System requirements are on the rise, and a glut of recent PC facepunchers has left some of the RPS treehouse wondering if it’s time for a graphics card upgrade. Being a helpful colleague and a handsome friend, I dutifully informed them that the highly capable Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super is currently getting the Black Friday price cut treatment, with Zotac’s Twin Edge model dropping especially low in both the UK and US. Still, dear readers, if you feel like punishing us for that comment system switch, you could always head over to Amazon and buy up all the stock yourself.

$590 is a decent deal for a model that’s spent most of the past few months at $610, but us Brits are getting the better bargain here - even if it’s not for the OC version. £500 means a hefty £49 slasheroo, the deepest discount this card has seen yet, and you’ll also get a key for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to play when it releases on December 9th.

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It's often claimed by liars and fools that our website's title is a clever reference to the ancient Chinese game of shoushiling - or "rock paper scissors", as it's known overseas. The orthodox interpretation is that "Rock Paper Shotgun" is a folksy regional variation on this, with a "shotgun" instead of the "scissors". But friends, this is patently absurd. Think about it: a game that pits a shotgun against a rock or piece of paper would be incredibly one-sided. It goes against reason!

The sad reality is that the origins of our website's title have been deliberately obscured, allowing cold hard fact to slither back into legend. Behind that mockingly nonsensical moniker sleeps an eldritch truth of such gravity it would make Gandalf spill his mead. Friends, the Rock Paper Shotgun is real>. The Weapon exists. Or at least, it once did - and will, for I mean to fashion it anew by combing the writing of RPS writers gone by for raw materials. And in this endeavour, I will naturally need your aid.

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In hindsight, it’s surprising that it took so long for hardware manufacturers to start making "gaming" earbuds. If the likes of chairs, glasses, and chewing gum can be painted stealth-bomber black and prefixed with the G word, why not something that can actually get off its harshly angled bum and help pipe the games themselves into your head?

Then again, maybe gaming earbuds were just waiting for their moment. Obviously the Nintendo Switch is the Nintendo Switch, but the rise of handhelds like the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally has driven desires for more portable (yet games-friendly) noise-deliverers 'round these PC parts as well. Thus, for another edition of Should You Bother With – the RPS column where a diaphragm of testing vibrates advice directly into the cochlea of understanding – let’s have a listen of these wireless buds and find out whether they’re a worthy replacement for your current go-to headphones.

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Whereas some bits of games kit are in and out of the sales like they keep forgetting their keys there, The PlayStation 5 DualSense controller is one of those peripherals that just seems to hover around its £60 / $75 list price indefinitely. Which is a shame, as it’s a very, very good gamepad, including for PC playage. Consider these Black Friday week deals, then, as a rare opportunity to secure yourself said good gamepad without acquiescing to Sony’s stubbornness: it’s down to £40 in the UK and $54 in the US.

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Recently, PC games have been gorging themselves silly on our storage space. 160GB for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2? 190GB for God of War Ragnarok? If these games were people they’d stand waiting at the Pizza Hut buffet and nab ten of the twelve slices of Pepperoni Feast as soon as they’re slid under the heatlamps. What to do? For our part, there’s little we can> do except upgrade capacity, and there are few better ways to do that on a budget than with the WD Blue SN580. It's a cheap yet fast PCIe 4.0 SSD, which the Black Friday sales have knocked down to £47 / $55 for 1TB.

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Sometimes a home only becomes a home when you leave. I recently moved out from a London flat I'd rented for over a decade, for instance, and this has properly done a number on me. Being given my notice transformed the place from a transient pile of cadaverous lino and spasmodic plumbing into something mythical and unnerving – a whole chapter of my life completed and reduced to a piece of masonry in the rearview mirror, a relic I had been living in for years without quite realising.

A few video game developers have investigated emotions like these by recreating their current and prior homes as virtual environments: places of mingled memory and invention, expressive of both nostalgia and surprise. At this year's Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, I interviewed a couple of teams who are coming at this premise with very different objectives, and somehow, meeting in the middle. One of the games in question is a work of daydreaming fondness, the other of comical anger. Both find a focus in the figure of a matriarch who is kindly in one game, abusive in the other.

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I’ve always liked the Razer Basilisk V3 Pro mouse, a lightweight wireless version of the equally comfortable and responsive Basilisk V3. Yet it’s usually been just a few tenners too expensive for me to say "You, RPS reader, buy this", and since telling people what to buy is around 40% of this job, well, that just leaves a peripheral-shaped hole in my heart.

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"James, please don’t just make half your Black Friday deal posts about Steam Deck stuff again", warns a steely-eyed Graham. "I won’t", I reply in sing-song while quietly adding pictures of the JSAUX ModCase to the CMS. That’s right, Amazon and a bunch of other retails have launched their BF sales a week early, which is annoying, unless you’re in the market for a Steam Deck case upgrade. If so, consider the compact, multifunctional ModCase, which is down to just £24 / $24. That makes for savings of 33% and 20% respectively, on what was already a nicely affordable alternative to the luxury of Dbrand’s similar Project Killswitch.

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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! This week, it’s Looking Glass Studios’ legend, Deus Ex director, and Otherside’s Warren Spector - who I suspect might have realised the very secret goal of this column. Cheers Warren! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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If you want to bump up the storage for your Switch or Steam Deck, then Black Friday is going to be a fantastic time to do just that.

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