Black Friday is usually heaving with discounts on NVMe SSDs, and today’s is no exception. Rather than do the usual routine of just suggesting the WD Black SN850X again, however, there’s no better SSD-for-yer-money deal right now than the Crucial T500, which is going for an exceptionally low £58 right now for the 1TB capacity – down from £120. The 2TB version is also an excellent buy at £100, and there are decent offers up for grabs in the US too.

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Okay okay, just one> more handheld deal then I’ll look at some desktop stuff. But here’s a properly chunky Black Friday discount on the most endearingly out-there Steam Deck rival to date, the Lenovo Legion Go: the 512GB model has shed hundreds of pounds/dollaridoos to fall all the way to £479 / $500. That’s really not a lot for something that goes full luxe on its display and build quality, not to mention its party trick of letting the two controller sections split off, Nintendo-switch style, with one acting as a portable mouse.

This is also the cheapest that the Legion Go has ever gone, at least in the UK, so could make a good pickup if you’ve been wanting something with more power than the Steam Deck range but have been put off by the Legion Go or Asus ROG Ally X’s high launch pricing.

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Happy Black Friday, I definitely don’t say with a gun pressed into my spine. These days, of course, Black Friday sort of just starts whenever retailers feel like it, which is why we’ve already seen the kind of Steam Deck microSD deals that I’d have normally spent this morning writing up. Instead, here’s an alternate for the more eager screwdriverists among you: up to 50% off the Crucial P310, currently our top pick of the recent breed of Steam Deck replacement SSDs.

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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl challenges you to survive the Zone, a land where the rules of nature are more like half-hearted suggestions and death may come from a mutant’s fang as quickly as a bandit’s bullet. But what if you could not only survive it, but tame it?

I am Bohdan Beastmaster, aspiring wrangler of all the radiation-twisted insults to God that occupy the Zone. One of its rogue Artifacts exploded my flat, and rather than find a place on SpareRoom, I’ve gone for the easier and safer option of venturing into the wilds of Chornobyl – armed not with rusty AKs or scavenged grenades but the teeth and claws of my mutant soon-to-be companions. The absence of any actual fauna-influencing tools or techniques only makes my plan even simpler: find beasts, aggro beasts onto human enemies, win.

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All that writing about gaming earbuds yesterday has reignited my appreciation for the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless, the PC headset I’ve been donning every day for... ooh, maybe two and a half years now? It sounds lovely, is comfortable enough to wear for hours, and has such a long battery life that we should probably just consider it witchcraft by now. Also, it’s just had its price cut for Black Friday week, dropping to a very agreeable £110 in the UK and $126.

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Another explosion sends the bodies flying. "Has anyone been here long enough to tell me what the hell is going on!?" the sergeant yells. He sounds annoyed. The field hospital is gone, probably blown to pieces. Troops keep wandering north and disappearing from view, only to come flying back as airborne cadavers moments later. The number of corpses and spilled backpacks on the road imply that someone in battalion headquarters (if such a place even exists) has made a terrible decision. If the Colonial forces want to win the persistent online war of Foxhole, suggests the sergeant with his many irritated noises, then someone needs to piece these dying fools together. As the only medic in a 500 metre radius, that means me.

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The Alienware Black Friday sale is well underway, and you can get your hands on some very tasty gaming PCs for a huge discount this year. Our top pick from this sale is the Aurora R16 RTX 4090 Gaming PC for $2,999.99. That’s a gigantic $1,000 saving on a powerful out-of-the-box gaming PC.

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We’re now just one day out from Black Friday, so the savings are starting to seriously ramp up. You can grab our favourite Steam Deck dock in the sale for just $23.99 this year. That’s a full $16 off the usual price. The 6-in-1 option is also on sale and 20% off at Amazon today.

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Back in January I wrote a (supporters only) post about how tired I am of all survival games starting off the same. Here's the gist of it: I've had enough of gathering rocks and sticks to make a crafting bench, from which I'm forced to build a hut and so on. I'm sure for some this is riveting, but for me, it's something I tire of within seconds.

And so it's with a heavy heart I say that Towers Of Aghasba suffers from the same starting gamut of sticks and stones. There's a hint of some interesting ecosystem stuff springing up a bit later, and judging by the trailers, an ability to clamber on massive flying creatures made of what looks like elephant skin and hair. Still, I just can't do it.

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I've gone on record as not being a huge fan of the artstyle choices used in the new Warcraft I & II remasters. It's crisp and readable, sure, but I'm never exactly thrilled to see all the roughness of older sprites completely done away with, especially when I always felt some of that ruggedness was the point. The tendency of remasters to treat every characterful oddity as a blemish is a wider topic than the scope of this article, but one day, Bluepoint will remaster Bloodborne, and the world will feel my pain.

Anyway. Nowadays, I'd say Blizzard - or, World Of Warcraft, at least - is pretty much synomous with a softer, more colorful approach to fantasy worlds. While I don't pine for a return to the more boobily ridiculous elements of Frank Frazetta's style, I do often wish that some of the more expressive, pained, and physically grounded elements of classic Sword And Sorcery art was a bit more common. I'm no art scholar, and there's undoubtedly a bit of tunnel vision of my part to this assertion, but as far as as pop culture goes: I see the Blizzard version of fantasy more than I see the Frazetta version, and I don't exactly love it. Same goes for the older, punkier, less uniform sci-fi art from things like 2000 AD and Warhammer 40,000. Edwin touched on some of this in his excellent Space Marine piece.

Anyway, a valued RPS community member on the Discord shared an older bit of art by Blizzard's Chris Metzen, from the original Starcraft manual. I figured a few of you might enjoy seeing these older pieces, considering how much the overall look of their games has changed over the years.

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