Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

To quickly recap my Steam Deck OLED review, Valve’s refreshed handheld is brilliant, serving up major improvements to screen quality and battery life while making loads of little quality-of-life tweaks. Its reveal was a surprise, mind – haven’t Valve repeatedly said that there wouldn’t be another new Steam Deck for ages?

Not quite. That warning was always qualified in that a more powerful Deck was still a ways off, and the Steam Deck OLED’s performance improvements are both tiny and a likely incidental result of its efficiency savings. This very point was repeated to me in an interview with Valve designer Jay Shaw and software engineer Jeremy Selan, which also covered the Steam Deck family’s future, its current struggles with intensive big-budget games, and why they want “more, more, more” rivals like the Asus ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go.

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For Vladimir Makarov, the babyfaced villain of Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, trust and morale are irrelevant concepts. As he makes clear to his army of Russian ultranationalists, he is interested only in their quiet, unwavering loyalty. Evidently, Activision expects much the same from its army of COD fans. This latest Modern Warfare campaign follows disconcertedly close on the heels of 2022’s entry because, as per Bloomberg, it began life as a mere expansion. Rather than allow a fallow year, Activision has upgraded that expansion’s status to a premium release, and charged $69.99 for pre-orders – granting early access to the single-player campaign as an enticement.

Instead of Modern Warfare’s usual lead studio, Infinity Ward, development duties have fallen to Sledgehammer, the outfit most recently responsible for 2021’s unloved Vanguard. And in an industry where AAA FPS games now regularly take half a decade to make, this campaign has reportedly come together in less than two years. Reader: it shows.

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When Kiryu’s tale “ended” in Yakuza 6, it left me in absolute tatters. A faked death finally saw him freed from the shackles of the yakuza with one big catch: he couldn’t ever see his family again. Since then, we’ve had the plucky Ichiban take on the mantle of Tojo Clan nastiness in Yakuza: Like A Dragon (7), with its sequel Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth (8) set to wash up on Hawaii’s shores next year. What do we know about Infinite Wealth? Kiryu is set to return as a protagonist alongside Ichiban, with an all-new haircut. And more importantly, what has Like A Dragon Gaiden got to do with any of this? Well, it’s a shorter stop-gap between the events of Yakuza 6 and Yakuza 8 that fills us in on what Kiryu’s been up to this whole time.

But aside from moreish minigames and a fantastic Agent persona with web-slinging abilities, Kiryu’s epilogue is a far cry from Yakuza’s best stories. By no means is it bad, it just isn’t the best introduction to the series for newcomers, and even longtime fans will struggle balancing his resurrection with its heavy feelings of repetition.

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Post-apocalyptic role-playing game Broken Roads – billed as a “classic RPG for the modern age” – has once again had its release delayed from 14th November this year till early 2024, as developer Drop Bear Bytes have been caught out by the scale of their own creation. Still, we can rest assured that it is finally “content complete”.

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“To be a good designer, you have to have very, very strong opinions,” says Slay The Spire design lead Anthony Giovannetti. “Show me a game designer who gives a thumbs-up to most things, and I suspect that’s probably someone who doesn’t have a very good game design sense. I want someone who really, really loves and hates things, and gives you reasons why.”

It’s a trait which Giovannetti has in common with his Megacrit co-founder, Casey Yano, and has possessed ever since he was a kid growing up in Woodinville, 30 minutes outside Seattle. It’s matched by a competitiveness that first emerged in Warhammer 40,000 tournaments as a teen. Before he was old enough to drive, Giovannetti would ride his bike to the local game store and play until the early hours of the morning.

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GTA 6 publisher Take-Two Interactive’s CEO Strauss Zelnick has been on the blower to the company’s investors about the idea of making games using the latest artificial intelligence content generation tools. Echoing his relatively guarded enthusiasm for NFTs a couple of years ago, he’s sort of mixed on them, regarding AI tools less as transformative technologies than simply the latest step towards the eternal industry objective of More, Faster And Better For Less.

Zelnick thinks automated learning and generation tools will make development more “efficient” and games, overall “better”, but in terms of Take-Two’s own bottom line, any gains will likely be offset by the fact that other big companies have access to the same tools, and by the fact that Take-Two will take advantage of said efficiencies by setting more ambitious goals. As such, he doesn’t think using generative AI will lead to lower prices for big commercial games. If you’re a developer that can’t afford to buy or license generative “AI” tools, Zelnick added, you can expect competition to become “more intense” in the coming years. Good stuff.

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Bethesda’s Starfield is awash with things to eat or drink, from half-eaten club sandwiches to bits of steaming alien gizzard, but chugging your fill has always been fussier than it needs to be, involving a trip through the game’s irritating menus. No more! The next Starfield patch, which is currently available as an opt-in Steam beta, will let you guzzle things without opening your inventory, on top of various tweaks to the game’s graphics and quests.

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Intel’s Core i5 12600KF is one of the company’s best value gaming CPUs, and today it’s down to $155 at Walmart versus its standard price of $220.

This chip offers solid gaming performance in modern AAA games plus PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 support (with the correct motherboard) all while costing significantly less than competing CPUs like the later 13600KF ($285) or AMD’s Ryzen 5 7600 ($229) which offer only marginally better performance at 1080p and are basically the same speed at 1440p or 4K.

For reference, I saw the 12600K deliver a minimum of 85% of the performance of the later 13600K (and by extension the nearly identical 14600K), while costing 54% of the price with this deal – surely that makes the 12600K the obvious choice?

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Deus Ex and Doom have two of the most iconic aesthetics in video games. Chuck the satanic hellspawn shooter and cyberpunk immersive sim together in a pot, season with a banging soundtrack and you’ll find Beyond Sunset.

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Almost five years since it launched – and two years after Epic revealed they hoped to gobble up half of all PC gaming revenue – the Epic Games Store is still yet to turn a profit.

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