It's so stormy where I live that a house in the town next over lost its roof this morning, which must mean it's the season for cosy life sim games. After having fun in Fae Farm recently, this week I've been taking Moonstone Island for a spin. The twist for this Stardewlike is that it has collided the farming and having a nice house business with Pokémon-style death battles involving whimsical Ghibli-esque Spirits. After a few scant hours I think I sort of... like it...? But I also have some problems with it.

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Cyberpunk 2077’s update 2.0 makes its RPG combat better than it’s ever been. The new perk system means that you can easily create a brutal killing machine, one capable of deflecting bullets with samurai swords and air-dashing like an anime hero to punch enemies apart.

Phantom Liberty, the expansion released right after update 2.0, makes its combat better in one extra way: by making most of it optional.

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Oh god, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm trying to fix it. Oh, hello everybody! Welcome to the fourth chapter of the great Starfield no-planets run, in which my character, rancid astro-buccaneer Mary Read, tries to play the entirety of Bethesda's so-big-it's-small RPG in space. When last we caught up with this galloping galactic nuisance, Mary was beginning to lose momentum. She had grown weary of happy-slapping freighter after freighter, though there's one particular wandering geologist she'd like to settle the score with. She had even lost her enthusiasm for boarding actions - the spice in every pirate's cup of grog - having mastered the art of standing at the bottom of a ladder.

I've spent the past few days trying to cook up a proper endgame objective for Mary - some mad caper befitting a legendary space pirate and her rowdy crew of turncoats and tearaways, who absolutely aren't a bunch of corpses Mary has arranged into sitting postures and decorated with buckets. And in my desperation, I have turned to the forbidden magic of Starfield console commands - a hundred or more deceptively homely lines of text which, when typed into Starfield's in-game console (hit the tilde or @ key), can be used to perform impossible feats, like unlocking all the game's powers or becoming immortal. My initial hope was to solidify the game's weirdly intangible asteroids somehow, and build outposts on them. It's been a couple hours since then, and well, everything has gone awonk. I'm not even playing Starfield anymore. Instead, I am playing a very special, inadvertent Starfield mod of my own devising. Working title: "Totally Fucked".

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Corsair's recent Airflow cases have been great, mixing smart and stylish designs with huge cooling potential, and now you can pick up the mid-size 3000D Airflow for just £58 from TechNextDay via Ebay using the code SAVINGS20. By comparison, this case costs £80 on Ebay, making it a sweet little discount.

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Beijing-based audio brand Edifier makes some of the best value speakers in the business, often offering significantly better performance, functionality and aesthetics than more well-known Western brands. I've reviewed a half-dozen of their speakers over the years, and each one has been impressive.

I'm currently recommending Edifier's R2000DB and S3000PRO speakers over at Eurogamer, but today an even more affordable model is on sale at Amazon US: the R1700BTs. These 2.0 bookshelf speakers normally go for $199, but today you can apply a $40 coupon on the product page to bring these speakers down to... $159, if my maths are correct. That's a solid deal for speakers that come with a litany of positive critic and user reviews.

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As a child of the early internet, games like Hypnospace Outlaw can't help but resonate quite deeply with me. This was the internet as I remembered it, goddamnit, and the fact it mixed in a compelling corporate conspiracy story in between its pages was just the icing on an already fine cake (in GIF form, naturally, with a MIDI tune of Vivaldi's Four Seasons blaring out from your internet browser for good measure). But in revisiting Hypnospace for this month's RPS Game Club, there was one page in particular that really brought the rose-tinted shutters down on me. It was beautiful, lovely April, Hypnospace's virtual pet hamster, who can live, snooze and poop on your desktop, and maybe turn a slightly sickly shade of green if you don't pay enough attention to her.

As with most things in Hypnospace, I can only assume that April and her fellow gaggle of virtual pet friends are riffs on real-life virtual pet games Catz and Dogz from the late 90s, which, yes, as a ten-year-old girl at the time, I was absolutely obsessed with. Developed by the now defunct PF Magic, Catz and Dogz 3 were arguably two of my most formative PC games growing up, and cor, I miss those dumb beasts so very much.

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This week we at the Electronic Wireless Show podcast look at two contrasting tales of games being always online: Payday 3's overloaded launch servers, and Sea Of Thieves' triumphant reveal of season 10 additions. Is always online good? Is it bad? Or, much like the radiator in your living room, is it basically invisible as long as nothing breaks? Plus we dive into the games we've been playing recently (Nate is still plugging away at Baldur's Gate 3), recommend a bunch of unrelated short videos, and answer a question that has plagued humanity for years: would you punch a gorilla for a cheeseburger?

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Prime Day 2023 only came and went in July, but that hasn’t deterred Amazon – who presumably own a number of oversized clocks with the word "DEALS" replacing all twelve numbers – from announcing another, functionally identical sale. This time it’s Amazon Prime Big Deal Days, it’s happening this October, and god, I am so, so very tired of writing about these things.

Still, as much as Prime Big Deal Days is sillily named and oddly timed (is Black Friday not just a month later?), it may yet prove useful as a source of cheap PC gaming hardware. Amazon sales usually are, with SSDs, gaming mice, keyboards, and even graphics cards reliably among their discounted wares. Here’s everything we know so far, and some tips for the big day(s) on how to secure the best stuff and avoid shady rip-off tactics.

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Last time, you decided by 72% against 28% that setting unit waypoints is better than receiving waypoints yourself. Given how loudly people decry receiving waypoints, I'm a little surprised it was that close. And that's how we know we're doing science. This week, I ask you to choose between mastery of place and mastery of time. What's better: improvised environmental weapons, or skipping across a timeline flowchart?

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Gaming on Mac becomes more of a reality every day, with powerful Apple Silicon processors and the Game Porting Toolkit unlocking surprisingly decent performance in a wide range of modern games and emulated titles alike. We don't normally cover Mac gaming here, but I thought you might want to know that the latest M2 Mac Mini is down to $499 at B&H Photo in the US, a $100 reduction on the base-spec unit that makes it quite a powerful computer for the money.

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