Logitech’s MX Master series of office mice are incredible for getting stuff done, thanks to their iconic wide shapes, multiple scroll wheels and powerful software. Today the newest version, the Master 3S, has dropped from an RRP of £120 to £82 at Amazon UK, a historic low price.
This latest edition is ideal for writing, programming, content creation and surfing the web, thanks to quiet button clicks, a fast and accurate ‘magspeed’ scroll wheel (and a secondary thumb wheel), and a high-end 8K laser sensor that allows for accurate tracking on any surface, even glass.
Half-Life turns 25 years old tomorrow, with new maps and updates to celebrate. Valve also reunited the game’s original developers for an hour-long making-of documentary in which its original programmers and artists reminisce about creating the first-person classic at a time when many of them had never shipped a game before.
Chief among the revelations within is that all of Half-Life’s textures were created by a single person, Karen Laur.
Immortals Of Aveum never looked like it was going to be successful, and it wasn’t. I root for it, however. In an industry where big budget blockbusters are most often sequels, or boringly safe, Aveum feels comparatively bold just by being a self-evidentaly daft first-person mashup of Call Of Duty and Doctor Strange magic powers.
Mazes and labyrinths can be confusing, frustrating, oppressive, nightmarish. They are the kinds of structures videogame developers are reluctant to put in their games, because the potential for the player losing heart or patience is relatively high. But as productions, they can be strangely economical, oddly light-footed. Mazes and labyrinths, after all, twist up space and as such, discover or create additional space within space. They allow vast journeys to happen within areas that are modest when judged in terms of square footage, journeys that encompass a multitude of locations that have an inherent, automatic atmosphere: tantalising forks in the path and mocking dead ends, hubs with corridors leading in all directions, leisurely perimeter paths and gristly knots of inner passages.
As such, I think they’re useful to reflect on at a time when the mantra of growth for its own sake has conquered the heart of videogame world design: bigger budgets for grander maps in terms of both explorable area and computational resource, all the way to Armageddon (did you know that Suicide Squad’s Metropolis is twice the size of Arkham Knight’s Gotham City?). But don’t take it from me, an armchair developer with armchair socialist sensibilities. Take it from The Legend of Zelda.
Bitesize café management game Zipp’s Café has hit PC, landing somewhere between the animal-noir atmosphere of raccoon detective game Backbone and the chill relationships-and-drinks vibes of Coffee Talk.
Good news for those Assassin’s Creed fans who’ve already finished Mirage – a far more accomplishable task than in the series’ last few games – and are itching to dive back into the streets of ninth-century Baghdad for a fresh challenge: New Game Plus will arrive for free next month, along with a punishing new permadeath mode.
“Night Cascades is on sale,” a Steam notification informed me this week. I didn’t remember adding it to my wishlist, and honestly I didn’t remember what it was. Still, a visual novel about lesbians solving occult mysteries? Oh, and it’s made by the studio behind RPS favourites Long Live The Queen and Black Closet? For under £5? Ah, go on. Having now played it, yeah, I’m happy with the spooky investigation and clueless yearning that I got for a fiver.
Hades is one of the many GOTY award winners I feel extremely guilty about barely spending any time with. I think I’ve played a couple of hours tops. Nobody must know! Oh drat. Anyway, despite my lack of expertise, the Supergiant action-roguelite was the first comparison that came to mind while watching the trailer for Realm of Ink, which has just been announced.
It makes use of a similar angled perspective, appears similarly focussed on build customisation, with hundreds of magic items to equip, and sees you playing out the backstories of various mythological personalities – derived, in this case, not from Ancient Greece but China and Buddhism.
Former Dragon Age: Dreadwolf production director and veteran Mass Effect scribe Mac Walters has founded a new studio, Worlds Untold, with funding from NetEase. According to the official site, the studio will develop “triple-A action adventure games with an emphasis on narrative and worldbuilding”: its first project is a single-player-focussed, “near future action adventure game in a breathtaking world filled with mystery and exploration”.
Amongst other things, this reflects Walter’s desire to move away from the “space opera” RPGs he’s made in the past and develop a more linear, story-driven sci-fi game, whose universe might also host TV or novel adaptations. Which might not sound very appealing to BioWare diehards, but you can rest easy on one count: the game will have plenty of lore, though how it’s served up to the player is another question.
In terms of straight-up savings, the best early Black Friday gaming laptop deals are surely the most generous among pre-Christmas games tech discounts. True, they’re pricier than any gaming mouse or Steam Deck accessory to begin with, but basic principles of proportions mean that the choicest deals will lop off enormous wads of cash.
And these are quality lappies, too. Some of my personal favourites (the Gigabyte Aorus 15X! The Razer Blade 14! The Acer Nitro 5, if you’re on a budget!) have made into Black Friday’s early deal highlights, and there are plenty more besides. Most of them are rocking up-to-date Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs, too, so they’ll be able to handle ray tracing and roid their own performance via DLSS 3. To varying extents, naturally.
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