Ryzen 7000 is AMD's most competitive series of CPUs yet, with the 7800X3D and 7950X3D tending to outperform Intel's Core i9 13900K flagship. If you're considering a Ryzen 7000 system, then you'll want a good value motherboard - and this option from MSI is a really good shout at $50 off.
Fast 2TB NVMe SSDs are continuing their downwards slide towards affordability, with Crucial's popular (and fast) P5 Plus PCIe 4.0 SSD reaching a new low of $88 at Newegg today. That price is courtesy of a $10 discount when you use code SSACW527 and runs for today only.
The P5 Plus is a drive that we've covered many times over on the RPS Deals beat, as it comes very close in performance to the top options in its category - your Samsung 990 Pros and your WD SN850xs - while often costing much less.
Samsung's 512GB Evo Plus Micro SD card has dropped to a new low price at Amazon and MyMemory, where it's now just £25 rather than the £32 we saw in July. That makes it a great time to add a huge amount of storage to your Steam Deck, ROG Ally, Nintendo Switch - or indeed, your camera, drone, phone or tablet.
I first clocked the mysterious-looking OU when Japanese indie collective Asobu did their pre-Bitsummit showcase stream in 2021. It wasn't entirely clear what OU was going to be at that point, other than a sort-of-puzzle game about an amnesiac boy who'd found himself in a fantastical world of picturebook pages, and even when Alicia Haddick played it for herself at Bitsummit proper the following year, OU still had a strong, impenetrable sense of ambiguity about it.
But its striking art and rustic guitar soundtrack have stuck in my mind ever since, and finally, OU is now out in the wild. I've only played about two hours of it so far, but it's clear there's still a lot more to discover within its dreamy little vignettes. It's one of those games that's designed to be played multiple times to get the full extent of the story, and I've just hit the first of those Nier Automata-esque restarts. Honestly, I'm not quite sure what to think of it yet, but one thing is certain: I can't get it out of my head.
As promised, I have returned from the Starfield fields for an extended look at its PC performance and settings. And what a journey it’s been – there was the drama-tinged DLSS mod, the crap Steam Deck showing, the streaming workaround for said crap Steam Deck showing, and even the first recorded instance (I think?) of a game utterly refusing to work on a hard drive.
Although most of my favourite films are tragedies, games with a grim and heavy premise don't often appeal to me as much as you'd think. I wasn't quite expecting to enjoy The Man Came Around, then, as it's about a group of desperate people trying to cross the border to escape their authoritarian government. In Winter, no less.
It's actually rather light in practice, although not in a flippant or trivialising way. The message is clearly that these things are serious and our sympathies should be, well, basic concern for the wellbeing of other people. But it's not as miserable to play as games with such serious themes often are. The premise is serious, but the act of playing it is not. I'd call it "diverting" rather than "entertaining", but the bottom line is there's a good afternoon or two in there for you.
Confession time: if you've been keeping up to date with Colossal Order's feature highlight video series for Cities: Skylines 2 over the last couple of months, you're probably not going to learn a huge amount from my experience of playing it at Gamescom a couple of weeks ago. I spent most of my hour-long demo session steadily working my way through its extensive tutorial, as I have not, in fact, played Cities: Skylines before now - although I can at least confirm that its tutorial is very newbie-friendly, and that I now feel more prepared to give it a go properly when it comes out in full on October 24th.
But the thing that really impressed me was just the sheer scope of its playable spaces. We've known since the end of July that its maps are roughly 5x bigger than those in the first game, and when I saw Colossal Order's Maps & Themes video, I thought, 'Yes, those sure look enormous!' But actually seeing them in person really put things into perspective for me, especially when I tried zooming the camera out and it just kept going and going and going and…
On today’s installment of Bad Calls I Have Made, I will cop to never really buying the idea of Starfield needing> an SSD. Even among its astronomical system requirements, an inflexible demand for solid state storage seemed like a stretch; after all, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart runs mostly fine on a hard drive, and in a previous life that game was employed as a cheerleader for the PS5’s SSD. Starfield would probably just have rubbish load times or texture pop-in or something, and all would be revealed once I could try it on mechanical storage. Which I now have.
So, can you play Starfield on an HDD? No. It’s bloody awful.
Maybe it was replaying Aperture Desk Job for the RPS Game Club, or maybe it was the sheer scale of Baldur's Gate 3 activating the ol’ fight-or-flight. Either way, I’ve recently developed an intense appreciation for teeny, tiny microgames, to the point where I’ve essentially been begging in the RPS Slack channel for recommendations. Just one more Steam link and I’ll be fine, promise.
And I don’t mean short games in the seven- or eight-hour sense. Not even film-length games like Portal or Jazzpunk. No, I seek to gorge on the slightest sub-hour canapés, games in which you can see and do everything in one or hour or less. "Irresponsibly large"? Another time, Mister Starfield, I crave something irrevocably small.
Space will neither save nor free us. Like Starfield, it will not be glamorous or exciting. As billionaire jebends plot to establish their own corporate fiefdoms amongst the stars, our descendents' potential spacelives are looking as miserable as collecting 5 spacewolf livers. But I find some hope in spaceship salvage sim Hardspace: Shipbreaker, both in the overt plot about unionisation and in the small satisfaction of doing a job well. Head down, shut up, and focus on dismantling this spaceship carefully and efficiently. It's an attitude that won't save the world but can get you through one more day, and sometimes that's enough.