Longtime readers will know that I really appreciate a good kick in a vide-oh my god I've been working here that long. Anyway, I like a kick, and I like a game that manages to actually be funny, and I have been playing Deathbulge: Battle Of The Bands. You do the math(s).

I actually wrote about Deathbulge in a round up of best demos in a Steam Next Fest back in 2020, at which time I enjoyed the RPG antics of a band entering a cursed Battle Of The Bands competition and finding out that it's a fight to the death. The full thing came out a month ago without my noticing, and got past the endpoint of the demo. It's fun! I'm enjoying the combat, which is both real-time and turn-based, and has some surprisingly deep tactics attached to it. But more importantly, the full Deathbulge game starts in a town where you enter houses by kicking doors in.

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When the Lenovo Legion Go revealed itself, I was unconvinced by its portability credentials but enticed by the wireless mouse transmogrification of its detachable, Nintendo Switch-like controllers. A sparkling sliver of Swiss Army handheld design, providing a familiar taste of desktop play that the Steam Deck or Asus ROG Ally could never achieve without a USB dock.

Turns out, now that I’ve tried the Legion Go for myself, I was worried about the wrong thing. It’s nowhere near as heavy or cumbersome as it looks, and while the breakaway controls remain an exciting prospect, they also risk introducing an acute pain point. At the very least, the model I tested proved highly vulnerable to lead-handed RPS hardware editors, because I left the building very much with the impression that I’d broken it.

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As gaming at large gorges itself on a feast of fantastic titles, PCVR crawls beneath the table licking up the crumbs. There are tasty treats simmering in the kitchen, like the remake of The 7th Guest and sequels to I Expect You To Die and Arizona Sunshine, but right now all the fine dining is happening on Quest and PSVR2, covering which would involve running my thumb under RPS' hermetic PC seal.

In my desperation, I've turned to golf, something I would never consider under normal circumstances. I feel about golf the same way I feel about the UK Conservative party, insofar as both occupy space that would be better filled with trees. But I haven't gone totally tartan slacks. We're only entering the realm of minigolf, which I am more positively inclined toward. It lacks the pretensions and exclusionary nature of its bigger, paunchier cousin. Anybody can rock up to a minigolf course with a putter and nobody will sneer at you for being shit at it. It's also small and inherently naff, traits I can likewise relate to.

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Last time, you decided that upgrading cards is better than fast travel. I think the outcome is partially from a love of cards, and partially a dislike of the impact fast travel has had on game design. Can't deny it's convenient, mind. This week, I ask you to pick between taking things you want and something that should always have been ours. What's better: capturing enemy buildings, or hand grenades exploding on impact with enemies?

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Bethesda has detailed a number of incoming quality-of-life improvements and expanded graphical options headed to Starfield in a regular series of updates.

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Cor, has it really been almost half a year since we've done one of these? Apologies, readers. I honestly don't know where the time goes. It's probably because we're spending too much time with our favourite guilty pleasure games, which is the subject of this latest Ask RPS column.

The question comes courtesy of ronzilla, who asked: What were your favourite guilty pleasure games of 2022? As in, I play this all the time and I'm semi-embarrassed to admit it?

A good question! In canvassing the wider RPS Treehouse for their responses, it quickly became clear that most of our guilty pleasure games extend way beyond the bounds of just the year 2022, so we've answered a bit more broadly than the original question perhaps intended. Still, hopefully there are still some entertaining answers in here nonetheless.

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The internet isn’t fun anymore. Actually, that statement isn’t severe enough to reflect how bad the internet is these days, so let me try that again: being online in 2023 is a fucking nightmare>. There are only three websites. They are all designed to make you angry because it’s the most profitable emotion. Your aunt was indoctrinated into fascism by a page called “This country used to have real bin men” after she liked a meme about glass milk bottles in 2012. Every boy you went to school with has a podcast about football now. Your Mam once warned you about spending too much time on the computer but now spends eight hours a day playing Hay Day on her phone. AI was meant to let us lie in fields and read books, but instead it’s being used to show you what Breaking Bad would have looked like as an anime.

But it didn’t used to be like this! Obviously I don’t need to remind our regular readers about the glory days of the information superhighway because some of you are old enough to be my Dad (and I’m thirty-one>) but just in case a member of Gen Z has stumbled upon this article by accident: the internet used to be fun. Like, really fun, and Hypnospace Outlaw is living proof of it.

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While Starfield is the big sci-fi shooter on Game Pass right now, folks fancying shootier shooting should see another FPS owned by Bethesda: Quake 2. Id Software's 1997 shooter was fancied up with a remaster released as a free update in August, complete with all the old stuff and one notable new addition. MachineGames, the studio behind the modern Wolfenstein games, have created a whole new story campaign for the remaster. I've really enjoyed playing it. It's the old Quake 2 you know and have complicated feelings about, filtered through modern design sensibilities. I think both veterans and newcomers could enjoy blasting these biomechanical alien horrors.

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Logitech's G305 Lightspeed mouse is one of my favourites, combining bullet-proof Lightspeed 2.4GHz wireless with a small, light and eminently moddable design. It normally retails for around $40, but today it's down to $33.99 at Amazon US. That's not the best price we've ever seen, but it's still great value for a mouse that remains in my personal rotation a few years after it first debuted.

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"Usually, when a player is going through a strategy game, they figure out how things work by trial and error," Total War: Pharaoh's game director Todor Nikolov tells me at this year's Gamescom. "And once they do, they feel the urge to start a brand-new campaign because they've already figured out that portion of the gameplay."

Sitting across the table, these words ring frighteningly true for me. Unbeknownst to Nikolov, he has just described the exact experience I had playing the 50-turn campaign preview for Pharaoh a week earlier to an absolute tee. Unlike the far more knowledgeable brain of frequent RPS contributor Nic Reuben, I am a complete babe in arms when it comes to the Total War juggernaut machine, and it took me attempting to play two other games in the series (Three Kingdoms and Troy) and several restarts in Pharaoh itself before I felt just about confident that I (very vaguely) knew what I was doing. At the time, I thought, 'Man alive, how is Total War still so rubbish at teaching players how it works?' But when I speak to Nikolov a week later, he has some very welcome news for me: there's going to be a dedicated tutorial campaign where players can (hopefully) find their feet. Music to my ears.

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