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December is here! It has snuck up on us once again, hidden as it always is behind November’s back. It’s arrival heralds the beginning of the RPS Advent Calendar 2024, the yearly list of our favourite games of the year. Step inside, open the doors, and celebrate another year’s gaming survived.
This year’s RPS Advent Calendar has arrived, and it’s time for us to fill the nook behind each door with 24 delightful game-shaped chocolates. But man, it’s hard work making these chocolates. Too much manual labour. I wish we could automate the process somehow – perhaps we just need to exploit the planet’s resources and turn it into a giant chocolate-making factory spanning the entire solar system. Yes, that should work.
Is your Zone more Anomaly-rich than it should be? Are your corpses uncannily airborne? Do your comrades have dodgy teeth, and not in a good way? Do bits of your HUD keep disappearing? Be of good cheer, for GSC Game World have released the first proper S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart Of Chornbyl update, which patches out over 650 different bugs and issues. These range from more significant problems such as crashing and progression-blockers in certain missions, to relatively negligible stuff like wonky NPC voice volume during storms.
The Samsung Pro Plus is, alongside the Logitech G502 Hero, one of those hardware products that rocks up at literally every single sales event in the calendar. Just an endless cycle of microSD cards, mice, microSD cards, mice. At least it’s a good’un, though – the best Steam Deck-compatible microSD of them all, in fact. Previously, its one weakness was the lack of a truly cavernous 1TB model, but that was amended earlier this year, and now that capacity is getting its first major saving as part of Black Friday 2024.
To be clear, I still think the best graphics card deal of Black Friday week is that RTX 4070 Super offer and oh no wait that one’s gone now. But even if hadn’t been ecommerced to death, there’d still be a way to get the upgraded ray tracing and DLSS 3 frame gen tools of the RTX 40 series for less cash still: plucky 1080p contender, the RTX 4060, whose deals are still very much available and kicking.
In the UK, the best available prices are for the MSI GeForce RTX Ventus 2X Black edition, which is the partner card I happen to own myself – and has become the effective go-to GPU for RPS game performance tests. Over in the US, meanwhile, the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4060 Gaming OC is the most affordable of all; it’s a chunkier design than that of the compact Ventus 2X, though that’s mainly just the tradeoff for having an extra fan. These cards were already on the cheaper end of the RTX 4060 spectrum, and now they’re £30 / $35 off in the sales. Bargain.
As far as Black Friday deals go, the Logitech G502 Hero isn’t so much low-hanging fruit as it is a root vegetable. Every year, this damned multi-buttoned mouse goes on sale, and every year, I’m powerless to avoid writing about it. Can’t even be bothered to take a different header image photo. It’s partly your fault, you know. You like it too much.
This time it’s down from £80 to £26 in the UK (£27 outside the Bezos Empire), which isn’t quite an all-time low, but is pretty close – and a silly-good price for such a capable mouse in any case. Its US discount price of $35 ain’t half bad either, though I notice Amazon US is shouting louder about knocking the newer G502 X down from $80 for $45. That’s mostly a fine mouse as well, though I find its redesigned scroll wheel a bit too much on scratchy side. Of the two, I’d stick with the classic.
You can now knock down enemy dirtbags using a dinner plate as a violent frisbee in Selaco. Wonderful. The first-person shooter, which is replete with satisfying explosions, gunfire, bullet ricochets, smashing glass, sparks, goo, blood spatters, dust, ice particles, smoke, flecks of plaster, and bad guys yelling at one another about how she’s over there, may be described as noisy, both in the aural and visual sense of the word. Which is how we like it, you understand. This latest update to the early access shooter leans into that by layering on even more juicy shootFX. It also adds a whole new game mode and plenty of other tweaks. The bad news is that some story bits are now delayed.
In many ways, the SteelSeries Apex 3 TKL and Apex Pro TKL are about as different as tenkeyless gaming keyboards get: the first is a budget-friendly membrane ‘board, the second a luxurious all-mechanical number with adjustable switches and its own little OLED display. Yet they’re also both very good at what they do, and are now sharing Black Friday discount honours.
We’ll chat about what Frostpunk 2’s new roadmap is bringing to the strategy game in a second, but first, here are some other genres with the -punk suffix I would like to see brought to fruition soon:
Okay okay, just one more handheld deal then I’ll look at some desktop stuff. But here’s a properly chunky Black Friday discount on the most endearingly out-there Steam Deck rival to date, the Lenovo Legion Go: the 512GB model has shed hundreds of pounds/dollaridoos to fall all the way to £479 / $500. That’s really not a lot for something that goes full luxe on its display and build quality, not to mention its party trick of letting the two controller sections split off, Nintendo-switch style, with one acting as a portable mouse.
This is also the cheapest that the Legion Go has ever gone, at least in the UK, so could make a good pickup if you’ve been wanting something with more power than the Steam Deck range but have been put off by the Legion Go or Asus ROG Ally X’s high launch pricing.
