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! I am ill, so no guest this week. To tide you over, here is a short excerpt from a story I started once about the redemptive power of forgiveness:

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Sundays are for holding talks with the Squirmles to try and talk them down from a diplomatic incident after my cat’s various war crimes. Before that, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

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How do you do, fellow humans? After a period of rather intense illness and staying indoors, I feel like an alien. Perhaps this weekend will be my chance to go outside, breathe in the rainy Glasgow air again, and engage in some general decrustation of the soul. Or, more likely, stay indoors and play games, because the outside is where other people are, and other people are scary. Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend!

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Full disclosure: I hadn't heard of Bakeru until Graham mentioned it to me. Graham always has his hands on the video game pulse, gliding them over Xwitter or Steam or wherever and waiting for that "ker kun, ker kun" of a new Cool Thing. And that cool thing is Bakeru, described by its Steam page as "Japan-esque", but is in actual fact, very> Japanese. I mean, you travel around 47 Japanese prefectures as a metamorphing tanuki who bashes evilness with his taiko drum sticks. Come on.

What I hadn't suspected was Bakeru's chops not only as a platformer, but as a means to increase your chances at success in pub quizzes. The game is a certified trivia Tardis, where you'll learn all sorts about Japanese culture as well as just like, the colour sepia being a genus of cuttlefish.

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I've already said my piece on the hulking bugstomper in our Space Marine 2 review, but I'd like to celebrate one more thing about it - the photo mode. This is a fairly standard feature for a lot of blockbuster games, but in the world of Warhammer 40K there are so many mega-scale battles with pitch-perfect composition that I found it hard to resist hitting pause and taking a handful of snaps every few minutes. With a keen eye (and a beefy PC) you can capture some wonderfully violent moments.

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Amazon is currently offering a significant discount on one of the best microSD cards for the Steam Deck. The Lexar 1TB Play microSDXC Memory Card, an ideal storage solution for portable gaming devices like the Steam Deck, ROG Ally X, and others, is now priced at just $66.49, or £61.74 in the UK. This is a substantial drop from its original $129.99/ £129.99 list price, making it a great deal while the sale lasts.

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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! I’ve moved on to Wolfe’s Sword Of The Lictor this week and, readers, I’m starting to think that Severian might not be a very good dude. This week it’s Still Wakes the Deep, Little Orpheus, and Robocraft designer (along with many others) and current lead technical level designer at Half Mermaid, Robert McLachlan! Cheers Robert! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Sundays are for more cat. She’s reached the “follow me into the bathroom when I go downstairs at night for a wee” stage, but still won’t come upstairs - which means I have to leave her alone for long periods while I work, which makes me feel bad. Before I unsuccessfully arrange yet more treats on the stairs, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

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Time to set the record straight! I wasn't> too busy playing Black Myth: Wukong to write up last weekend's Playing This Weekend. I'd never fail you all thus! Instead, I had one of the worst flu illnesses I've ever had, followed by a nice bout of tonsillitis, for which I'm still on antibiotics. Thankfully, I can now look at a monitor screen for more than an hour before feeling sick, so gaming is no longer out of the question for this weekend. Let's see what we're all going to be clicking on!

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