Get the 2K Megahits Bundle As with previous Humble Bundles, this is operating on a ‘pay what you want’ scheme with a four-item bundle as the base reward, a 12-item bundle if you pay over the average and a 16-item bundle if you pay $16 or more. The 4-item bundle is OK for the price - $1 gets you the X-COM complete pack (ie everything before the XCOM reboots), plus Hidden and Dangerous, Hidden and Dangerous 2 and Army Men RTS....
Get the Seasonic Focus SGX-500 for $35 w/ code NEOCTOBER and a $15 rebate SFX-L power supplies like this one are mainly intended to be used in smaller cases, like the Mini ITX Cooler Master NR200P we’ve featuered a few times in deals posts, but you could theoretically use it in a larger case too. With 500W of power, you won’t be able to run a high-end GPU like the RTX 3080, but with a modern CPU - particularly an efficient AMD Ryzen one - you should be able to run an RTX 2070, RX 5700 XT or similar depending on the rest of your components....
Get an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 + Gigabyte B450M mobo for £170 (was £220) Similarly, the cheap and performant Intel Core i3 12100 can be purchased with an H610 motherboard for a similar price. For example, you could go for an MSI Pro H610M-B DDR4 motherboard and the Core i3 12100F for £82 + £95 = £177. This should get you better gaming performance, thanks to faster cores, but worse content creation performance (eg transcoding video) as you have only four cores with the Intel CPU....
The Streak65 keyboard is one of the best gaming keyboards available, thanks to its compact size and usability. That’s what the 65 in the name means - it’s 65% of the standard keyboard size. But it remains functional and usable for gaming and personal use. The Streak65 has arrow keys, which seems like an obvious requrement, but is sometimes left out, along with media keys. With sleek and unintrusive keycaps, softly glowing LED backlighting, and easily replacable USB-C to A cable make sure that the Streak65 is a great keyboard, and at this current price is quite the steal, especially for anyone in the market for a slightly smaller keyboard than the norm....
Mojang’s update notes for snapshot 21w03A explain what’s possible with the new glow squids and their ink. They’re meant to live in deep dark caves but Mojang say they won’t spawn naturally in this snapshot. For now, you’ll need to create a Creative world and use spawn eggs to summon them up. Naturally, I found a dark little pond and slapped down a whole handful of them and they’re quite pretty....
That’s lovely, that. Aside from giving me that drowning feeling seeing someone walk around underwater for so long. But otherwise lovely! Made by “Aedenthorn”, the mod names simply Swim is available from the Stardew Valley Nexus. You will need to install the TMXL Map Toolkit and some other bits, so do read that page carefully. Oh, I’m reminded of the hot spring cave mod too. And for more fun and interesting player creations, see our best Stardew Valley mods round-up....
The 1.0 version of Grounded will add a new area to explore in the form of the upper yard. There’ll be new armour and weapons introduced too, which is good news because the kids are going to face off against the huge Mantis boss coming as part of the update. Shudder. I was attacked by a small mantis once and it properly stung my hand, so I don’t like to think what damage a massive one could inflict....
Guerrilla’s job listing for a writer for the Online Project talks about pitching “compelling ideas for quests, factions, and backstories”, while another listing for lead combat designer mentions creating “playable characters and a varity of enemies (Machines & Humanoid)”. The senior machine combat designer posting, meanwhile, mentions creating “a variety of Machine enemies that are spectacular, challenging and memorable to fight cooperatively”, suggesting you’ll be able to team up with pals to take down its big mechanical beasties Monster Hunter-style....
This was true of basically every RTS I played back then. In Starcraft I’d amass an army of Protoss Carriers and launch them across the map. In Supreme Commander, I’d tech all the way up to the Experimental Weapons, and then send the colossal CZAR Mothership to Independence-Day the entire enemy base. But my favourite variation of this was in Impossible Creatures: a wonderful early noughties strategy game where you create your own units by stitching together parts from different animals....
