Choosing the lowest storage capacity Steam Deck or other PC gaming handheld then upgrading to a high-capacity SSD is often cheaper than choosing the highest-tier storage option out of the gate, and can even provide better performance too.
If that makes sense to you, we spotted a 10% discount on the WD SN740, a solid PCIe 4.0 option that works well in the Steam Deck and even better in the ROG Ally, Legion Go and MSI Claw gaming handhelds that support faster PCIe 4.0 speeds. After the discount at Scan in the UK, the SN740 is available for £81 for 1TB.
Lexar’s Play Micro SD cards are some of the most affordable 1TB memory cards you can buy, and now you can pick up one for just £67.85 – within £3 of the cheapest price ever recorded for this model, which was during Black Friday last year.
These cards are rated for up to 150MB/s reads and have both UHS Speed Class 3 (3) and App Performance Class 2 (A2) certifications for minimum speeds, making them a decent choice for Steam Deck, ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go owners amongst other use cases in phones, cameras and more.
VVVVVV was part of the initial wave of indie platformers, which means it was released in 2010 and is now a certified classic. To celebrate its 14th birthday, developer Terry Cavanagh has dropped an update which makes it Steam Deck verified and professionally translates it into 21 new languages.
It took all of one turn before the insults started flying in our Solium Infernum multiplayer preview session this week. Specifically, they’d been launched straight into the court of League Of Geeks co-founder and studio director Trent Kusters, who was attempting to show us how the game’s asynchronous multiplayer mode worked in a six-player match-up – the public playtest for which goes live today, Thursday January 11th, over on Steam. Moments earlier, he’d been walking myself, deputy editor Alice Bee and guides editor Ollie through the basics of this strategy game from hell, telling us about the importance of claiming territory, seeking out places of power to bolster our domain, and how to do battle with our hive-like legion units. But just as we were watching our individual turn orders play out, Kusters announced that Ollie had given him the digital equivalent of a demonic slap in the face, demanding he pay tribute to him, or else…
To his credit, Kusters took it with good humour. “This is the beautiful thing about this game – it’s petty high school politics in Hell,” he said laughing before graciously deciding to accept the insult at the cost of some of his prestige – the all-important hallmark of how you’re perceived within this conclave of warring demons fighting for Satan’s empty throne. Personally, I think Ollie’s insult would have pierced my exceedingly thin skin instantly if I’d been in the same position, and I’d probably have been torn between declaring a vendetta against Ollie’s unjustified affront, or challenging him to a Praetor duel to exact some (hopefully) righteous vengeance. Alas, since we were literally only a turn into this game, none of us were in any position to make good on those options, leaving the only possible outcome as eating it and moving on. It was a smart move on Ollie’s part, and one that makes me both terrified and excited to see how our own team multiplayer sessions will play out in the run-up to Solium Infernum’s full release on February 14th.
A new Elden Ring update has patched the game’s Easy Anti-Cheat to support a recent SteamOS update, as detailed on publisher Bandai Namco’s official site. It’s good news for people playing the FromSoftware RPG on Steam Decks, especially those haunted by memories of the game’s technical tribulations at launch, some of which were caused by the anti-cheat functionality. It’s less great news for the millions hankering for the slightest whisper of new information about Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC. But save your pity, above all, for the dozens of videogame news writers – dozens, I tell you! – who must write about Elden Ring’s Shadow of the Erdtree DLC at any opportunity, lest the demigods of traffic eat our souls.
The Independent Games Festival awards – aka: the only awards that are actually worth paying attention to – have announced the finalists for their 2024 cohort, and wouldn’t you know it, there are lots of RPS-endorsed games in there, lemme tell ya. Cooking adventure Venba leads the pack with a total of four nominations, but it’s closely followed by Cocoon, A Highland Song, Mediterranea Inferno and 1000xResist, all of which have scooped three noms apiece.
New year, same us! The Electronic Wireless Show podcast returns and kicks off the new year with a look forward at what 2024 may bring. We chat about our most anticipated video games that may or may not be arriving this year, including some racing, some spac(marine)ing and some book selling. Also some freezing and some despairing (at BioWare and Bloodlines 2, potentially). Plus: Nate and James have an anecdote off, which makes me lose my mind and become a horrible person for about four solid minutes. I have apologised, and me and James are still friends.
It’s time for another pull on the velvet rope labelled “too many games”. In fairness, this time the argument is a touch more involved than perennial moaning about backlogs – to whit, “there are too many games and it’s all the pandemic’s fault”. Nacon’s head of publishing Benoit Clerc has argued that the Covid lockdown years have bred too much investment in new games, and that we’re currently reaping the results in the form of an unsustainable glut of releases.
Indiana Jones And The Great Circle appears to be the title of Bethesda and Lucasfilm’s new Indiana Jones game created by Wolfenstein developers MachineGames, if a recent brace of domain registrations are any indication.
I’m pretty sure I’ve written about this somewhere already – I may have expressed it to a therapist – but when I was a lad, I had a recurring nightmare about a place called Snake World. It was a fizzing neon labyrinth that was both home to various evil snakes and sort of made of snakes in probably-Freudian ways.
Fortunately, I had a lucid dreaming strategy for escaping from Snake World: relax all my limbs as much as I could, then flail around violently to wake myself up. It doesn’t look like this will be an effective gambit in Digested, a bodycam horror game about being stuck on a barren, thinly forested and possibly irradiated island with a giant snake. Your tactical options seem to consist mostly here of running away.
