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Samsung first announced their Gaming Hub cloud gaming platform back in July for their smart TVs, and it’s that same service that’s going to be available on their Odyssey Ark and Odyssey G70B and G65B monitors, which have been unveiled this week at Gamescom and will be available before the end of the year. Samsung say they’ve all been designed to offer a complete home gaming PC experience without the need for dedicated PC hardware, although people will still be able to connect them to a Windows or Mac device wirelessly if they wish....

Cost-effectiveness is, of course, the main reason to opt for a mechnical hard drive instead of the best SSDs, as solid-state storage will always be faster and more durable than an HDD. As Katharine found in her review, the P10’s read and write speeds were around half that of the Samsung T5. However, buying the equivalent amount of space across multiple T5s would currently cost you around £500, so half the performance is really not a bad compromise for a fivefold saving....

Here in Blightyland, both the 500GB and 1TB models get money off, with a slightly better discount on the latter pushing it below £80 for the first time. The Blue SN570 was already a nice and affordable PCIe 3.0 SSD, and this deal makes it an even more attainable upgrade on creaking mechanical HDDs. Update - in a moment of Black Friday-induced madness these links previously went to the SN550....

Nope - the game wasn’t what I expected at all. At least, not the 45-minute portion I got to play. Rather, my demo was more of a hardcore puzzler with some exploration elements and the teeniest smattering of action. Don’t get me wrong, it was still unsettling and grotesque! Just in more of a brain-training way, if the brain-training was for MIT graduates, or like, the human calculators on University Challenge....

Before we get the ghost, though, developers Rare expressed their ongoing support for Black Lives Matter. The devs are looking for ways to improve their efforts going forwards, reiterating their “zero-tolerance” stance on discrimination and explaining how to effectively report it in-game. In Rare producer Joe Neate’s words, “there’s no place on the seas for people who discriminate”. Alright then, onto the ghost pirates. Ghost Ships are described as a deadly sailing challenge, a step up from the broadside brawls you may have fought with the game’s existing skeleton fleets....

Running from now until March 2nd, the Humble Bundle Train Sim Expedition Game Bundle pack is split into three tiers, starting at just 73p / $1. This initial tier gets you the base Train Simulator 2021 game along with five DLC packs, while the other two tiers add even more types of trains to the mix, as well as additional scenarios to tackle. Humble Bundle Train Sim Expedition Bundle - £8....

The basic idea is that you fly around disused spaceships and gradually cut them apart for scrap and salvage, in a full 3D simulation complete with deadly hazards, time and money pressure, and a soothing space banjo soundtrack. It is lovely. And after playing it regularly for over a week, I’ve found some less obvious reasons why it has made a home in my heart. It’s the details, mostly. But what details....

Drawful is a party game where each player gets a prompt to draw something silly, then everyone suggests what might have been the prompt, and finally they all have to guess what the actual prompt was from all the options. I played a few rounds with pals only a few weeks ago and had felt such pride as when everyone could tell I was drawing “drinking the liquid from a Magic 8-Ball”....

Other features in today’s update include multiple save slots, a fix for save corruption that trapped players in infinite loading, and more bug fixes and performance optimisations. See the Rift Update patch notes for more. You might have found your saves have vanished, though. They say they’re working on that but you can fix it manually too. “This is just the beginning, as we now look to Phase 1 of content updates, with more maps, vehicles, missions, and more!...

Heart Machine have announced today that Solar Ash needs just a bit of extra time from the prior October 26 launch date. “We want Solar Ash to shine, and we need a bit more time to get the last pieces of polish and bug fixes into the game, while still navigating this global pandemic as a highly dedicated team. This short delay will help us get there,” Heart Machine say....

It’s got me thinking about the way detectoring is going to be a thing in Cyberpunk, ‘cos I reckon it’ll either be really good or really annoying. Despite an emphasis on lawlessness and people taking justice into their own hands as gangs run riot and so on, the police do exist in Night City and classify things as actual crime. We’ve seen their special digi-crime scene tape and everything in CD Projekt Red’s Night City Wire streams, there was a crime scene being investigated in the very earliest gameplay video two years ago, and there was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot in the video about gangs that came out last month....

Not liking the look of that spooky floating kid much. I had next to no interest in Sonic Frontiers for the longest time. Back in the days of the Sega Saturn, I yearned for a proper 3D Sonic game. Instead, I made do with Burning Rangers and developing cramp in my right hand from playing too much Virtua Cop 2. Honestly, mum, that was why. I’m not sure that Sega have managed to achieve what my twelve-year-old self was hoping for with Frontiers, but I’m going to give it the benefit of the doubt....

The news was announced on the PlayStation blog, with Housemarque co-founder Ilari Kuittinen writing that the acquisition would “secure the legacy of the oldest game studio in Finland.” The studio has gone through substantial changes since Nex Machina’s launch in 2017, with the studio announcing at the time that “arcade is dead”. Nex Machina was critically acclaimed but it hadn’t “sold in significant numbers”. That was a shame, given Nex Machina was excellent....

Launching on November 16th, Ixion is a space-faring management game that puts you in charge of creating a new home for humanity aboard a humongous cylindrical ship known as the Tiqqun (pronounced ’tycoon’). You’ll be filling its huge hangars with various facilities, accommodation buildings and more to manufacture everything you need for your journey through the stars. You’re headed toward Proxima Centauri, where you’ll supposedly be performing field research, mining ops and colonisation tests for your megacorp owners DOLOS....

As I explained more in detail after playing the demo earlier this year, Neon White is a speedrunning FPS about an extremely anime group of dead idiot assassins (called Neons) trying to enter vaporwave Heaven by winning a demon-slaying contest. As Neon White, we’re dashing through short levels, grabbing different guns (represented by cards) which can spray death or be ‘discarded’ (right-clicked) for a single-use movement ability: double-jump, airdash, stomp, and more....

The deal transfers around 1,100 staff to Embracer and more than 50 ‘back-catalogue’ games. It’s expected to conclude sometime between July and September, in the second quarter of Embracer’s current financial year, subject to regulatory approvals. Embracer held an hour-long livestream to detail the announcement, which you can watch in full here. Compared to Microsoft’s billion-dollar buying splurge in recent years, Embracer have landed these AAA studios for cheap – they’re only paying the equivalent of 960,000,000 Freddos....

Square Enix are just one of a number of games companies to invest in Oasys’s platform so far. Bandai Namco, Sega and Ubisoft are some of the biggies who’ve jumped aboard to invest in Oasys as “validators”. Squeenix and Oasys say their deal will allow them to “explore the feasibility of harnessing user contributions” when developing new games on the blockchain. Oh happy day. The deal between Square Enix and Oasys is the most recent move along the publisher’s very insistent blockchain journey....

Aspyr Media lead producer Ryan Treadwell appeared on the livestream post-show to talk up the game some more. He clarified that it’s not a remaster, but a full remake built “from the ground up.” The aim is to “honour the original story” while delivering much higher fidelity graphics. He also said that it would be some time before they’re ready to show anymore. Boo. Knights Of The Old Republic Remake will be “console exclusive on PlayStation 5 at launch” according to the PlayStation blog, which normally doesn’t prevent it from launching simultaneously on PC....

In the statement, they said: “It is very important for us that you are able to fully enjoy the game from day 1, without any issue spoiling your fun or without having to wait for future patches or hotfixes.” They also mention that the game is now content complete, and the rest of the dev time will be spent on polishing what’s there. They plan on showing a bit more about the game closer to launch, too....