In the market for a new SSD and> a new controller? Good news, Ebuyer has got you covered with deal that bundles the excellent Sony DualSense PS5 controller with a fast Crucial T500 2TB SSD, complete with heatsink. Bought separately, these would run you £180, but together you can pick them up for just £140.

This deal is marketed as the 'ideal PS5 upgrade kit', but it's actually just as relevant for PC users looking to pick up one of the best gamepads (alongside the Xbox Elite controller also discounted today) and get more game storage at the same time.

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Microsoft's phenomenal Elite Series 2 controller is down to £100 after a £60 discount at Amazon UK. That's a great price for, in my opinion, one of the very best gamepads for PC and Xbox - and well worth picking up for the holidays.

If you want just the core controller without its accessory bag (purchaseable separately), you can get the controller for even less - £78!

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I don't look for Christmas games. Partly because they're basically all terrible, and partly because of how tiresome it is when everything is saturated with the same theme wherever you look. But Ebenezer And The Invisible World is about helping Scrooge run around London bashing capitalists and other evil spirits with his cane, and summoning friendly ghosts to prevent Caspar Malthus from genociding the working class. I simply could not find out what the hell was going on there.

Turns out, it's kinda good. But it has too many problems to reach much beyond that.

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It's always saddened me that Simogo's brilliant text-based adventure Device 6 has been trapped on iOS-only devices since it first came out... ten years ago? Hell's bells, now I feel old. If you're unfamiliar with it, it's about a girl named Anna who must escape from a mysterious island, but the whole game is presented like you're reading a book - only one that you can click on and prod with your fingers to reveal new puzzles within that text. It's very clever, especially when it occasionally asks you to rotate your device to navigate parts of its game worlds - there's an excellent bit with stairs that I won't spoil, but seriously, if you haven't played Device 6 and you own an iOS device, go and download it now.

Once you've done that, you should also have a look this year's Delete After Reading, which does a very good impression of it for us folks on PC, hiding smart, tactile text puzzles inside its interactive spy thriller.

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To celebrate Doom's 30th birthday we had a discussion about the (understandably) vaunted FPS's influence, and what games would look like without it. It seems particularly interesting today in light of the recent resurgence of Doom-style shooters, often known as "boomer shooters" because of their deliberately retro style and singular focus on shootin' stuff and bein' cool, much like Doom. And then the obvious solution was to just ask the devs making these games about what they think of Doom and its impact on their work.

I reached out to developers who've worked on Turbo Overkill, Prodeus, Forgive Me Father (and Forgive Me Father 2) and almost the whole stable working at New Blood Interactive to ask them some annoyingly specific questions about Doom in the hope of getting the sort of idiosyncratic answers you get from interesting devs - and they delivered! In fact, they delivered in such quantity and quality that I've elected to just present their answers to you, rather than try to weave them together as if we were all sitting together at dinner exchanging bon mots, both for clarity and to include as much as possible in their own words. It's a fascinating and entertaining collection of thoughts.

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Gaze down the sights of today's Advent Calendar window and you'll find time is a tricksy, malleable concept that's all slow-motion power slides and extraordinary grenade explosions. Just mind the gibs on the floor there. Wouldn't want to stain your boots.

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The first mod I ever downloaded was for Skyrim. It replaced NPCs with Shrek. The second was a texture pack for Dark Souls: Remastered. I believe that these two examples form a representative sample of what mods are: quality of life improvements, and Shrek. Doom’s modding community, known by its file package WAD, is the Ur modding community. Thanks to John Carmack’s lightning-fast engine, creating levels and content for Doom has been accessible for 30 years. WAD devs have gone on to become fully-fledged game designers, and some WADs have been released commercially. The breadth and depth of this community formed the bedrock of game developers. And yet even with this pedigree, MyHouse.WAD is a miracle.

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Ultrawide monitors often come at a premium, but right now you can pick up a 34-inch gaming monitor for just $199 - just in time for the winter holidays where you'll have a chance to snuggle up and play some video games!

That's a phenomenally good price for a 3440x1440 LG model with a 100Hz refresh rate and FreeSync/G-Sync Compatible support for gaming. The monitor is even based around an IPS panel that covers 99% of the sRGB gamut with wide viewing angles and good colour accuracy, making it a good choice for content creation too.

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TeamGroup makes some of the best value RAM and SSDs on the market, and today we're looking at the latter - the MP34, a PCIe 3.0 SSD available in a massive 4TB size for just $151.99 at Newegg - down from a usual price of $199.99. This is an outstanding value for a high-speed NVMe drive that is perfect for huge game and media collections.

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"I was looking up our Wikipedia page to see what happened this year," says Nightdive Studios' CEO Stephen Kick as we sit down to chat. That might seem like an odd thing to say about your own company's activities. But when you look at what Nightdive have done in the last twelve months, it's less surprising. In March, Nightdive announced they were being acquired by Atari in a deal worth $10 million. In May, they released their long-anticipated remake of System Shock, in development for eight years. July brought Rise Of The Triad: Ludicrous Edition, while August saw the release of Quake 2 Remastered, and a remaster of Turok 3 arrived at the end of November. Nightdive are currently working on an overhaul of Star Wars: Dark Forces, due out in 2024.

In short, it's been a busy year for the remastering maestros. In the wider context of 2023, which has been simultaneously a banner games and a deeply worrying year for the people making them, I wanted to know how Nightdive view the last twelve months, and what the audience response to these projects means for the studio's future.

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