Welcome once again to The Electronic Wireless Show podcast. We're discussing current things about old things this week, as Bayonetta man Hideki Kamiya reveals he's not super fond of the term 'retro' when applied to games. We discuss his comments, and what retro even means anyway, as well as what kind of games count as retro. Who even knows? Definitions are a jail, man.
Lords Of The Fallen is a curious sequel/reboot of the 2014 Lords Of The Fallen. It takes the Soulslike credentials of the original, gives them a grittier makeover, a much bigger world, and a magical lantern that reveals a gnarlier version of the universe you can actually step into.
Having spent roughly 90-minutes with the game, I'd say it has strong Dark Souls 2 energy mixed with a realm-hopping gimmick that's surprisingly impressive. While it's definitely too early to make big claims, I could see LOTF as a genuine competitor in the saturated Soulslike arena.
It's not just me - NVMe SSD prices have gotten absolutely wild recently, right? Today we spotted a deal on the 2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus, formerly one of the very fastest SSDs on the market. It normally retails for $100, but today it's down to an even more incredible $74 at Amazon - not bad for a drive that originally retailed at $500> and cost $100 more in January>!
Corsair makes some of the best power supplies in the business, and today one of their highly-rated 850W Platinum units is down to $125 at Newegg. To get this price on the Corsair HX850, use code BTSCVA93 at the checkout. This is a good price for this PSU, $60 below its US MSRP.
As a liker, consumer and person who used to work in print media, I always get a thrill out of seeing things like books in games, DVD shelves, magazines, you name it. If it's a bit of video game set dressing that has a legible spine with words on it, I will absolutely scrutinise it to the nth degree. Videoverse, the excellent homage to early 00s internet forums and Nintendo's Miiverse that came out earlier this week, doesn't have spine-filled book shelves, per se, but throughout the game you will see a collection of game magazines piling up on Emmett's desk, and readers, let me tell you, they are a delight>.
I'm still stupidly early on in my Baldur's Gate 3 journey - I did, after all, spend several hours replaying the start to see how different origin characters worked - but last night I had my first real run-in up at the chapel near where you crash land in the big nautiloid. I'd played this bit before in early access, so I knew to fireball the tiny bit of rope to drop the big stone down into the floor and take out the rest of the bandits hanging about up there pretty sharpish. But before I went down beneath the chapel (there were a lot of other> nasty bandits down there last time I checked), I had a little extra nose around the outside, eventually discovering a locked hatch down a nearby cliff path that took me to the brilliantly named Dank Crypt.
Sensing not all was well down here, I went into hiding mode and gingerly crept around the place, looting the handful of corpses lying about of their gold and spell scrolls, but leaving their weapons. You see, I have a terrible habit in RPGs of stuffing my pockets with absolutely everything I can find. In Bioshock, I will scavenge everything out of every bin like some feral raccoon; in Skyrim, I had to enable a cheat code for infinite storage one time because I was so overencumbered (and couldn't bear to part with everything I'd picked up over the course of the quest) that I actually couldn't move. And in my early hours of Baldur's Gate 3, I started doing exactly the same thing, looting everyone's swords, daggers and crossbows up on the Nautiloid. Not to much effect, mind. Nothing was really that much better than what I already had. So I resolved to do better and resist temptation. And what a dumb idea that> turned out to be...
Want a 128GB flash drive for half a sawbuck a fiver five of your US dollars? Good news, as this TeamGroup C175 USB drive is down to $5.49 at Newegg, half price and a great deal for a drive capable of 100MB/s reads in the right circumstances.
AMD's Ryzen 5 3600 processor remains one of the best "good enough" CPUs on the market, providing a six-core design and enough grunt to run most games at 60fps when paired with DDR4-3200 RAM and a good modern graphics card. The CPU launched at £200 and now costs around half that, but it does occasionally go on discount - and today that's happened, with the CPU now costing just £70 at Scan.
Baldur's Gate 3, out of early access last week, is an officially licensed D&D RPG of many hours of turn-based combat, as you bring together a rag-tag group of misfit heroes to save the world from a mysterious cult. And also every single one of those misfit heroes wants to get at you. In many cases with zero prompting from you whatsoever. It doesn't end with your team companions either; by my loose estimations, any character who is in upwards of three cutscenes comes with a 70% chance of propositioning you. There's one romance option that I experienced effectively as a jump scare, entering a cutscene to see a character suddenly and casually-not-casually shirtless. It never ends. In hindsight, picking from a selection of genitals in character creation was probably a clue.
The Logitech G502 X is an interesting remake of the RPS reader favourite G502 gaming mouse, and today it's discounted to $50 in the US when you use a $10 coupon code at Amazon.
It features a more streamlined design that James called "achingly close to perfection", with hybrid optical-mechanical switches and a slightly lower weight (89g) - plus the same high complement of programmable buttons and the hyper-advanced scroll wheel that made the G502 such a hit in the first place.