The best gaming SSD deals in Amazon’s Spring Sale

I’ve hit the install cap on my storage drive more times than I’ve rage-quit in Apex. At some point, deleting a 90GB game just to download another becomes a sad cycle of SSD suffering. So yeah, when a bunch of top-tier M.2 drives go on sale, I pay attention. Amazon’s Spring Sale has been great for PC gaming deals, but it’s also the last day of the sale as well, so don’t delay on these latest price drops.

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RuneScape returns as an open world survival RPG in which you hunt a Dragon Queen

Jagex have announced RuneScape: Dragonwilds, a new open world co-operative survival game set in the same fantasy world as their ancient MMO. It runs on Unreal Engine 5, looks a bit like Valheim and Enshrouded, and will launch into early access this spring. Dragonwilds is set on the continent of Ashenfall, a wild place featuring dragons, and your overall goal is to “slay the Dragon Queen”.

I’m going to make the obvious prediction here: you will spend much more time in Ashenfall chopping down trees and composing their delicious, grainy innards into barn doors than chopping down any dragons, regal or otherwise. It’s a survival game, after all. The ratio of dragons to logging and carpentry in the first screenshots is a nail-biting 1:1 – if it weren’t for that subtitle, I might have assumed this to be a game about woodlands management with optional Smaug-bashing QTEs. Rather than dragon-felling cantrips, the announcement release gives prominent mention to a spell for summoning spectral axes to chop trees down for you, which feels a bit like a car salesman leading with the option to just buy a train ticket instead. Here’s the announcement trailer.

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The best gaming headset deals in Amazon’s Spring Sale

I used to think any old headset would do. Plug it in, hear the game, done. Then I bought a half-decent one and immediately heard footsteps I’d been ignoring for years. Now I can’t go back. If you’re still gaming with tinny audio and a mic that makes you sound like a drive-thru cashier in a hurricane, Amazon’s Spring Sale is your best chance to escape the audio troubles, and it’s also the last day of the sale as well, so don’t delay on these top discounts.

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I threw hands with Doom: The Dark Ages and its rock ’em sock ’em robot

Doom is going medieval. Id Software’s next brutish shooter, Doom: The Dark Ages, was revealed with a shield-flinging trailer last summer, and we’ve since learned more about how it’ll actually play. Nic already summed up the new features but I gots something that Nic boy don’t: three hours of hands-on time with the Doomlad, including some dragonback dog-fighting, and a fifty-storey fistfight in a gargantuan mech. Let me tell you what it’s like.

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Purge your village of the Devil using Tarot cards in this festively rancid strategy game

If you handed me a deck of revolting Tarot cards and told me to heal a bunch of sickly, deranged medieval peasants, I would probably attempt to sew the cards together into bandages. Perhaps I would offer the nicer ones to children instead of lollipops, to distract them while I apply the leeches (lollipops did exist in the Middle Ages, I’m shocked to discover, but mostly in noble circles). Bloodletter has grander ambitions.

In this whispery, crazy-eyed deckbuilder, you’ll play Tarot-style cards to purge foul spirits who are seeking to possess and kill your neighbours. “Evil entities have crept into the hearts of the common folk, who teeter upon the brink of madness and death,” the developers explain. “Only thy bathhouse stands as a bastion against the creeping corruption.” It sounds like a mixture of Pathologic and Black Book and Pentiment. Here be’est the trailer.

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Assassin’s Creed Shadows team “actively looking at” tougher difficulty options

Assassin’s Creed Shadows‘s dev team are “actively looking at” adding options for a more challenging jaunt through the throaty-poke ’em up’s incarnation of feudal Japan. “We’re looking at these things and monitoring what people say about the game,” creative director Jonathon Dumont told GamesRadar+ at this year’s GDC.

Shadows currently features four difficulty options for both stealth and combat, ranging from ‘story’ to ‘expert’, as well as the ‘guaranteed assassination’ toggle from recent previous entries, which ensures that when you stab a man in the neck with a large sharp piece of metal, he does not react with a blasé “ow! Nevertheless…”.

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Satisfactory is getting a photo mode, new building tools, proper controller support and programmable elevators

Coffee Stain remain dissatisfied with Satisfactory, their first-person factory sim, despite Matt Cox giving it the Cox’s Orange Pippin Award in our Satisfactory 1.0 review. They’re just about to release update 1.1 into public testing. This adds Photo Mode, programmable personnel elevators, and a bunch of twisty furnishings.

One thing it doesn’t add is rain, which used to exist in Satisfactory but was removed because it wasn’t working properly. Apparently, Coffee Stain need to do an Unreal Engine upgrade before they can restore the missing precipitation. Many players are sad about this. Ah, I think it’s kind of poetic that there are people in the Satisfactory community who wish only to be rained upon.

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Tony Hawk personally made changes to Pro Skater 3+4 soundtracks because he wants you to discover new music

“Alien Ant Farm or we boycott,” reads the top comment on Activision’s recent reveal of the next wave of tracks for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 – a response to the revelation that the upcoming remasters have both been hit and struck by some soundtrack changes, which hasn’t gone down completely smoothly with fans. You could almost say they feel making alterations to such classics is criminal. OK, I’ll stop. For now.

It turns out these changes come straight from the large Hawk himself. “It was my choice to pick some different songs by the same artists featured in THPS3+4 OST,” he wrote on Instagram, as spotted by Very Gary Computing. “I’m hoping that discovery is half the fun, and a big reason that these soundtracks resonated in the first place. So listen and enjoy the ride. More to come… both old and new.”

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The Final Fantasy 9 remake looks ever so slightly more likely as Square Enix add anniversary page to website

Rumours of a Final Fantasy IX remake have been remaking themselves part of the discourse for several years now, sparked by the announcement of an animated series and a Nvidia leak back in 2021, and stoked by manifestations of several other Squeenix games from the leaked Geforce list. Now, Square Enix have added a dedicated 25th anniversary page flogging figures, spectacles, and other charming tat to their website.

The JRPG‘s 25th cake day isn’t until July 7th, but this new page lines up with claims from Oblivion remake leaker NateTheHate that we’re getting closer to an announcement, if not a release. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has also claimed that the Final Final Tactics remaster is still being worked on – a rumour that’s been twinned with the FF9 one for about as long as it’s been floating about.

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