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The next Sims game – currently codenamed Project Rene, even though we all know it’ll almost definitely be called The Sims 5 – will “definitely” have a multiplayer element of some kind, according to its devs. As guidance on what that could be, its team are unsurprisingly looking at the success of fellow cozy life-sim game Animal Crossing, as well as a perhaps less obvious inspiration in murder-mystery argument-starter Among Us.
The Crucial T500 only released on October 31st 2023, yet not even a full three weeks later, its prices are being cut to noodles as part of the early Black Friday sales. A very welcome surprise, that – it feels like I only just finished adding it to our best SSD rankings, for its absolutely top-class performance in game load speeds.
Possibly the single best gaming keyboard deal of the early Black Friday period is, in a black mark for Anglo-US relations, currently only available in the States. But what a deal it is: the Roccat Vulcan Pro, a full-size mechanical board with ultralight half-height keycaps, macro recording, a removable palm rest, full RGB backlighting, and more goodies besides, has plummeted from $120 to $50 on Roccat’s own store. That’s real high-end mech keyboard features for mushy membrane money.
Black Friday week is underway and the world’s most reliably discounted gaming mouse, the Logitech G502 Hero, is enjoying a fresh round of savings. Yep, the same Logitech G502 Hero we post about every gosh–darn time there’s a Black Friday, or whatever mutant Prime Day variation Amazon has spawned. Still, no sense in stopping – it’s a cracking mouse, going cheap, and you folks seem to love it as much these days as you did in 2019.
Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter’s #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, I bring you not just screenshots but a screenshot of an options menu too, so I’ll hear no more griping about all the videos thank you very much. Hop on in to admire automative combat, cool platforming, an infinite city, and more attractive and interesting indie games.
Want to get the best value gamepad for PC? Microsoft’s Xbox Wireless Controller is down to £39 at Amazon UK, a great price for a controller that is widely supported in PC games, with Bluetooth, 2.4GHz Xbox wireless and USB-C connectivity. These controllers also work on Xbox Series and One consoles, and plenty of phones and tablets too.
A wide range of colours are available too – I spotted white, purple, red, lime and blue options all available at £40 or below. I also spotted a similar deal on Amazon USA, with the price dropping to $45 on some colourways.
Logitech’s MX Master series of office mice are incredible for getting stuff done, thanks to their iconic wide shapes, multiple scroll wheels and powerful software. Today the newest version, the Master 3S, has dropped from an RRP of £120 to £82 at Amazon UK, a historic low price.
This latest edition is ideal for writing, programming, content creation and surfing the web, thanks to quiet button clicks, a fast and accurate ‘magspeed’ scroll wheel (and a secondary thumb wheel), and a high-end 8K laser sensor that allows for accurate tracking on any surface, even glass.
Half-Life turns 25 years old tomorrow, with new maps and updates to celebrate. Valve also reunited the game’s original developers for an hour-long making-of documentary in which its original programmers and artists reminisce about creating the first-person classic at a time when many of them had never shipped a game before.
Chief among the revelations within is that all of Half-Life’s textures were created by a single person, Karen Laur.
Immortals Of Aveum never looked like it was going to be successful, and it wasn’t. I root for it, however. In an industry where big budget blockbusters are most often sequels, or boringly safe, Aveum feels comparatively bold just by being a self-evidentaly daft first-person mashup of Call Of Duty and Doctor Strange magic powers.
Now it has a demo, so you can try it for free.
Mazes and labyrinths can be confusing, frustrating, oppressive, nightmarish. They are the kinds of structures videogame developers are reluctant to put in their games, because the potential for the player losing heart or patience is relatively high. But as productions, they can be strangely economical, oddly light-footed. Mazes and labyrinths, after all, twist up space and as such, discover or create additional space within space. They allow vast journeys to happen within areas that are modest when judged in terms of square footage, journeys that encompass a multitude of locations that have an inherent, automatic atmosphere: tantalising forks in the path and mocking dead ends, hubs with corridors leading in all directions, leisurely perimeter paths and gristly knots of inner passages.
As such, I think they’re useful to reflect on at a time when the mantra of growth for its own sake has conquered the heart of videogame world design: bigger budgets for grander maps in terms of both explorable area and computational resource, all the way to Armageddon (did you know that Suicide Squad’s Metropolis is twice the size of Arkham Knight’s Gotham City?). But don’t take it from me, an armchair developer with armchair socialist sensibilities. Take it from The Legend of Zelda.
