In the grim darkness of the far future, the galaxy is your oyster. Or at least it will be, once you've played 100 hours of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, an RPG from Pathfinder developer Owlcat in which you can buy planets, configure your genocidal Dark Eldar friend to strike ten times a turn, and gaze on ruefully as a demon explodes out of your Psyker's head.

An immediate and shameful disclaimer: I can't match Nic Reuben's deep knowledge of the 40K tabletop universe, which saw him ruminating upon the mysteries of the Koronus Expanse back in 2022, while holding Owlcat's feet to the fire over the absence of space dwarves. The nearest I got to playing 40K as a lad was its Battlefleet Gothic spin-off (which none of my friends were interested in, so when I say "playing", I mean that I sat in a room staring glumly at some unpainted Lunar-class Cruisers while other kids went out and climbed trees). The framing I'm working with instead, based on an hour of hands-off Rogue Trader gameplay, is that it's sort of Warhammer Mass Effect, but with XCOM-style turn- and grid-based combat, and while there are opportunities to be a compassionate hero, you fundamentally only have the option of playing Renegade. Let's dig in!

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One SteamOS patch and a reinstall later, and I’ve overcome my initial launching woes to properly play Starfield on the Steam Deck. Though perhaps it was better off breaking in the atmosphere, and while I’m enjoying Starfield’s spacey adventures in a general sense, its punishing technical requirements are making the Deck’s usually-plucky hardware look like a pile of Old Earth scrap.

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Lightyear Frontier is not the kind of game that fits neatly into a 30-minute Gamescom demo. There's so much to see and do in this laidback farming mech sim that by the time my demo ends, I barely feel like I've scratched the surface of it (and that's even with the assistance of some handy secret dev cheats to show me some of the structures and features they've got planned later on in the game). Rather, this is a game that's designed to unfurl slowly, bit by bit, over the course of several hours, and before we begin, developer Frame Break's CEO Joakim Hedström tells me they've shortened the game's opening sequence for this particular demo, just so they can get players right into the thick of things as quickly as possible.

But even on this whistlestop tour, there's plenty to dig into and delight in here - not least its gloriously bright and inviting colour palette (take that, Todd). I got to sample its farming, its wonderfully weighty mech exploration, and even indulge in a little bit of, well, powerwashing. Yep, PowerWash Simulator's influence was well and truly felt at this year's Gamescom, and I'm so very here for it.

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Sad news vis-a-vis playing Starfield on the Steam Deck: it runs like a slug, even on the lowest possible settings. And if you were planning to get it through PC Game Pass, that's another issue, as Game Pass games are locked down behind the fully Deck-incompatible Universal Windows Platform system. If the wonder of space depends on the it being a borderless infinity realm of endless possibilities, nobody told Microsoft.

There is a way, however, to sidestep both problems. Xbox Cloud Gaming will let you play Starfield on the Steam Deck at a steady (enough) 30fps, by streaming the game from Microsoft's cloud network direct to your screen - no Proton GE or Lutris launcher required. It still takes some setting up, but luckily, you’ve already clicked onto a step-by-step guide on how to do it.

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The name Nextorage might not mean much to you, but this storage company was founded by Sony Japan employees in 2019 and acquired by NVMe SSD controller manufacturer Phison in 2022 - making them well-placed to deliver some high-quality SSDs. Today, their flagship NEM-PA2TB 2TB SSD is down to $109.99 at Newegg, where you can even pick up a $10 gift card with the purchase - neat.

For context, that ties the best price we've seen for a 2TB NVMe SSD, although this option comes with a heatsink and is therefore a better choice for many PC and all PS5 owners.

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Want to build a small form factor PC based around Intel's 12th-gen, 13th-gen or even their mooted 14th-gen processors? You should know that one of the best Mini ITX motherboards available for Intel CPUs has dropped to $309.99 at Amazon, a high but fair(er) price for an extremely powerful SFF motherboard packed with features. That represents a $90 discount and the best price ever recorded for this model, so it's well worth reading more...

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You may have seen that Alice Bee has started a "land on every planet" run of Bethesda's Starfield. By total coincidence - I promise you it's accidental, I was so pleased - I've been working on a "land on no> planets" run of Starfield. The reasoning for this is as follows: people say that outer space is the worst part of the game, because it's just an irritating interval between the maps where the majority of quests, loot, intrigues, etc are found. It's a fast travel loading screen you can fly about in. But what if you double-down on the space stuff?

What if you never descend from orbit, not even to repair, modify or upgrade your ship and offload inventory? What if, rather than buying new ships or building them, you progress exclusively by boarding other captains and making off with ship and cargo? How well does Starfield scrub up as a thoroughbred space sim that leans towards bloodthirsty piracy? Here to answer these questions is Mary Read, my custom character and budding astral freebooter. She's named for her distant ancestor, the legendary 18th century English buccaneer Mary Read. She's had a crack at life on shore, setting foot most recently on Earth's Moon, but from this point on, her fate and fortune lies amid the stars. Arrr!

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People have talked about Baldur's Gate 3 going a bit wonk in the final chapter when you reach the titular big city. It was actually my favourite act of the whole game - not that I doubt other people saw things going on the wonk a lot, but I did, thankfully, escape more or less unscathed (apart from one instance where, for some reason, Gale the smug sex wizard had a conversation with me, and then immediately repeated the exact same conversation). For me, the final act of BG3 is the act when all my nonsensing in the rest of the game paid off. The part where it turned out it did matter that I spent a painstaking hour separating and killing a bunch of guards in a mine, so I could save the gnomes trapped in a cave-in. It was also where a genie turned me into cheese.

Spoilers, obvs, if you're that way inclined.

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I am currently juggling two playthroughs of Starfield with very different aims. While Sayer the Space Scoundrel is having trouble getting around as they engage with the main story, I have started another character to engage in some nonsense (to the extent that there is any in Starfield) - the first of such I've detailed here.

I've said it before, but you're my very best friend, so we're going to play Starfield together. Join me as we step, wobbly and uncertain like Bambi on ice, into Bethesda's huge and partially procedurally generated space RPG universe for the adventures of Turbo Eclipse (I used an astronaut name generator intended for a child's party), a spacefaring nerd who longs only for the thrill of science. Yes, we're going to visit every planet in Starfield. Or at least as many as possible before I lose every single one of my marbles. And hey, planets look kinda like marbles! Strap in, spacefarers. Let's put this proc gen through its paces.

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As someone with a general aversion to online competitive modes in games, I'm always grateful when someone, for once, especially in this age of endlessly bland multiplayer experiments, thinks of the solitary solo player. I'm especially grateful when us single player preferers get a knowing nod of acknowledgement in fighting games, too, which are so naturally geared toward pitting your skills against other human beings that anything involving playing against the AI is often either an afterthought or so threadbare that you can't help but feel like you're missing the point.

But that's still, for my sins, how I like to consume fighting games when I occasionally play them - which isn't often, I'll admit, for exactly the reasons described above - and so when I sat down for my Mortal Kombat 1 demo session at Gamescom this year, I was pleased to see not just a very slick story mode in attendance, but also a new single player challenge mode called Invasions that publishers Warner Bros described as "a giant interactive board game" that "lent into action RPG" territory. Its numerous node-based missions looked substantial based on what I played, and the idea of applying a seasonal service model to it, endlessly rotating in new locations and missions every so often - a whole different Invasion, so to speak - is actually something I'd be very much behind. It, that is, I was a) good at Mortal Kombat, and b) the missions I played during my demo weren't quite so… err… boring.

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