Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I have one urgent request for Starward Industries, creators of the just-announced “anti-combat” survival RPG Dante’s Ring – don’t use the phrase “ring of fire” in your English marketing materials. I get that you’re going for a cocktail of Divina Commedia and FromSoftware associations, but you have to remember that this is the internet and we’re all desperately crude. I can’t speak for people from other English-language countries, but when I hear somebody talking about their “ring of fire”, I tend to assume they’ve been at the vindaloo.

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System requirements are on the rise, and a glut of recent PC facepunchers has left some of the RPS treehouse wondering if it’s time for a graphics card upgrade. Being a helpful colleague and a handsome friend, I dutifully informed them that the highly capable Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super is currently getting the Black Friday price cut treatment, with Zotac’s Twin Edge model dropping especially low in both the UK and US. Still, dear readers, if you feel like punishing us for that comment system switch, you could always head over to Amazon and buy up all the stock yourself.

$590 is a decent deal for a model that’s spent most of the past few months at $610, but us Brits are getting the better bargain here – even if it’s not for the OC version. £500 means a hefty £49 slasheroo, the deepest discount this card has seen yet, and you’ll also get a key for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to play when it releases on December 9th.

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In hindsight, it’s surprising that it took so long for hardware manufacturers to start making “gaming” earbuds. If the likes of chairs, glasses, and chewing gum can be painted stealth-bomber black and prefixed with the G word, why not something that can actually get off its harshly angled bum and help pipe the games themselves into your head?

Then again, maybe gaming earbuds were just waiting for their moment. Obviously the Nintendo Switch is the Nintendo Switch, but the rise of handhelds like the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally has driven desires for more portable (yet games-friendly) noise-deliverers ’round these PC parts as well. Thus, for another edition of Should You Bother With – the RPS column where a diaphragm of testing vibrates advice directly into the cochlea of understanding – let’s have a listen of these wireless buds and find out whether they’re a worthy replacement for your current go-to headphones.

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Half-Life 2 just got a small update, mostly to fix a long-running music bug. But hiding in the patch notes is an apology of sorts, a nod to that most tenacious of bunnyhopper: the Half-Life 2 speedrunner. It seems the recent 20th anniversary update for the classic first-person shooter messed with some beginner speedrun strategies by introducing an invisible wall to a big sewer pipe. Valve have now corrected that, removing the offending blocker and restoring order to the universe. Well, almost.

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As anyone who’s ever glanced at some of the better entries at r/twosentencehorror will tell you, the genre thrives on restrictions. Here’s a creepy good ‘un: “‘Please, God, don’t let it look in the closet,’ I silently prayed. ‘Please, God, don’t let it look in the closet,’ it parroted back from the next room.” You can’t do that with baby shoes, you anonymous hack!

Silent Hill 2 remake’s senior narrative designer Barbara Kciuk reckons this principle extends to much bigger productions. “It is a bit niche, but actually, the interesting part about horror is that it is one of the best ratios when it comes to the cost of production and the earnings,” she recently told TheGamer’s Rhiannon Bevan.

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I just played the neon bathroom graffiti on magic mushrooms stylings of puzzle game Children Of The Sun for the first time last night, and it is very much my thing. It’s glowy! It’s violent! It’s thinky! You can be a bullet, and then you can be another bullet! Mental! (It’s technically the same bullet, but still!)

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Just when you thought you’d played all the RPGs – maxed every last stat, drained the XP of every last creature, tap-danced your way along every branching questline – CD Projekt have announced that The Witcher 4 is in “full-scale production”.

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Whereas some bits of games kit are in and out of the sales like they keep forgetting their keys there, The PlayStation 5 DualSense controller is one of those peripherals that just seems to hover around its £60 / $75 list price indefinitely. Which is a shame, as it’s a very, very good gamepad, including for PC playage. Consider these Black Friday week deals, then, as a rare opportunity to secure yourself said good gamepad without acquiescing to Sony’s stubbornness: it’s down to £40 in the UK and $54 in the US.

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Recently, PC games have been gorging themselves silly on our storage space. 160GB for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2? 190GB for God of War Ragnarok? If these games were people they’d stand waiting at the Pizza Hut buffet and nab ten of the twelve slices of Pepperoni Feast as soon as they’re slid under the heatlamps. What to do? For our part, there’s little we can do except upgrade capacity, and there are few better ways to do that on a budget than with the WD Blue SN580. It’s a cheap yet fast PCIe 4.0 SSD, which the Black Friday sales have knocked down to £47 / $55 for 1TB.

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Here are some orc names I quite like. Haters will tell you these “aren’t real orcs”, but those fools are forever trapped in a stifling prison forged from the failures of their own imaginations. Suck it, haters:

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