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Now? Now I feel silly. After playing the early portions of Persona 5: Royal, which finds itself coming to practically every remaining platform this week, including PC, my goodness me, it’s wonderful to be back in Shibuya with the gang. Already it’s the Persona 5 I adored, with new cutscenes and pacing adjustments to make it – somehow – even better. Have you never played Persona before? Good! Let me twist your arm....

It just so happens that they’re free on the very same day that Cyberpunk 2077 launches. So, will you go for a new futuristic RPG that’s gonna cost you upwards of £50? Or two known very good fantasy RPGs that are completely free? Look, I know you’re probably gonna buy Cyberpunk anyway, but Pillars and Tyranny are great and free so you might as well add them to your library....

The free weekend starts at today at 6pm BST, and ends at the same time on Monday the 24th. You can download Warzone right here if you haven’t got it already - but be warned, it’s a hefty 85 GB. According to Metro, the trial will offer 6v6 and 10v10 modes on five maps: Aniyah Incursion, Hovec Sawmill, Khandor Hideout, Shoot House, and Talsik Backlot. Matt was a little iffy on the multiplayer in his Modern Warfare review, mostly because it’s all very “samey” to previous games....

You’re here? Alright, lovely. Here are the basics. Spotted on Twitter by @stvulture, this mod from last year is very descriptively named “All Khajits Are 1978 Garfield.” Missing the extra “i,” in Khajiit for effect, perhaps. The mod turns your Khajiit character in the quite old RPG Elder Scrolls: Arena into a very human-looking orange tabby. Muscular abs, partially exposed breast, orange fur, and all. “Don’t ask me to fix anything because I’m probably not going to,” the creator said when uploading it last March....

Microsoft have also made the full version of the Education Edition free for all learners and teachers with access to Office 365 Education. Here is some advice about home-schooling, from professionals who all stress the importance of keeping things creative and fun. Enter: Minecraft. Microsoft have pulled out ten “educational worlds” from the Education Edition, and made them free for everyone with the Minecraft Bedrock edition. Some of those have been cooked up by Microsoft themselves, while others come courtesy of outside creators....

Valorant’s cheat czar Matt “K3o” Paoletti calls this whole meta of getting banned: “the cheat bus on the highway to hell.” So be wary of who you make friends with, because their downfall might leave you sitting on the sidelines for three months. There’s more to Valorant’s efforts than punitive justice. They’re also attempting to undo the demoralising effects of encountering a cheater. Losing a game isn’t just a personal slight, but it could lose you a promotion or break a win streak....

The trailer is 53 perfect seconds: I love the illustrations at the start that set up the dynamic. I love the echoing drum beats. I love those big hands. There also seem to be all the elements of a strong local multiplayer game on display, too. If you reverse engineered a classic of the form, such as Nidhogg, I think you’d identify three core elements. First, a weapon that’s powerful but somewhat unpredictable, so you get near misses and unlikely strikes....

The bad news is that the vast majority of Prime Day GPU “deals” still reach above the respective card’s original retail price. The good news is that I’ve found a small handful of offers that are, if nothing else, good value by the incredibly whacked-out standards of the past two years. First up, there are a couple of Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 series cards worth considering in the UK, including an MSI-made RTX 3070 (that Ebuyer have price matched)....

“This faction, named Pillar, is heavily armed and is none too happy about you being on their turf,” PUBG Corp say. “You’ll have to avoid the Pillar Scout Helicopter attempting to track and spot survivors from the sky. Those unlucky enough to be caught by its spotlight will need to move quickly to avoid the Pillar Tactical Truck as it closes in and attempts to quickly eliminate its target with bullets and fire....

The announcement is counting down to a 10am PST / 1pm ET / 6pm BST reveal today, and you can watch it right here with us later on. The stream is full of gunfire and the sound of bombing runs, punctuated by newsreel footage reporting on various WW2 conflicts in the area. I’ve watched a couple of news stories about both Tobruk and Tunis, areas around the edge of the displayed map, and one about Italy being invaded popped up as I was writing this....

