Welcome to Part Two of The RPS 100 for 2023, our annual countdown of our favourite PC games from across the ages. Earlier this week, we ranked our favourite games from 100-51, which can be found over in Part One of this year's list. But now it's time for the big 50, going all the way to our collective number one. And I'll tell you now, it's not the same as last year.
SanDisk are well known for their Micro SD cards these days, but they've actually been making flash USB drives for even longer. Case in point is their SanDisk Ultra Flair, a metal-shod USB drive that's available in capacities up to 512GB - and it's this size that sees a nice 69% reduction on Amazon UK today.
Want a massive 32-inch 4K gaming monitor? Good news, because today you can pick one up for only £210 at Laptops Direct in the UK. That's a £144 savings versus its original price, and £139 cheaper than the same model is on Amazon right now.
It’s been about an hour since Evelyn Mansell - one of the lead art directors on the System Shock remake - and I started talking about guns. Specifically the big, daft chunky guns that she worked on, but also about videogame guns in general - what makes them tick. What separates a good one from a bad one. Whether or not Doom 3’s shotgun is one of the good ones (it is).
If there’s one area where all of the remake’s ideas truly come together and shine, it’s in the weapons. There wasn’t much to see in the original - nothing beyond the tip of a barrel. Here, the weapons are very much the star of the show. Heavy, industrial things covered in thumb-print smeared LCD screens and superfluous greeblies. NERF guns that've been painted by a 12-year-old and covered in spaceship parts. These are the toy guns you would have wanted for Christmas, and I wanted to know more about them.
I'm not someone who usually likes little puzzles or point-and-click games as I'm far too impatient. I'd much rather solve the puzzle by battering it with my fist so the pieces go flying everywhere, or turn my pointer into a fist so I can batter the dialogue out of the dialogue box and watch the wizard's words spill onto the dirt like I've just shaken an open can of spaghettios.
Unpacking, a game where you click on items and shelve them nicely, has somehow tamed my urge to punch the boxes open. Except it's done one thing to personally attack me, and that's by not allowing me to unpack stuff and leave it on the floor. It's a fight I simply can't win.
Having been absent for the majority of the last few pods, I'm back! At least for a bit, and just in time for Six Ages: Ride Like The Wind (a spiritual successor to King Of Dragon Pass) to to get a depressing-sounding sequel and Myst to get a Humble Bundle featuring its sequels, both official and spiritual. So that got us to thinking: what in the darn heck is a spiritual successor anyway? Are there standard parameters? We have a definitional argument, as is our wont.
Plus: we've been playing a clutch of games that are both fun to talk about and current, James instigates a discussion about whether SSDs should be considered the default over mechanical hard drives, and Nate does a mini-game contest that is literally just about fish and has no relation to games whatsoever.
Ideally, the story of Remnant II’s launch would start and end with it being an ambitious success of a shooty Soulslike. Sadly not: in a Reddit post addressing complaints of wonky performance, even on higher-end graphics cards, developers Gunfire Games admitted to having "designed the game with upscaling in mind."
Working the likes of Nvidia DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS into a game wouldn’t normally be a cause of incredulity. Indeed, as optional performance boosters, they’re pretty much always a welcome sight amid the duller texture filtering and ambient occlusion toggles of the average settings menu. The problem here is that with its dismal performance at native, non-upscaled resolutions, Remnant II essentially forgets about the 'optional' part – and in doing so, undermines what makes DLSS and its rivals such valuable tools in the first place.
In writing about games like A Little To The Left or current RPS Game Club pick Unpacking, I often have to point out that I am a weird little gremlin who loves puzzles and putting things in the right place in games, but not actually in real life. In real life, I write to you today from a desk covered in a weird detritus of work and life that wouldn't quite see me on an exploitative reality TV show with the word hoarder somewhere in the title, but, you know... maybe give it 15 years.
But I bloody love tidying things in games. Getting everything in the right place. And something that makes it extra enjoyable in Unpacking is the sound design. The house itself is quiet, but everything in the game makes a little noise when you put it away or hang it up or slide it in a shelf, and it's all stuff you recognise from home. It makes the whole experience feel domestic and familiar.
We begin this episode with a little bit of sad news: the Indiescovery podcast is going on hiatus, due to the fact that Rachel and I are both leaving Rock Paper Shotgun for pastures new. However, there's no need to be too downhearted, as your favourite indie-loving trio has every intention of continuing to collaborate on a few silly bits and bobs here and there.
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Now that Diablo 4's new season has arrived, I thought I'd give the game another shot. So, in an evening spare of stuff to do, I booted the game up and created a druid called ANIMALS. After a few hours of pressing 1,3,2,4, in either the same pattern or different patterns, I've come to realise the game doesn't make me feel anything. I bash some skeletons, I equip a staff, I exit to Windows, I couldn't care less. Maybe, though, it's not such a bad thing?
I know I said I'd like Diablo 4 to channel Vampire Survivors and give me an auto-attack switch, so I could just steer my character through encounters without having to think at all. I still stand by my stubbornness! But having obliterated more packs of rabid wolves and legions of demons, I've come to develop what I think is ARPG muscle memory.