Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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.

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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.

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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.

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We’ll chat about what Frostpunk 2’s new roadmap is bringing to the strategy game in a second, but first, here are some other genres with the -punk suffix I would like to see brought to fruition soon:

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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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I greatly enjoyed tooting with my mouse in Trombone Champ on a flat monitor, but in retrospect it’s the perfect candidate for conversion to virtual reality. It’s small in scope, for one, but also VR would let you see through the eyes of the tooter and slide your trombone note up and down by holding the motion controllers up to your face.

So it is in Trombone Champ: Unflattened, a VR spin-off that’s out now.

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It’s almost the end of November, which means it is technically but not spiritually still autumn. It is spiritually winter, the season of wearing gloves and using my phone’s flashlight to look for my dog’s poos in the long grass. Yet it’s not the Steam winter sale that started yesterday, but the Steam autumn sale.

Discounts are definitely never a bad thing, but Steam sales used to feel like big events on the PC gaming calendar. They don’t anymore, to me. Friends, are Steam sales still exciting to you?

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In Ndemic Creations’ mobile strategy sim Plague Inc, you nurture a disease and attempt to spread it across the world. Originally launched in 2012, the game saw a morbid upsurge in popularity during the early years of Covid, as millions of people sought to model the pandemic’s advance or just play out their anxieties. Perhaps seeking to wash away any lingering bad karma, Ndemic have now unveiled After Inc: Revival, a blend of city builder and miniature 4X set in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. In Plague Inc, you brought the world to an end; now, you must grow it anew from the wreckage.

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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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