousin is also discounted at the official Dell store. This model debuted at $1300, but a $100 price drop and a 10% off coupon code - SAVEMONITORS10 brings the AW3423DW to its lowest US price ever.

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We've seen 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSDs under the £100 mark before, but never have we see one for a clear £5 below - and never this model either. The Adata Legend 800 has been steeply discounted at Ebuyer, where £92 plus £3 shipping gets you this new model capable of 3500MB/s reads and 2800MB/s writes.

Yes, this isn't the best gaming SSD in terms of raw speed, but its PCIe 4.0 design means that it uses less power and fewer lanes than PCIe 3.0 alternatives of the same speed, a nicety for desktop use and a big deal for laptops.

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As I have complained about mightily in the past, I grew up somwhere that didn't have much in the way of entertainment, so me and my friends had to engage in the time honoured tradition of making our own fun. Once we reached about age 17 this included playing poker with a shared second-hand chip set, and trying to do beer centurions (the progress in the latter affecting our interest in the former). I was never any good at it because, though poker was a fixture for several years, I was never really able to learn the rules. What hand is good? Why has your hand beaten his hand? But the little pictures are the best, I don't understand! It's disappointing because understanding poker is a cool adult thing, plus not understanding it makes certain pivotal scenes in James Bond films quite hard to parse.

Last week we got an email (shout out Aidan) singing the praises of Aces And Adventures, and I do try to check out recommendations from readers, even if I don't have time to reply or to write about the games. In this case I've made a special because Aces And Adventures is a great game that is teaching me winning poker hands through the medium of a dwarven warrior smashing things.

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When Skyrim came out I was a student, and I worked in Gamestation (RIP) to help pay for chicken noodles. I remember the hype around it very clearly because Gamestation had a deal where you could buy it for like £22, and I had a sideline going when the stock was low to keep some back for my friends. Apols if you were caught in the crossfire for that, but dragon fever was running high off the back of a still very cool trailer, and shouting Fus Ro Dah was the only cure.

In the years since, Skyrim has been released and re-released many times, on every conceivable platform. "Arrow to the knee" jokes became de rigueur and hacky almost overnight, and at this point might have horse-shoed back around to being funny again. There are many examples of unrelated games or videos that cut to black fading back up into the opening of Skyrim, in a kind of sub-genre of rickroll. Does it hold up now? Kind of. It's a really fun, ambitious RPG, with faults - but if the faults didn't exist maybe it wouldn't have been as popular as it was.

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Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by cute townbuilding, decapitating horror, a demon skateboarding through Hell, bouncing logos, handcrafted strategy, an entire movie jammed into an immersive sim, and more. Come admire these interesting indies!

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