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! As both Ollie and this immaculately-crafted Green Stuff Slann butt have already foretold, Kiera Mills is leaving RPS for pastures more dog-like. As such, she’s joining me to talk about books! Cheers Kiera! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
This year’s RPS Advent Calendar has arrived, and it’s time for us to fill the nook behind each door with 24 delightful game-shaped chocolates. But man, it’s hard work making these chocolates. Too much manual labour. I wish we could automate the process somehow - perhaps we just need to exploit the planet’s resources and turn it into a giant chocolate-making factory spanning the entire solar system. Yes, that should work.
December is here! It has snuck up on us once again, hidden as it always is behind November's back. It's arrival heralds the beginning of the RPS Advent Calendar 2024, the yearly list of our favourite games of the year. Step inside, open the doors, and celebrate another year's gaming survived.
Sundays! Sundays are for going quickly.
Gabriel Winslow-Yost wrote for Harper's Magazine - not an outlet typically known for their videogame coverage - about Elden Ring and the role of death and failure in games.
The Samsung Pro Plus is, alongside the Logitech G502 Hero, one of those hardware products that rocks up at literally every single sales event in the calendar. Just an endless cycle of microSD cards, mice, microSD cards, mice. At least it’s a good'un, though - the best Steam Deck-compatible microSD of them all, in fact. Previously, its one weakness was the lack of a truly cavernous 1TB model, but that was amended earlier this year, and now that capacity is getting its first major saving as part of Black Friday 2024.
Cyber Knights Colon Flashpoint does not lead with its best foot. This is easier to shrug off while it's still in early access, but I will confess some relief when I read that the Trese Brothers (It's pronounced "Trese") nudged their estimated release date back to 2025. It needs a bit longer. But I'm about ready to start recommending it.
I'm a tad biased by my love for their previous Star Traders Colon Frontiers, an interest in mercenary management, and a wish for more turn-based tactics games that aren't bloody XCOM again. That I have reservations about what CKF hasn't yet nailed down is in part a symptom of high expectations. And because despite carrying over some design ethos from Frontiers, Cyber Knights is a very different kind of game.
To be clear, I still think the best graphics card deal of Black Friday week is that RTX 4070 Super offer and oh no wait that one’s gone now. But even if hadn’t been ecommerced to death, there’d still be a way to get the upgraded ray tracing and DLSS 3 frame gen tools of the RTX 40 series for less cash still: plucky 1080p contender, the RTX 4060, whose deals are still very much available and kicking.
In the UK, the best available prices are for the MSI GeForce RTX Ventus 2X Black edition, which is the partner card I happen to own myself – and has become the effective go-to GPU for RPS game performance tests. Over in the US, meanwhile, the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4060 Gaming OC is the most affordable of all; it’s a chunkier design than that of the compact Ventus 2X, though that’s mainly just the tradeoff for having an extra fan. These cards were already on the cheaper end of the RTX 4060 spectrum, and now they’re £30 / $35 off in the sales. Bargain.
As far as Black Friday deals go, the Logitech G502 Hero isn’t so much low-hanging fruit as it is a root vegetable. Every year, this damned multi-buttoned mouse goes on sale, and every year, I’m powerless to avoid writing about it. Can’t even be bothered to take a different header image photo. It’s partly your fault, you know. You like it too much.
This time it’s down from £80 to £26 in the UK (£27 outside the Bezos Empire), which isn’t quite an all-time low, but is pretty close – and a silly-good price for such a capable mouse in any case. Its US discount price of $35 ain’t half bad either, though I notice Amazon US is shouting louder about knocking the newer G502 X down from $80 for $45. That’s mostly a fine mouse as well, though I find its redesigned scroll wheel a bit too much on scratchy side. Of the two, I’d stick with the classic.
In many ways, the SteelSeries Apex 3 TKL and Apex Pro TKL are about as different as tenkeyless gaming keyboards get: the first is a budget-friendly membrane ‘board, the second a luxurious all-mechanical number with adjustable switches and its own little OLED display. Yet they’re also both very good at what they do, and are now sharing Black Friday discount honours.