SS13 is a top-down, multiplayer, session-based RPG, where people take on jobs aboard a space station, and can interact with everything therein. It was originally a sober atmospherics sim built in freeware engine BYOND, but after the code became public, it… evolved. These days, SS13 exists as a spectrum of wildly different, community-run servers. Some are semi-serious roleplay environments. Some are anarchic. Some don’t even feature space stations. Most are “hidden traitor” games, but they all share two things in common: they’re a pain in the arse to play, but it’s worth it for the stories they generate....
Wales Interactive, wot published The Bunker, even have a whole FMV collection. Well into FMV, they are. I think The Bunker was their first forray into it, though, and to my mind I think it remains the best. The main character Adam (played by Adam Brown, best known for being one of the dwarf lads in The Hobbit) was born underground in the bunker, ‘cos his mum went into labour the day nuclear war started....
You play a more than usually intrepid journo, who’s reporting on an explosion - notionally a terrorist attack - that happened at a government contracted research group. Some months after the explosion, which killed 23 people, the government has introduced The Union Act. You’re sort of poking around at it all, like a child picking at a scab, and have arranged interviews with various people at the Bowman Carson Group....
Season One was the game that put Telltale on the map for me, although I’ve enjoyed others since. I played its episodes back-to-back over the course of one harrowing weekend. I bewildered my family by bursting into tears and hammering on my keyboard relentlessly at points, until they had to tell me to stop in case I broke it. I still don’t want to go into too many details with you about why it made me do those things in case you haven’t played it yet....
In Westerado, guns have to be cocked manually. You press J to draw, K to cock and K to fire. I’m not going to pretend that a keyboard stroke or gamepad squeeze in any way simulates the heft of a weapon, but there’s something in the fussiness of the action that feels tactile to my fingers. An awful lot can happen in a millisecond: bandits can shift from your line of fire, you can shift into a bandit’s line of fire and… okay, that’s about all that can happen....
Today’s trailer is mostly a quick roundup and reminder of all the PC-specific features we can expect. KojProd say they’ve added a new “Very Hard” difficulty in case the nightmare monsters just aren’t enough of a challenge for you. They’ve also collaborated with Valve to add some Half-Life themed items to the game. For the ultrawide-havers among us, Death Stranding will also support your 21:9 monitor. Art Director Yoji Shinkawa talked a bit more about ultrawide support today in an interview for the Summer Games Fest, mentioning adjustments made to the game’s UI and how the wider aspect ratio gives you a better view of enemies or possible destinations....
Today’s video starts off right at the very beginning, with Alex talking to a doctor at the Helping Hands Group Home where she’s lived for eight years. She’s asked if her brother Gabe, who she’s leaving to live with, knows about her “issues”. That’ll be her supernatural ability to see, hear, and influence the strong emotions of people around her. Alex says she’s looking forward to being a “normal girl in a normal town” which I suspect is not at all how this story is going to play out....
To my surprise, the algorithm has recently started throwing indie games my way. Hero’s Hour is among the most interesting it’s shown me: a strategy RPG in which you construct armies of pixelated fantasy beasts who then have automated battles. In Hero’s Hour, you stomp around an overworld, build your hometown and venture out to explore new regions. It’s turn-based and leisurely. Enter into a scrap and the battle is in real-time - but then, still somewhat leisurely, as your units fight for themselves....
If you’re braver than I, there’s a demo you can play now, and a recent trailer below. This particular trailer was showing this week during the Future Games Show, although most (all?) of the footage is old. Fixing ropes to cavern walls and ziplining across chasms? Yes. Using drones to map the size and shape of adjacent caverns? Yes. Doing all this in a relentless horror atmosphere before having my hands bit off by a disguised monster?...
I’m quite excited that we now know it’ll be out in two weeks, on July 27th. I like everything about the look of this, and Nate’s HighFleet preview from May only gave me more reasons to be cheerful. He played it for a few hours and, while wishing it was a little less labour-intensive, found each of its separate elements brilliant on their own terms. “Don’t make me be reductive, though; I beg you,” writes Nate....
Hit Io Interactive’s import website to sign in and get the process underway. It’ll ask you to link accounts to see what you own, then give you ’em as Access Passes for Hitman 3. See the import guide for more. And yep, that should be it, assuming servers don’t fall over again. Your progress and locations from the first two (and from Steam) can now be in 3. Took a bit....
