Tick “Alice forgot to do a cavern of lies” on your bingo card, but get set for the revelation that Matthew is totally a weed dad, illegal discussion of Nintendo, and the correct take that the worst drink in the world is hot Pepsi in a plastic bottle. Also: what would we do if put in each other’s bodies? One answer may surprise you (it involves piss) and one will not (in involves banging on glass)....
We also have a very good Cyberpunk-themed Cavern Of Lies courtesy of Matthew, who has no updates on his Olympic feud this week, but does reaveal (during a long digression about whether or not we, personally, can drive) that it took him nine goes to pass his driving test. Nine honestly seems a bit excessive. You can listen above, or on on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or Pocket Casts. You can find the RSS feed here, and you can discuss the episode on our Discord channel, which has a dedicated room for podcast chat....
This Ideal spec stops short of suggesting latest-gen CPUs as well, though its listed picks of an AMD Ryzen 7 3800XT or Intel i7-10700K are still well within enthusiast territory. Even the Recommended specs are a big step up from their Forza Horizon 4 equivalents, too: the fifth installment is asking for a Radeon RX 590 or GTX 1070, as well as either a Ryzen 5 1500X or Intel Core i5-8400 chip....
Get the Crucial P5 Plus for £99.98 (was £128, RRP £157) So: let me tell you a little about this Crucial drive. It’s one that I’ve had the pleasure of testing in both the PC and PS5, and in both places it’s delivered rather impressive real world results, on par with other ‘second-gen’ PCIe 4.0 SSDs that cost substantially more - like the Samsung 980 Pro and WD Black SN850, the latter of which being RPS’ choice for the best PCIe 4....
Graham reported yesterday that both Judgment and Lost Judgment had been rated for PC by the ESRB. It was a pretty good indicator that the games would be arriving at some point soon, and we expected to see them announced during the Ryu Ga Gotoku summit earlier today. Weirdly, they weren’t included in the showcase but their omission doesn’t seem to have stopped publishers Sega from surprise releasing the series today anyway....
I mention all this because The Kids We Were is probably the only game I’ve played since then that’s even come close to capturing some of that Attack Of The Friday Monsters magic. You won’t find any kaiju here, but this is a similarly nostalgic portrait of pastoral Tokyo, as viewed through the eyes of young Minato on his summer holidays, first in the present day and then in the 1980s when he ends up travelling back in time Back To The Future-style to when his parents first met as kids....
“We’d only ever done 2D games in our own in-house tech,” director Ulf Hartelius says. “The main spark for The Gunk came from working on different prototypes in Unreal and getting up to date with the engine and working in 3D. Some of our early prototypes were SteamWorld, but The Gunk’s prototype wasn’t, which was also very intentional from our end. Creatively we wanted a break from the SteamWorld games, and that world to recharge our batteries and do something else and be allowed to do other things....
First things first, today sees the end of MultiVersus’ early access. Early access began on July 19th and was a week-long period when people who played the closed alpha earlier this year could dive back into the game before it soft-launches today. Anyone who wanted to play early but hadn’t been in the alpha could try to bag a code through Twitch drops, while people who bought the Founder’s Pack on Steam for the princely sum of £33/$40/€40 were guaranteed access....
AMD kept it fairly cryptic in their initial tweet, revealing neither the name of their new graphics card (although we can all probably assume it’s going to be the RX 6700 or RX 6700 XT, given the only way AMD can go is down the power ladder now they’ve launched the 4K-capable RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT), how much it’s going to cost, or when it’s actually going on sale....
Get the Razer Viper Ultimate w/ dock for $59.99 (was $149.99) So: the Razer Viper Ultimate. There are a lot of reasons why this mouse has just steadfastly remained on my desk despite a parade of other gaming mice arriving regularly for review. The shape is key, I think - despite the low weight, ideal for competitive gaming, the ambidextrous shape is suitable for a wide range of hand sizes, and side buttons on left and right mean that it can be used by left and right-handers equally comfortably....
