Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

What if the company that sold your cheese also sold your PC gaming hardware? This is not the murmuring of some poor sod on a nineteen-hour Dota 2 binge who’s started thinking that the crumbs in his keyboard resemble a viable snack, but a bold new reality, one I recently found myself staring down during a trip to Asda. The supermarket chain – third biggest in the UK by turnover and purveyors of ill-fitting clothes and surprisingly good doughnuts alike – has added light-up gaming mice, keyboards, and headsets to its mountain of own-brand wares.

Asda being what it is (Americans, if you’re unfamiliar, think Walmart with less gun violence), it’s all dirt cheap as well. £17 for a full-size keyboard. £16 for an FPS mouse. Overwhelmed with curiosity, I ended up taking home a complete starter set (keeb, different mouse, headset, and mousemat) for £45, or about a third of the price of the Logitech G515 Lightspeed TKL that I’d shortly kick off my desk. Could this be a new frontier in affordable PC hardware, bringing tech to the masses in a way no specialist retailer ever could, or should supermarkets stick to cereal and meal deals? Surely the Asda Tech (real name) 4-in-1 Gaming Kit would have the answers.

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Hmmm… it could be nothing, but the technomancers at Nvidia have just updated their graphics drivers, and among the list of game profiles now listed in their control panel tool is Final Fantasy XVI. The blockbuster JRPG isn’t out on PC yet, and developers Square Enix have not given a concrete release date for it, but this does seem to be prep work for the inevitable. And with Squeenix in attendance at Gamescom, it’s possible we’ll know more soon.

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Back in June, strategy bods Creative Assembly put out a chunky, chatty video discussing the next expansion for Total War: Warhammer 3. Aside from a not-so-subtle hint that the orcs, ogres, and Khorne pack would feature at least one colossal squig, it also ended with a tease at smaller bits of new content coming alongside regular patches. As of the game’s latest hotfix blog, we’ve now got a better idea when we’ll start seeing some of these “smaller bits and pieces.” Bits and pieces? In this economy? Yes, and this month in fact. “Late August” to be precise by quoting a vague statement precisely.

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In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only War, unless you don’t have a 64-bit PC with an Intel Core i5-8600K equivalent and at least eight gigs of RAM, in which case you’ll have to, I don’t know, live in everlasting peace, or something. I’m pretty sure not having eight gigs of RAM is heretical, but never fear, you can probably compensate by taking a leaf from the God-Emperor’s book and arrange for a host of dying psykers to pour their brain energy into your motherboard.

All of which is to say that Focus Home have released the system requirements for huge-shouldered action game Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. Find them proudly emblazoned across the header image above, and written out for easier copy-pasting in the blockquote, below.

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As the wait lengthens for Hollow Knight: Silksong, other Soulsy creature features are scurrying to fill the breach. We had Deviator last week – now, it’s time for a bumper helping of the heebie-jeebies in the shape of Perennial Order. The title makes it sound like an eBay delivery of potted geraniums. The game festering beneath is actually a “plant horror” boss rusher with twin stick melee controls, unlockable “Instinct” abilities and one-hit deaths.

In a gift to headline writers everywhere, the developers, four-person Gardenfiend Games, are calling it “Hollow Knight meets Titan Souls”, and who am I to deny them? It’s got one of those “painterly” art styles, too, though other words come to mind, such as “rotted” and “unhallowed” and “manky”. It’s out on 6th September. Find a trailer nested below this paragraph like a venus flytrap poised to clamp around your fingers.

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I don’t play much Call Of Duty any more. My feelings about the series have settled back from self-righteous fury over its Pentagon-sponsored war-fellating to a quieter, regretful sense that there have maybe been enough Call Of Duty games now, and that it would be nice if we could fill that infamous late October/early November release slot with, I don’t know, games about witches instead, or maybe just turn it into a public holiday and spend the week lying on a mattress regarding the ceiling. Still: I’ve skinned and filleted enough COD in my time to know that Black Ops 6‘s new “omnimovement” system is going to ruffle as many feathers as it smooths. The short version is that it turns you into Max Payne.

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Cinematic platformer Bionic Bay opens on a scene of a very large egg doing very bad things – easily my third favourite genre of speculative fiction. You awake to a world of tree trunks that twist like viscera and corroded contraptions powered by luminous goop that’s stored in the balls, uh, big glass orbs. A beam of light soon fills your character with newfound vigour, which is a nice moment of triumph in what otherwise feels like a deeply oppressive rust pit, all unsteady platforms and jagged pipes.

It doesn’t take long before you start spotting examples of the reason Bionic Bay went viral earlier this week. Above your head hangs a painstakingly detailed mass of vents and cables, looming lifelike with dust and shadow and history. I stood and stared because I’d seen how the sausage was made, but I like to think I would have lingered longer than usual anyway. It really is just that impressive.

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What is it with monstrous eating mechanics in games of late? Last week it was carnivorous post-Soviet elevators, now it’s retro fantasy RPGs that devour themselves. In Super Dungeon Muncher, you are a teeny-tiny hero navigating a corridor-shaped map full of fireball traps and crumbling platforms, spinning coins and patrolling critters. That’s the “Super Dungeon” part. The “Muncher” part refers to the corpulent red monster guzzling the whole level in your wake.

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Every so often, the fine folk of Resetera take a break from their usual schedule of complaining that video games journalists get all their news from Resetera, and post a Thing Of Beauty. For example: it’s thanks to Resetera member AstralSphere that I know about Alistair Aitcheson’s Magic Box and BizHawk retro emulation tools, which – amongst other things – allow you to play old Sonic the Hedgehog games in giddy parallel, shuffling between them whenever you collect a ring.

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The monst! The monst are back! Whoo-hoo! We’re still a while off from the TBC 2025 release date of haute-couture-asaurus RPG Monster Hunter Wilds, and Capcom have finally graced us with some delicious Actual Details, following the previous cinematic trailers. These come in the form of three short videos uploaded today on the official Monster Hunter channel, detailing the basics, focus mode, and the great sword’s moveset.

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