Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by dramatic skies, a body-surfing game I cannot help but suspect is not actually Starfield, and the fanciest interactive toilet I have ever seen in a video game. Check out these attractive and interesting indies, and many more!
My kitten became a game designer after I taught her to play Fetch. She'll carry the little felt balls around in her mouth and drop them in different places to explore new playpossibilities. In my slipper brings the fun of working in the dark. Beneath a chair makes for a great climbing frame ballsport straight out of a dystopian movie where a kickboxing freedom fighter (played by a muttering European) brings down The Man by being really, really good at batting a ball while dangling from a bar. Between two dumbells creates fun obstacles and windows of opportunity. And in the tangle of wires behind my PC brings the transgressive anti-authoritarian thrill of rolling around while being told "Baby no! Don't you...! Get out my wires!" Anyway, what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!
The Logitech G502 is one of the most popular gaming mice in the world - and also the reigning champion of the last RPS Readers' Peripheral of Choice Awards or whatever we called it at the time. There are both wired and wireless versions available across multiple generations, with the wireless models normally holding a steep premium - but that's not true at the moment.
Today, the G502 Lightspeed wireless model is down to $75 at Amazon US when you use the $20 coupon on the product page, making it 50% off MSRP. Note that this deal is only for Amazon.com, not Amazon UK or other Amazon regions.
Samsung's 980 Pro NVMe SSD may not be quite as fast as the later 990 Pro, but it's still an incredibly rapid option that's often available at a more reasonable price. Samsung is currently running a money-back promotion that brings this high-end PCIe 4.0 drive down to an attractively low price in both 1TB and 2TB varieties.
You can get £30 back on the 2TB size, bringing the price to £94, while the 1TB size offers £20 back, resulting in a final price of £52. (This cashback offer runs until 9th October 2023, for the record; see their site for more info.) These are great deals and well worth considering if you want to upgrade your PC (or even PS5) with one of the fastest SSDs on the market.
Space Mechanic Simulator almost had me. The promise of jetpacking over to satellites and stations then tinkering in their innards is a solid one, and adjacent to my impossible space salvage game dream. Elements of it work. Others are within acceptable levels of wonkiness for me personally. But it needs a bit of an overhaul to fix some silly design choices it's hobbled itself with.
Friends, I am excited. A new trailer for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth dropped last night during the Playstation State Of Play stream, and holy cow, despite feeling a bit ill and exhausted and generally not firing on all cylinders at the moment, I think I might be more pumped for this than literally any other video game on the horizon right now. Even that long-awaited PC release of Final Fantasy 16 can't quite compare to this, if you ask me, and I might even be more enthused by it than the prospect of a Switch 2. And I don't even really like> Final Fantasy VII! That's how much Nomura's mad, timey-wimey game child has sunk its teeth into me. I'm mostly here just to see what mad nonsense comes Cloud's way next - and from the looks of things, it's a lot>.
Riot Forge have been quietly building up quite the catalogue of League Of Legends side story games over the last couple of years. In November 2021, they launched the double whammy of rhythm runner Hextech Mayhem and turn-based RPG Ruined King, and this year alone we've already had action RPG The Mageseeker and narrative platformer Conv/rgence. As you can probably tell, they're all focused on different genres, different League heroes, and have all come from different developers - and soon they'll be joined by Song Of Nunu, the next game from Rime developers Tequila Works.
I got to play a very small slice of it at Gamescom last month, and yep, if you've been craving another low stakes adventure that's all but guaranteed to wrench at your heartstrings and wibble your tear ducts, Song Of Nunu will almost certainly fill that Rime-shaped hole in your life when it comes to PC on November 1st.
On paper, Final Fantasy XIV doesn’t do a very good job of encouraging fishing. FFXIV’s lead director and producer Naoki Yoshida — known as Yoshi P — wanted to create something that was "fun, but relaxing”, and there aren’t a lot of material rewards for the time you put in. You can sell the fish or break them down into other materials, but really the only reason to fish is for the sake of fishing itself.
And yet today Final Fantasy XIV is home to a close knit fishing community of over 27,000 people. This single shared interest has spun off into many different directions, including fishing as a competitive journey, the process of building a space for the hobby itself, and even a kind of metagame. But the main thread tying these all together is the love for fishing, and the community’s central hub is actually located outside of the game - in a Discord server called Fisherman’s Horizon, lovingly nicknamed Fishcord.
There comes a point in every diary playthrough when the Comet of Invention meets the Cowpat of Diminishing Returns, when the Foot of Agency meets the Covert Hedgehog of Limited Design, when Fucking Around meets Finding Not Much Out. I fear we are reaching that point with the life and times of Mary Read, my Starfield character and nowadays quite accomplished space pirate, who has sworn never to land on a planet ever again.
Immediately after conquering the Chimera in Part 2 of the Starfield No-Planet Run, I commandeered a UC Longsword II on the other side of the same system. The Longsword has proven a predator without equal, charging straight through opposing craft even when they've got several levels on me, its unforgiving autocannons forming the dominant bassline of every encounter. Frankly, it's getting repetitive, and while the obvious remedy is to plunge cackling and crying into a star system with an AI threat level in the high double digits, I doubt that will really alter the rhythms of Starfield's ship combat - it'll just mean I have to do some grinding.
I didn't sleep a lot at the weekend and nothing interesting happened during the week (please bear in mind that we recorded this episode of The Electronic Wireless Show podcast before Unity made any announcements) so we decided to look at how Starfield is doing post-launch. Plus, Nate has been playing Baldur's Gate 3 and has thoughts about it, so that's double SEO juice for this episode.
There's double beans metaphors> this week, and James talks about the latest Steam Decklike, the Lenovo Legion go, which is like if a portable PC made love to a Switch, kind of. Some fun recommendations this week, too, especially if you like cathedrals.