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Today’s advent calendar window has an entire cult inside of it. Also, an alcoholic knight speaking in plummy prose between mouthfuls of booze and porridge. What’s more Christmassy than booze and porridge, eh? Not much, we’ll wager. You could pour the booze in the porridge, perhaps? You could call it ‘inebrioats’!
One of the many high concept ludonarrative experiments I’d one day like to bring to fruition is an immersive sim in which the player has access to many guns, but their default arsenal selection is an open packet of crisps which they hold out in front of them, in first person, and offer to NPCs. Some NPCs wouldn’t be swayed by this, but some would lower their weapons at the offer of a prawn cocktail treat, and so you’d be constantly playing chicken with various guards: edging closer toward them, your shaking hands rattling the delicious disks inside the oily packet, mentally weighing up whether it’s worth risking them turning hostile at the last second.
Obviously, I’d scan some real crisp packets and just alter the logos for maximum immersion. One game that’s already taken this scanned bricolage concept and run with it to beautiful effect is Hyperdrive Inn. It’s an avant garde point and click adventure from Finnish studio Horsefly, where the entire world is constructed from scanned fabric samples. Have a looksee.
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?
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.
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.
Is your Zone more Anomaly-rich than it should be? Are your corpses uncannily airborne? Do your comrades have dodgy teeth, and not in a good way? Do bits of your HUD keep disappearing? Be of good cheer, for GSC Game World have released the first proper S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart Of Chornbyl update, which patches out over 650 different bugs and issues. These range from more significant problems such as crashing and progression-blockers in certain missions, to relatively negligible stuff like wonky NPC voice volume during storms.
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.
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.
You can now knock down enemy dirtbags using a dinner plate as a violent frisbee in Selaco. Wonderful. The first-person shooter, which is replete with satisfying explosions, gunfire, bullet ricochets, smashing glass, sparks, goo, blood spatters, dust, ice particles, smoke, flecks of plaster, and bad guys yelling at one another about how she’s over there, may be described as noisy, both in the aural and visual sense of the word. Which is how we like it, you understand. This latest update to the early access shooter leans into that by layering on even more juicy shootFX. It also adds a whole new game mode and plenty of other tweaks. The bad news is that some story bits are now delayed.
