Both Nvidia and AMD's latest graphics card releases, the RTX 7600 and RTX 4060 Ti, have crashed and burned - so who's going to actually make a well-priced GPU? If you had Intel on your bingo cards, congrulations - their Arc A750 8GB graphics card is down to £230.98 on Amazon UK, marking a £20 price drop that brings this option way below the £300 RTX 3060 that it comprehensively beats.
Wow, this is a good one. The 1TB WD SN850x, our best PCIe 4.0 SSD for gaming, is down to £64.99 at Amazon UK - after costing £95 earlier this month! This is by far the cheapest price we've ever seen for this model and an incredible deal for the level of performance it provides.
This week, inspired by Doom running on teletext, the Electronic Wireless Show podcast investigates: what other devices, mechanisms, or live animals can join the immortal shooter’s vast empire of unlikely ports? Despite not even being on the show this week, Alice Bee tasks us with finding the best, worst, or weirdest cases of Can It Run Doom from across the internet. And, sometimes, inside Nate’s mind.
We also discuss what we’ve been playing this week, with a double bill of disappointment in The Lord of the Rings: Gollum and Darkest Dungeon 2, before Nate transforms the Tower of Jocularity into a marketplace of Dark Bargains. Capitalised for terrible, terrible emphasis.
I didn't get as deep into The Lord of the Rings: Gollum as our reviewist Rachel, but I do share her view that it is not A Good Game. In fact, I’ve had about as much fun with it as I would on a spa day in the Barad-dûr sulfur pits. Between the soulless platforming, undercooked stealth, tedious storytelling, and framerate stuttering so bad it’s got me killed twice, Gollum is perilously short on likeable qualities. Especially if you’re not into LOTR lore, or fine hattery.
In my unclad head, then, Gollum’s highlight so far has been DLSS 3. It’s one of just a few dozen games to support the newest, most artificially intelligent version of Nvidia’s deep learning-powered upscaler, and frankly makes a very compelling argument for switching it on. Graphics card allowing, obviously.
Last time, you decided that fighting your double is better than optional challenges giving rewards upfront. I am an impartial observer here but oops oh no I have accidentally copy/pasted a remark from commenter Oli Baba, who said "Rewards upfront is one of the coolest mechanics to grace gaming and seems to be losing only because so few people have come across it." Whoops, I really must fix those hotkeys. Next, I ask you to choose between cooly saying nothing, or being told how cool you are. What's better: a silent protagonist, or combat style ratings?
Small form factor (SFF) PCs are definitely in right now. I've built my fair share over the past few years, but new models continue to come into the market offering impressive looks, thermals, buildability for their size. One recent release is the Asus AP201, a Micro ATX case that offers excellent cooling potential, a stylish, unshowy appearance and a very reasonable price - especially today, as the black and white versions of this SFF case have dropped to $70 on Newegg following a $15 discount.
Logitech make some of the best peripherals in the business, including some of my favourite keyboards. I normally prefer mechanical fare here, but their MX Keys low profile scissor switch keyboard is the exception. It provides a full-size UK layout, pleasant typing experience and long battery life when connected via 2.4GHz wireless or Bluetooth. It's normally at its £120 RRP, or close to it, but today you can pick it up for £81 - the lowest we've seen it since January.
WD's SN770 SSD is one of the very best value options on the market, combining a PCIe 4.0 interface, sequential read speeds up to 5150MB/s and an aggressive pricing strategy that makes it extremely affordable to add to your PC or PS5. Today this drive has dropped to a new low on Amazon UK, where a 1TB model will cost you £43.99 and the 2TB size is just £99.98. Either way, you're getting a great value SSD that performs impressively for gaming.
Intel's Arc series of GPUs has continued to improve following the launch of the A750 and A770 last year, and now these RTX 3060 competitors have hit a new low price point in the US: $199.99 at Newegg.
That's an awesome deal for an 8GB graphics card that delivers excellent RT performance for its tier, AV1 encoding/decoding and a solid upscaling solution in XeSS. If you're in the market for a GPU that can handle 1080p gaming with a relatively modern motherboard that supports the Resizeable BAR feature, this is an awesome pickup for the money.
For whatever reason, I'm quite good at reading physical books, but when presented with a visual novel game my attention span slumps. "It's not you, it's me", rings true here, as it's definitely not the fault of the video games. I trust that Phoenix Wright or Paranormasight are brilliant, but the sudden act of having to read lots in a game has never worked out for me.
Then Citizen Sleeper came along for this month's RPS Game Club - and I think I'm a changed man? I think I now get why people are excited about static images and dialogue boxes. And I'm certain it's the game's cyclic nature that's managed to lasso my brain and keep it focused on the task at hand: help an AI trapped in a vending machine.