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We’ve all used a Steam Deck, so we all know how poor the battery life can be when playing a more graphically extensive game like God of War: Ragnarok, or Cyberpunk 2077. Here’s the trick, you need a good power bank to accompany your portable PC adventures.
I’m told that if I do one more Prime Big Deal Days post, they’ll take off the metal clamps holding my eyelids open, and won’t put them back on until Black Friday next month. Result! So here’s a little after-dinner mint of a PC gaming hardware bargain: JSAUX’s Steam Deck thumbstick covers, which come packaged with some stick-on decals for £8 / $8. Both 20% off, they be, leaving a price so low I have real hope you’ll forgive me using the phrase “stocking stuffer” in October.
I always like to balance the inherent cynicism and general corporate awfulness of covering events like Prime Big Deal Days by focusing recommendations on hardware I genuinely like, and ideally, what I actually own. Partly hence the G515 Lightspeed TKL keyboard post from yesterday. And here’s another: the sleek-lookin’, sharp-recordin’ Logitech StreamCam, which is down from £139 to £70 in the UK and down from $170 to $100 in the US.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 won’t be an “open sim” like the 2004 original game, according to Paradox Interactive. Now in development at The Chinese Room, it’ll be an action-RPG with a relatively linear story set in the World Of Darkness universe. This obviously plays to The Chinese Room’s strengths – they’re better known for melancholy or horrifying strolls through broken spaces than the Dishonorable massaging of intricate systems. But it also reflects Paradox’s view that the original Bloodlines has been “mythologised” a bit: people love the memory of it more than the reality, and there are aspects of the 2004 game, according to Paradox’s deputy chief executive officer Mattias Lilja, that simply “wouldn’t fly today”.
A new PlayStation blog (thanks cheery fanzine PCGamer for the spot) has provided some illuminating info on the upcoming Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii, and in many ways, the LAD series as a whole. The biggest takeaway: the fact pirate Yakuza was, at one point, going to be a fishing game called Like A Dragon: Tuna.
For the record, I still think it’s easier and safer to go with a microSD for your Steam Deck storage needs, and with good Prime Big Deal Days savings on two of the best – the Samsung Pro Plus and the SanDisk Ultra – that opinion remains unbudged. Still, you know what they say: when you’re holding a tiny screwdriver, everything starts to look like a tiny screw. So I understand if the call to replace the Deck’s internal SSD, or indeed that of your Asus ROG Ally, proves too strong.
In which case, have a look at the Crucial P310, which I added to our best SSDs list just last week, and is currently joining in the Prime sale frivolities. Specifically, the 1TB model has been slashed from £128 to £70 on Amazon UK, while it’s the 2TB version that gets a US discount, dropping from $265 to $168.
Amazon’s latest Prime Big Deal Days has entered its final day – of deals – so capacity-deprived gaming handheld owners still have a few hours to grab themselves a cheap microSD card upgrade. And if space is the sole concern, it’s hard to get more substantial than the 1.5TB SanDisk Ultra. Never mind how the header pic shows a 64GB card, the much more desirable 1.5TB version is down from £149 to £100 on Amazon UK and from $150 to $89 on Amazon US. Both of those are very fine bargains indeed, for a card that dwarfs even the biggest SSD options of the Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally families.
Why, Hawthorne, must you put in me a position where I have to balance my love of woodland fantasy against my complete exhaustion with chopping things down to build other things? There are two scurrying mammals wearing robes inside of me, and they both love Redwall, Mice And Mystics, and Mouse Guard, but might spontaneously combust if they have to craft another hatchet. A trailer, eh? Is…is that a mouse and an otter dancing on top of a table, each grasping a mug of ale of their tiny paws and dancing to fiddle music? Fine! Fine! I’m not happy about this, but Fine!
Ah, this makes for sore reading. Spanish developers Tequila Works have cancelled a game and made a “small” number of layoffs in the face of financial difficulties.
If you’re not militant about meeting all the latest hardware standards, but do need an upgrade in the CPU department, the AMD Ryzen 7 5700X3D is close to perfect. Despite releasing this year, it’s designed to fit the last-gen AM4 motherboard socket – which sounds strange, because it is, but then the 5700X3D is also the cheapest Ryzen chip to feature AMD’s extremely game-friendly 3D V-Cache tech. The result is a very sprightly processor that’s available for relative chump change, especially now that Prime Big Deal Days has sliced it down to £161 in the UK.
