Want AMD's fastest consumer graphics card for a good price? We've got just the deal for you - the RX 7900 XTX, after debuting at a tidy $999, is now down to $889.99 at Newegg. That's a nice $110 discount that brings the card into new relevance, especially as the first two FSR 3 frame generation games arrive. If you're not a Newegg fan, the card is also available at Amazon for $909.99.
I'm a fan of the modern Bethesda RPG, having spent nearly 100 hours with Fallout 4 - which, for me, is a lot more time than I'm usually willing to give up. My fondest memories lie with Oblivion, because I think it captured exploration beautifully. I liked emerging from a big cave as a big nobody and striking out along a cobbled path, excited to go for a summer's walk. Skyrim abandoned Oblivion's warmth for your average fantasyland, but kept the great outdoors.
If I don't have an objective in Starfield, I sort of freeze over and don't really know where to turn. And even if I do, I perform a deep sigh and open up my menus and curl myself into a pinball, ready to get pinged around the innards of whatever can lies beyond the airlock in front of me. So far, Starfield's adventuring forces me indoors and it's a shame.
Blackbird Interactive's next big thing is Homeworld 3, out February 2024, but Homeworld 3 has a little cousin, a new IP named Earthless, which tells approximately the same tale of a colony ship fleeing across the galaxy, but takes the form of a deck-building roguelite cardgame. Never one to say no to a bout of space strategy, I fired up a preview key over the weekend, and while I wouldn't say my pulse has jumped to hyperspace, I'm certainly enthused.
The Amazon Prime Big Deal Days sale has begun, and with it comes PC gaming deals on a scale you won’t see outside of Prime Day itself. Or Black Friday. Or the Amazon Spring Sale, come to think of it. Jeff, mate, sure you've got enough of these things?
Ecommerce saturation aside, I will say that Prime Big Deal Days – which runs until the end of October 11th – does serve up some respectable price cuts across the usual wide breadth of PC gaming hardware. They're on the stuff you’d actually want, too – there are discounts on some of the finest SSDs, peripherals, CPUs, and even graphics cards that we’ve shunted through the RPS test labs. In this guide, I’ve picked out only the best of the best deals; if there’s a PC upgrade worth having from Prime Big Deal Days, you’ll find it here.
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 retro-styled adventure games and city-builders, phenomenally cool fishing rod violence, and some sort of horrible sentient milk glands. Check out all these attractive and interesting indie games!
In the frozen hellscape of Frostpunk, you eked out your existence in hours and days, clinging to your heat- and life-giving generator at the centre of your fledgling city like there was literally no tomorrow. In 11 bit Studio's forthcoming sequel, Frostpunk 2, the apocalypse is yesterday's news. Now you're dealing with "what happens when you survive the un-survivable," as the game's co-director and design director Jakub Stokalski neatly puts it when I sit down for a hands off presentation at this year's Gamescom. And to do this, Frostpunk 2 is going big, measuring its time not in days, but weeks, months and even years.
"If we want to show the evolution of societies and different utopias/dystopias, we need breathing room," says Stokalski. "And this breathing room really is in the scale, both in the physical sense but also in the sense of time. It's difficult to show meaningful social change in the space of a month, so the time ticks now in weeks and months, and in a long playthrough you'll get up into years, so you can see the consequences of your choices."
Sundays are for finally feeling human again. Before you inhale through both nostrils, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).
Though there's many a huge RPG to play at the moment (recite the littany: Baldur's Gate 3, Starfield, Cyberpunk 2077) many of us in the treehouse have retreated to smaller, or at least less garganutan, games for our days off this weekend. Though of course there's something called Counter-Strike 2 happening at the moment. I dunno, doesn't sound like it's important to PC or anything.
In another reality, 2003's The Simpsons: Hit & Run — an action-adventure game that was by then the show's 22nd video game adaptation — might have slid quietly into obscurity. So why is it, then, that we can't seem to let it go? On YouTube, the game frequently resurfaces via longplays, speedruns, and retrospective essays that garner respectable amounts of views year after year. A few months ago, the game's lead designer told GamesRadar that he would support an official remake, mentioning that Hit & Run continues to be The Simpsons' most popular video game adaptation on Metacritic.
Yet Hit & Run's sustained relevance is, on its surface, a bit of an enigma. You'd be hard-pressed to find the game included in any critical canons or best-of lists, and there's hardly been a shortage of T-rated open-world games since its release. But for many, the game isn't just a source of nostalgia today; it was an introduction to a wholly new form of in-game self-expression. I looked into the still-growing community keeping it alive today.
During the Nintendo Direct the other week, a single game stood head and shoulders above the rest for me. It wasn't Super Mario Wonder (though that does look pretty all right for a 2D Mario game), and it wasn't F-Zero 99 (which I sort of instantly dismissed as a cheap cash-in on that most excellent of neglected Nintendo racing games but have since been told is also quite good). Rather, it was the news that the insta-sit-up-and-pay-attention pairing of Atlus and Vanillaware were making a new fantasy tactics RPG called - wait for it - Unicorn Overlord>, and woah nelly, it looks absolutely incredible. Vanillaware games have always been a feast for the eyes - see Muramasa: The Demon Blade on Wii and more recently 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim on PS4 and Switch - and the thought of marrying those lovely visuals with what appears to be a pixel art mash-up of Final Fantasy Tactics and Fire Emblem? Yes please and thank you.
I was all ready to gush about it in a news post and whack it straight into our release date calendar when I first saw it. But then my heart sank. The press release for it came through, and despite it launching on literally every other console including the Nintendo Switch, PC was not among them. My heart. It was broken.