If you've been yearning to take up arms against Super Earth as either an arachnid, a robot or a filthy (managed) democracy-hating human traitor, then I have bad news, roughneck. Helldivers 2 will "never" get a PvP mode, according to Arrowhead's CEO Johan Pilestedt. The reason? They want to avoid encouraging any toxic behaviour in the new shooter's multiplayer community.

Given that Helldivers 2 is a game with mandatory friendly fire in which you can kill team-mates by respawning right on top of them, I fear the Good Ship Camaraderie may already have sailed, but I'm very early on in my Helldiver career, and I'm... intrigued by how Arrowhead's efforts at community curation sit alongside/within the game's premise of playing a dirty space fascist locked in an endless xenophobic crusade.

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The AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D is my current go-to high-end gaming CPU recommendation, on account of its brilliant top-tier performance at a mid-tier price. The CPU normally costs around £375, but today it's down to £350 at Amazon UK. This isn't the cheapest we've ever seen this model, but it's the best price recorded in 2024 so far and a solid £25 below the going rate.

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The RTX 4070 Super is a rather good deal, offering a significant boost in gaming performance over the earlier RTX 4070 - in fact, it's closer to the 4070 Ti than the vanilla 4070. That makes it a great choice for gaming up to 4K, while costing just a bit over the £500 mark - £539 to be accurate after a £50 discount that puts it below the UK RRP of £579.

That price is for a relatively modest Zotac Twin Edge model which fits easily even into small form factor PC, but thanks to the efficiency of the Ada Lovelace architecture the card should still run quite cool and quiet.

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Last time, we conducted citizen science with a rare suggestion from a reader, and you decided that being able to reroll your build is better than instant-death bottomless pits. May you live a long and happy live refining by degrees, rather than slamming into hard lessons. This week, in celebration of Valentine's Day, we turn to matters of the heart, of loves and organs. What's better: health pick-ups looking like cartoon hearts or Doomguy's pet rabbit, Daisy?

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A new update for The Sims 4 has added options to give characters vitiligo, the autoimmune disorder which causes patches of skin to lose pigmentation. Rather than a handful of preset full-body patterns, The Sims 4's vitiligo impressively comes as loads of patterns for separate bodyparts, so you can create a wide range of effects. And no, you don't need to buy an expansion for it.

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We've eschewed any Valentine's theming this year, but Edwin put this in our news queue last night as a sort of dare for our evening shift, and let the record show I am less of a coward than Graham Smith. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, a visual novel Tarot-themed card game from perennial (perhaps perineal, in this case) favourites Deconstructeam, was praised by Edwin in his review, and I was going to use the same strapline for this news post had he not got there first. Because now, in time for the season of romance, they've teamed up with sex toy purveyors Uberrime to create a frankly prohibitively massive dildo as an official tie-in for the game, which can be won in a free competition by three lucky people living in either the UK, EU, US or Canada (as in, they each win their own dildo; they don't have to time share).

I mean I say "prohibitively", but I don't know your life.

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A number of Ubisoft France employees are on strike today after the collapse of union negotiations with Ubisoft management, who have reportedly proposed a budget for wages "that would be lower than inflation for the second year in a row". The strikers are calling it a "badly balanced rewards system". Cheeky devils!

The news comes care of a post from Le Syndicat des Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Jeu Vidéo, who have evidently been doing their homework on videogame humour. That research has paid off, for here I am writing about the strikes, though I think I probably would have written about them anyway.

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When it comes to co-op shooters and most other multiplayer games, it's often the case that friendly fire is switched off by default or there are endless systems in place to make it a punishable offence. In Helldivers 2 it isn't actively encouraged, nor is it punished. Accidentally vaporising your teammate with an air strike is all a part of the campaign for democracy and freedom, a hilarious byproduct of human error. I gushed about it in my review, and cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer wrote up a quick piece on the specific ways it eeks out silliness.

But comedy isn't just accidental in Helldivers 2, oh no. I think it encourages playground behaviour of the worst order: smacking your mates into things.

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Granblue Fantasy: Relink is a JRPG that is ticking off many of the action RPG tropes. It would be in danger of becoming workmanlike, such are the number of things you can tick off on your fingers like a plumber ordering parts: boss fights against improbably huge glowing monsters, an evil god, catboys, numbers popping off enemies, women who appreciate the combat applications of a thigh-high split skirt, anachronistic sunglasses, horned giants carrying halberds of the same approximate size as a caravan.

In practice, though, you sort of can't be mad at Granblue Fantasy: Relink. It's built around a layered combat system that seems impenetrable if you don't take some time to understand it. But really, Granblue Fantasy: Relink is just a game so committed to the rule of cool that the entire setting is physically impossible, and every battle is a disorientating Panic! At The Firework Factory that flirts with being a photosensitivity nightmare. I'm not selling it as such, but it's actually charming.

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The Silent Hill 2 remake's State of Play trailer doesn't give a full and proper representation of the game, Bloober Team's president Piotr Babieno has observed in an apparent swipe at publisher Konami, who Babieno portrays as responsible for the upcoming horror game's marketing. If you missed it, the trailer in question focuses on the "modernised" combat. It shows alleged "everyman" protagonist James Sunderland getting all Gears of Warry with some maggoty marionettes and rancid demon nurses.

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