You’re a cat lost in a big city. Of course, it’s Stray! James: Why are there not more games where you play as cats? It’s perfect: whenever we start playing something completely new, we sniff around environments, attack anything unfamiliar that we think we can take, and if there’s a loose object next to a ledge, you know damn well we’re pushing it off to see what happens. We act, essentially, like cats....
The Excavation Of Hob’s Barrow We’re in a period of good folk horror (see: day three on the advent cal.). The Excavation Of Hob’s Barrow is a point and click mystery game that would, in some ways, not be completely foreign to fans of something like The Case Of The Golden Idol. But Hob’s barrow is also a creepy horror game, with all eldritch folk rituals and sleeping evil and all that....
The Sims has done high street fashion collabs before, sure, but this one in particular has nice combos I think I’d actually buy. Between this and Deathloop’s fashion, I’m gonna need game devs to start opening boutiques or something. The Fashion Street kit is directly inspired by Mumbai’s fashion scene, and is made up of lots of flowy pieces and piercings for your Sims to rock. “[The kit] is inspired by the Indian handloom (weaving) industry, which is preserving and rendering a beautiful picture of our age old heritage, known worldwide for its richness and purity of its textiles,” says fashion curator Shruti Sitara Singh....
The pack promises to introduce staples of high school life like attending classes, getting detention, going to prom, and graduating, all as on-screen activities that the player can guide their Sims through. While there’s a fair bit of overlap with the series’ established college-themed expansion packs like The Sims 4 Discover University, giving this treatment to high school-aged characters is a franchise first, and something that’s been on the fandom’s collective wish list for a very long time....
World Brothers looks like the toy version of the main series. The spin-off is based in a parallel world where everything is made of cubes. The Earth is square. The aliens are blocky. Even yer da looks a bit boxy, truth be told. The goal of every level is to rescue team-mates to buff your squad. As you grab a downed colleague, they’ll slot into your arsenal, letting you swap between them....
It’s the character design that I love. They’re either decidedly unsexy (surely?) anthropomorphic animals, or wrinkly scrotes. The protagonist this time looks like the latter: you’re named Psuedo, and you become embroiled in a fight for the titular artifacts of chaos when you decide to protect your straightforwardly cute feather friend. The core of the game remains first- and third-person brawling, but there’s a framing device this time around in that the rules of combat are apparently determined “by a game of dice using artifacts with special properties....
Get the Integral Ultima Pro 512GB for £42 (was £53) The Ultima Pro is a standout choice when it comes to value, with other models from the likes of Samsung and SanDisk tending to cost anywhere from £51 to £70, but it’s a reasonable performer too. The card is rated for a maximum read speed of 100MB/s and meets the U3, V30 and A1 speed standards. That makes it an ideal choice for a wide range of uses, from more pedestrian use in a mobile phone, tablet or camera to loading games on Switch or (most importantly) Steam Deck....
Get an XFX Speedster RX 6800 XT for $769 (was $1099) $769 is a good price for the RX 6800 XT, some $330 below this particular card’s US MSRP - albeit $120 above the reference model’s launch price. Looking at the market, this is the cheapest model by a considerable margin, with most cards costing closer to $1000. XFX are an underrated manufacturer when it comes AMD graphics cards, and their imaginatively-titled Speedster SWFT 319 model is a solid package....
Get an EVGA SuperNova 1000 P6 PSU for £150 (was £200) With the RTX 4090 seemingly on the way, there’s never been a more pressing need to pick up a high-end PSU. Previously, 1000W power supplies were only viewed as necessary for multi-GPU setups, like SLI gaming PCs or crypto-mining rigs, but with extremely high rumoured power consumption having the full 1000W available means that your build will be future-proof even if you go high-end for the next few generations....
“Penthesilea relies on fearsome two-handed axe infantry while whittling her enemies down with devastating skirmishers and finishing them off with strong cavalry charges,” Creative Assembly say. The base Total War Saga: Troy game was free on Epic for one day when it launched launch, and 7.5 million people claimed it. See our Nate’s Total War Saga: Troy review for opinions on the game.
