Myself and Matthew have been throwing around ideas for the Rock Paper Shotgun YouTube channel as we enter this new era of Vidbudness - keep your eyes peeled over the coming weeks and months - and one of those ideas was to do a quiz for our wonderful viewers. Everyone likes showing off how clever they are, though, so we thought it only right to share the quiz with those of you that normally favour text over moving pictures....

Creative director Roman Campos-Oriola said that Motive have tried to recapture the survival horror roots of the Dead Space series for the remake. Motive are concentrating on three things they think are key to what makes the series scary. Those would be immersion in the horror of being trapped on a deserted spaceship overrun by Necromorphs, the setting of the USG Ishimura itself, and what Campos-Oriola calls the “strategic action” of selectively blasting off chunks of enemies, piece by piece....

Matthew himself has a new awkward food related story to share, Nate has been watching Squid Game, and a listener has sent in a very special musical theme for Sweeten The Deal! Music is by Jack de Quidt. Also featuring the musical talents of Tom Piercy, who provided a Sweeten The Deal theme! You can find his Soundcloud, with a selection of chill electronic tracks, here. Links Once again we were accidentally competent this week....

Here’s the launch trailer: There’s a mysterious story pulling you through Exo One, but the real meat of it is in how it looks and feels. It’s stunning, for a start, whether you’re zooming across choppy seas, desolate mountains, or floating between cuboid islands in the sky. It’s part dreamscape, part disaster movie. This is the Christopher Nolan part. In terms of how it feels, it’s alteranately peaceful and exhilirating....

Joining MacLachlan in the Fallout show will be relative newcomers Xelia Mendes-Jones and Aaron Moten, Variety reports. I’m a big MacLachstan myself so this is – excuse me – a damn fine piece of casting. Who he’ll play we don’t know, but I’m hoping for someone related to the Brotherhood Of Steel, or a Vault overseer. Maybe even a chatty floating robot butler such as Fallout 4’s Codsworth, or an intelligent Super Mutant....

In place of the familiar Donner und Blitzkrieg brigade, the never dull Broken Lines provides an army of gasmasked weirdos of unknown origin and intent. The dash of sci-fi combined with turn-based combat choreography and team management inevitably brings to mind marvellous masonry mutilation excuse Silent Storm. Get stuck in, however, and it’s soon apparent that there are as many differences as similarities. Pacier and, sadly, far more resilient to grenade and bazooka blasts, PortaPlay’s offering lacks the ballistic subtlety and entertaining physics of Nival’s, and some of the order sophistication of other genre notables like Frozen Synapse and Jagged Alliance....

Crucial MX500 1TB - £66 (was £107) Crucial MX500 2TB SSD - £138 (was £205) The MX500 doesn’t appear on the RPS list of the best SSDs for gaming, with the sagely James preferring the faster but slightly more expensive Samsung 870 Evo, but over at Digital Foundry we’ve recommended it for some time due to its reliability, performance and value. So why do we rate it? Well, the MX500 has a DRAM cache and uses TLC NAND, so it avoids the two most common cost-saving methods that tend to have a deleterious effect on sustained performance....

This is called a “story trailer”, but I had to watch it three times because the music and disconnected imagery kept prompting me to slip into a pure vibe state. All I had were disconnected thoughts: that’s a big train; the little people are always walking; why is that girl underwater; am I spinning around inside the… cyberverse? What I think the trailer is trying to communicate is: in Trails From Zero you, Lloyd Bannings, return to your bustling home city of Crossbell and join the police department, where you are assigned to the Special Support Section to handle oddjobs....

The G705, then, is a wireless mouse designed for smaller hands, while the G375 headset – also wireless – is proportioned to fit smaller heads and has more space in the earcups to accommodate earrings. It’s safe to say I’m not the Aurora Collection’s target audience, but having used the G705, the G375, and the G715 wireless keyboard as my main peripherals for a few days, I can say all three are pretty swish playthings regardless of how you identify....

Most of the major updates for the last couple of years of work on the base game focused on the campaign, but Tales From The Far Territory is explicitly an expansion pass for The Long Dark’s survival mode. It’s adding a new region, “new gameplay”, and new objective-based stories to uncover on your solo exploration of the freezing apocalypse. Developers Hinterland say the expansion pass will be released in “multiple Parts over the course of a 12-month campaign....

For the last few weeks I’ve been puzzling over the lingering feeling that it could have been more ambitious. Why do I think it could have pushed the trireme out further? Is it possible to make a modern RTS that captures the best of the classics without simply rehashing them? Has it even been done already and gone unrecognised? Let’s start with clarification: yes, “Real-Time Strategy” technically includes all manner of games, from Europa Universalis to RimWorld....

What’s that? You forgot about that last part? Fear not, festive heretic. As RPS’ official not-so-secret Santa, I am proud to bring you this year’s Christmas gift guide. Below you’ll find a wide range of potential presents for the fellow keyboard jockey in your life, from books to t-shirts all the way up to some of our favourite hardware from the last year. As in the past, we’ve divided our selected gifts into varying price brackets, so you should be able to find something for your spouse, child, parent, or non-denominated fellow kinsman whatever your budget may be....

Yup, the CPU pictured above is a 5600X - but I promise the Ryzen 5 5600 looks and performs pretty much identically. Get the AMD Ryzen 5 5600 for £138 (was £220) You can take a look at Katharine’s review of the 5600X linked above, but I’m going to take a look at another RPS source: James’ write-up of the best gaming CPUs. Of the 5600/X, he writes: Another point in the favour of the 5600 is that it’s not a Ryzen 7000 CPU, which are coming down in price rapidly but still require relatively expensive 600-series motherboards (X670E, X670, B650E, B650) and DDR5 RAM....

So: let’s cut to the chase. The 5800X is down to $229.99 at Ebay, from a list price of $449, meaning it’s nearly 50% off. That also makes it $170 cheaper than the equivalent Ryzen 7000 processor, the $400 eight-core Ryzen 7700X. Or, to put it another way, you’re paying around 60% of the price for at least 80% of the gaming performance of that newer CPU - not bad, given that you’ll also pay way less for a complete Ryzen 5000 system (with AM4 motherboards and DDR4) than a complete Ryzen 7000 one (with AM5 motherboards and DDR5)....

Now, time to enjoy your nice joke! Q: How do you get to Death’s Christmas party? A: You go through Death’s Door

Time to enjoy your lovely joke! Someone stole all the PSU cables out of my PC I told the police, but they couldn’t find any leads.

This latest expansion to EA’s (already monstrously expanded) life sim allows you to live out the ultimate Cottagecore fantasy. Compliant hens, a Llama to joke with, the ability to commune with wild foxes and birds, and loads of cute wooden furniture. It’s probably my favourite expansion in recent memory, maybe because Maxis appear to have embarked on a tactic of taking note of the most popular community mods and then making them....

We already knew about the next Game Fest which will run from the 7th to the 13th of October. A Steam Game Festival is a nice little event where Steam puts up loads of free demos for people to play, and hosts a bunch of dev talks and livestreams. The first ran alongside last year’s Game Awards, giving players the opportunity to try out demos for some of the newly-teased games....

But, before we get onto the topic of EA’s play for the Rocket League crowd, Headlines and Hot Takes is full of chat on all the Silent Hill rumours that have been floating around. Some folks seem to think that The Medium developer Bloober Team might be cooking up a new Silent Hill, while others are a bit more sceptical. Also, this week’s Tech Corner features some discussion on actual tech, as Nvidia have said they’re releasing graphics cards for cryptoboys and girls....