It was 20 years ago today that version 1.0 of Counter-Strike launched, boasting iconic maps like Dust and Italy. But what about the maps that didn’t make it out of beta? CS had over twenty which bounced around betas but were cut by the full release, including all the maps representing one entire mode. I revisited the cut beta maps today and was surprised by quite how many I remembered, a lot of weird fond memories mixed in with a few moments of “Oh yeah obviously I see why this was cut”....

The new trailer mostly covers the same ground as the original reveal trailer, including that same spooky story about a girl who runs away from her mother while picking berries deep into a forest. Ah, but this time Capcom say it’s a “storybook themed trailer” meaning there’s a Tim Burton-y animated sequence for the tale before we get back to the proper Resident Evil-style spooks. From what we knew so far, Resident Evil Village takes place a few years after Biohazard....

It seems clearly inspired by Slay The Spire, albeit with a handful of twists. You select two heroes from an available four, then build your deck of cards out of their special abilities. There’s exploration via a hex-based overworld and then turn-based battles that happen from a side-on perspective. There are ways to tweak and transmute cards, and it’s designed in such a way that you’re encouraged to build a big deck rather than throwing cards away to build a refined machine....

We spent most of today putting together a tour of the show floor (coming Friday), which meant whizzing round all of the booths, marvelling at all the insanely detailed decorations, and getting a lay of the land. With the big platform holders still absent from worldwide events, it means there’s more floor space for smaller indie publishers to take centre stage at PAX East this year, with some of the biggest stands belonging to Thunderful, Larian, TinyBuild and Gearbox....

Here are the rules. Like last time, these Time Capsules aren’t intended to be a definitive list of the best games from any given year. They’re all personal favourites, but the most important thing is that they’re all games we’d recommend people play today. They might be the best example of its genre, or they contain some kind of valuable lesson for future generations of game designers. It’s also this specific version we think people should play, too, so remasters and remakes may mean that certain games are missing from their original release year (and we’re going by PC release dates here, naturally, not when they first came out more generally)....

Other features include a plush detachable wrist rest, programmable RGB lighting, and doubleshot ABS keycaps, which is a fancy way of saying that the symbols on the keys won’t wear off. All of this combines to make a solid keyboard with all the features you’d expect and now you can get it with a hefty discount. If you’re in the US.

Why is the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless so firmly entrenched among the very best gaming headsets? It sounds great, for one, with that bass-rich but detailed sound that HyperX so often grant their PC headsets. And it’s light and comfortable enough to wear for hours, even stretched around my larger-than-average cueball of a head. But its greatest strength is its battery life: HyperX claims a class-leading 300 hours per charge, and honestly, I believe them....

Say No! More is a goofy-looking indie game with Katamari-like colorful, low-poly characters and a similar vein of quirky earnestness. In a world where saying “no” is a big no-no, you’ve started an internship at a company full of folks looking to take advantage of your willingness to say “yes.” Fortunately, you find a self-help cassette tape that teaches you the power of saying “no” more. “By finding more cassettes, your ’no!...

Scarlet Nexus takes place in a sci-fi anime world home to many tropey characters, many motives, and many monsters to fight. At its core, this is an action RPG where you’ll spend the majority of your time pulling off silly combos in dungeons full of baddies. In your down time, you hand your friends houseplants in an effort to make them smile. Then you go back to watching your cooldown meters....

The new maps are Megalo, Bloodwater, Hassle Castle, and Moldergrove, Valve say. Up top there’s Hassle Castle (which is just downright fun to say), a Payload map with multiple control points. You can hop into Halloween matches under the Special Events tab of casual play. You can catch the cosmetics over on the TF2 wiki. Yup, it’s a lotta hats. Devils and pumpkins and mummies, oh my. Along with the new maps and hats, you’ll have all your Halloween contracts reset so you can work on them again this year....