Dec 22, 2023
Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Welcome to door 22 of the RPS Advent Calendar. To enter, you must prove your identity by answering a simple question. Who are you? A human... or a puppet?
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Welcome to door 22 of the RPS Advent Calendar. To enter, you must prove your identity by answering a simple question. Who are you? A human... or a puppet?
Like a circus strongman's barbells, 2023's year in VR has been heavily weighted toward either end. The last twelve months were bookended with the launch of two excellent VR headsets (although only one is truly relevant to us PC gamers) and a whole bunch of great VR titles. The summer, however, was the quietest I've known for a long time, to the point where I ended up playing two VR minigolf games in the absence of anything better to do. Fortunately, the last few months have made up for it, providing enough fantastic VR games to feed us well into next year. So it's an unevenly weighted set of barbells, the kind that would give our moustachioed muscleman a slipped disk.
I've long been a fan of NZXT's AiO liquid coolers - in fact, I'm building a PC with one tomorrow>. You might be joining me on that, as today NZXT's Kraken 240mm AiO is down to £90 at Scan UK after a £40 discount. That's an excellent price for an all-in-one liquid cooler that sports an LCD screen for monitoring your temps or showing off your cat.
If you're looking for a great graphics card for 1080p gaming, three GPUs come to mind: the RTX 3060, the RX 6600 and the Arc A770. The latter is the most fascinating, in my opinion, as it's seriously faster than its rivals in many games and comes with a better upscaler than AMD's FSR in XeSS.
Today you can pick up this GPU for just £266 thanks to an Amazon UK Lightning Deal on a graphics card that comes from Amazon US - with no extra import or shipping fees. That compares favourably to the £320 that the next-cheapest A770 GPU costs, especially when you consider this is the better 16GB variant with a factory overclock!
I've recently returned to Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, one year after the grimdark Left 4 Dead 'em up launched and eleven months after I stopped playing. It was always fun to tear through the grubby guts of a Gothic industrial megacity with your chainsword, but it became repetitive and its whole loot-o-crafting mess sucked. A year on, the loot and crafting still suck, but I've really enjoyed the variety added by new levels and weapons and the polish from a year of tweaks and quality-of-life changes. If you played Darktide on Game Pass (or bought it), consider another look.
Dominions is a series where you can build the Ark Of The Covenant, which blinds everyone on any battlefield it appears on. Games where any soldier can receive a horror mark, which attracts unspeakable phantoms from beyond reality to randomly attack them, and if they survive, they'll probably receive more horror marks. Games where I once deployed my entire military against an evil raven so large and powerful that I lost, leaving behind corpses that it fed on to grow even stronger. Games where a frog could, mathematically, kill god with one blow.
Dominions 6 is due out in January, bringing with it changes so esoteric that I'd be better off talking about Dominions 3 to Dominions 5 instead. So let's do that.
It's the most wonderful time of the year i.e. the last working week for us at the RPS Treehouse, and therefore the last week of the Electronic Wireless Show podcast for 2023. We take a look back at the year that was, in very broad terms - was 2023, in fact, a good year for games? - share our favourite games of 2023, and talk about the games we're playing right now. It appears Nate is quite unfamiliar with time travel films. We also think up some some resolutions for next year, and you've also got our regular recommendations to look forwards to at the end of the show. Plus, Nate does a thrilling end of year quiz with a question for each month. It goes about as well as you'd expect.
Before you open this door on the Advent Calendar, make sure you have enough batteries for your mega-powered torch. The environment be damned, throw those spent batts on the floor where you stand and open-palm slam the new ones in, because light is the only way you're getting out of here alive.
My Steam Wrapped listed Baldur's Gate 3 and Vampire Survivors as my top two games of 2023. If Epic Games and my Switch were involved, Fortnite and Persona 5 Royal would've absolutely been included in the lineup, too. Motivation has lain mostly in co-op capers with friends, hangs with virtual pals, or in the battle royale-verse. Otherwise, nothing has truly> given me the itch.
But I think 2024 could be a big one for me. Not only are a number of upcoming RPGs right up my alley, they align with new and existing motivations: hangs with pals and Japanese language learning. For the first time, I'm excited to embrace the grind both in-game and outside of it.
Last time, in celebration of Doom's 30th birthday, you decided that Doom 2's super shotgun is better than Doom's shotgun (57% vs 43%, statheads). An intellectual brawl between two absolute titans. Whoever won, we'd lose. But whoever won, we won. This week, the calendar also dictates our subject. This being Christmastime, I need to know: what's better, giving items to other players or throwing grenades back?