Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Sad news today, folks. Our excellent guides writer Rebecca is moving on to pastures new. Specifically, pastures that have had the letters and numbers VG247 mown into them, as Rebecca is beginning a new guides journey at our dear sister site starting next week. We wish her all the best in her new adventures, follicking in the fields of Animal Crossing and other console-based delights, although I’ll personally be very sad to lose my fellow Zero Escape and Danganronpa liker (the placement of these games in next year’s RPS 100 is now in serious trouble, folks, I’m telling ya now). But before we get too deep in the doom and gloom, come and bid her farewell in the comments below.

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This AMD Radeon RX 7600 review will explain, I’d hope, a fair bit about the red team’s newest 1080p graphics card. It will tell you how fast it runs games, how hot it gets, how it compares to Nvidia’s RTX 4060 and suchlike. What I can’t explain with it, admittedly, is why the RX 7600 exists.

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One thing I never tire of ranting about is the brilliance of the original Homeworld Mothership – both for its elegant crescent-moon design, and for its more practical function as a giant compass needle shoved into Homeworld’s then-unprecedented 3D volumes, so that players can orient themselves and strategise. I admit, I was a little piqued by Homeworld 3‘s redesigned Mothership, which lies flat as a doormat – an act of blasphemy akin to flipping a crucifix upside down, or wearing a baseball cap backwards in your 50s. But I’ve come round to the new Mothership after reading Blackbird Interactive art director Karl Gryc’s thoughts on its creation.

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AMD and Bethesda have unveiled a limited-edition Starfield-themed Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPU and Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU at Quakecon 2023. Both are decorated according to the forthcoming open world space-me-do’s “NASApunk” aesthetic, a blend of cool whites, blues and yellows which I will admit to finding rather attractive, as somebody who generally finds gaming hardware aesthetics an absolute turn-off. It’s certainly better-looking than Nvidia’s lurid Cyberpunk 2077 GPU from 2020, but if you’re similarly beguiled, there’s an unfortunate catch: only 500 of these GPU/CPU sets are being made, and they’re exclusively available as part of a Quakecon giveaway.

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Overwatch 2 has launched on Steam and well, Activision Blizzard are probably regretting that right now. At the time of writing, the game has attracted 22,619 reviews, many written by people who’ve already been playing for a while on Battle.net, of which just 15% give the game a thumbs-up, making for an “Overwhelmingly Negative” rating. Tucked in amongst the usual troll reviews, cheeky links to Team Fortress 2 and dubious ASCII jokes there are some rather extensive essays on the game’s direction and faults.

Many players still have axes to grind about Overwatch 2’s switch to a free-to-play battle pass model – check out our launch-day Overwatch 2 review for the nitty gritty – which introduced levelling for new characters and cosmetics to a game that once handed you its entire roster almost without caveats, and encouraged you to experiment freely. Others are angry about Overwatch 2’s story-driven PVE modes, the supposed focus of the sequel – announced as a full-blown Hero Missions mode with skill trees and levelling, then dramatically stripped back to a series of separately sold seasonal co-op missions, much as with Halloween events in the first Overwatch. There are complaints about Blizzard’s recent handling of the Overwatch League, and more subjective quibbles about the switch to a 5v5 team format and the precise ratio of DPS to Support heroes. A few reviews touch on Activision-Blizzard’s alleged culture of sexual harassment and claims of unfair labour practices, which make Overwatch’s emphasis on team spirit ring rather hollow.

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What comes with free Gunnar blue light glasses and a copy of Starfield? Yup, it’s the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D when you buy it from Scan, and no I didn’t expect that either. Still, these freebies are on top of the lowest price we’ve ever seen for the fastest gaming CPU on the market, making this a deal that’s well worth your time if you’re considering a new gaming rig.

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It’s possible you’ve already played some of Baldur’s Gate 3, with Larian Studios having had their massive fantasy RPG in a successful early access for just under three years. It’s very good. But if you’re one of the many who haven’t, the premise is thus: an ancient evil has, as ancient evil is wont to do, arisen once more to threaten the great walled city of Baldur’s Gate, and by extension the surrounds, and by further extension the world and all the deep gnomes, elves and sexy demon wizards therein. Through happenstance and literal brainworms, you and the band of strange adventurers you meet in the first act are the only ones who can save the day. Don’t worry, you don’t need to remember or have played Baldur’s Gate 1 or 2. So. Off you go, then.

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Had you asked me yesterday about the best Baldur’s Gate 3 class, I might have picked Bard – versatile, swish, a solid support both in and out of combat – but that was before I discovered the ancient and honourable Larian discipline of barrelmancy. As the name suggests, it’s all about doing mildly game-breaking things with barrels, crates and other heavy containers, by taking advantage of high strength, the Throw command, and the fact that Larian RPG characters can somehow fit items as big as they are into their inventories, without bursting apart like rotten haggis.

A straightforward tactic: consider lugging a few oil barrels into a throne room, and dropping them all around the resident big cheese before you confront him. Given reasonably careful distribution, it’s possible to finish a whole battle this way in a single turn. Fortunately, while Baldur’s Gate NPCs can be eagle-eyed when it comes to sneaking rogues, they’re perfectly indifferent to people surrounding them with heavy explosives.

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Welcome once again to The Electronic Wireless Show podcast. We’re discussing current things about old things this week, as Bayonetta man Hideki Kamiya reveals he’s not super fond of the term ‘retro’ when applied to games. We discuss his comments, and what retro even means anyway, as well as what kind of games count as retro. Who even knows? Definitions are a jail, man.

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Look, I could justify this month’s Reality Bytes in any number of ways. I could say the VR launch cupboard is a little bare at the moment, with Steam’s New Releases list offering up a lot of dour military shooters, dubious Early Access projects, and fantasy dismemberment porn. I could say that The Room VR: A Dark Matter has just received a PSVR2 release, so now seems an opportune moment to revisit this acclaimed spin-off puzzler. I could say that The Room VR is the only entry in the series RPS hasn’t covered yet. But to be perfectly honest, I just fancied playing The Room VR. So there.

Oh all right, there was a slightly more specific reason why I wanted to revisit a game that came out just three days after Half-Life: Alyx. Upon its launch, there wasn’t much else like The Room on VR devices, a dedicated puzzler with high production values that didn’t feel the need to throw in a gun to shoot or a melon to chop. Now, there are bunch of fantastic VR brain-ticklers swimming in the pond, such as the time-travelling epic Wanderer, the perspective-bending A Fisherman’s Tale series, and the ingenious automation extravaganza The Last Clockwinder.

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