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Last time, you decided that gliding powers are better than Dragon’s Dogma 2’s Unmaking Arrow. Honestly I’m surprised it was that close (66% vs 33%—don’t sweat the rounding), and I’m proud of your ability to weigh a whole concept against a single-game implementation. We are so good at this. Onwards! This week, I ask you to choose between placing things in two very different ways. What’s better: a ‘put back’ action, or standing atop another player’s heads in an FPS?
I briefly posted about this in The Maw, but was unsure at that point if SteamWorld Heist 2 was coming to PC day and date with the launch on Switch. That date is August 8th, by the way, and the answer is: yes it is! Though it was revealed at Nintendo’s Indie World Showcase earlier this afternoon, strategy action-adventure-with-robots sequel SteamWorld Heist 2 isn’t a timed platform exclusive, so that’s fun!
SteamWorld Heist 2 is, if you hadn’t guessed, a sequel to SteamWorld Heist, which came to PC in 2016. The first was a side-on tactics game where you, leading a team of robots, shot teams of other (bad) robots in turn-based skill-heavy tactical battles. While that all took place in space, the sequel has achieved splashdown, and you’ll be chuntering about the seas with a new lead character (Captain Leeway) and a new bunch of crewmates. It’s a robot pirate game, in other words.
If you can’t wait to start rummaging in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt‘s guts with its powerful new modding tools, you can now shoot for early access by signing up for a playtest on Steam. The new REDkit suite is based on the actual tools that CD Projekt RED themselves sued to create one of the best RPGs, and will let folks make a much wider range of mods. We’ll be able to make new quests, new characters, even whole new worlds.
FACEMINER is a clicker/puzzle game where you work from your CRT monitor to analyse packets of facial surveillance data for a mysterious company. It describes itself as a ‘hardcore thriller clicker set in 1999’. As a connoisseur of unusual word combinations – as well as a believer in the satirical power of clicker games since playing Universal Paperclips – I immediately set about downloading the free Steam demo.
With the arrival of Amazon’s Fallout TV series last week came the dropping of another bombshell: the possible truth behind a mystery that’s gone unanswered in the video games for over 25 years. Before you read on, please bear in mind that spoilers for the Fallout TV show’s season one finale follow!
With Larian having now officially handed the reins of the Baldur’s Gate series back to Dungeons & Dragons owners Wizards of the Coast (and their Monopoly-making parents at Hasbro) – with the developers saying they have no plans to make any DLC or a sequel – the ball for a Baldur’s Gate 4 now sits in Wizards’ court. The good news is that, yes, they also want to make a follow-up to one of the most acclaimed and successful video games of the last few years. Just don’t expect that to necessarily be anytime soon.
Palworld, the viral survival game that stirred up controversy (and found plenty of success) on the back of being a Pokémon-a-like – with added guns and factory labour, mind – is now due to become the inspiration for its own generation of clones, according to the head of its developers.
The Crucial T500 is one of the best-performing PCIe 4.0 SSDs on the market right now, going toe-to-toe with both the WD Black SN850X and the Samsung 990 Pro SSDs when hardware ed James tested it last year.
You have to spend a bit to get the top performance, especially now with memory manufacturers slowing production and SSD makers offering fewer discounts as a result. Fortunately, the 2TB T500 does have a decent discount going at the moment, worth $51:
The T500 takes the title of best high-end PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD for gaming in the RPS best SSDs for gaming guide, and boasts ridiculous sequential speeds of up to 7400MB/s and 7000MB/s for read and writes respectively. It’s worth reading through the list to see how it compares to other, but here’s a quote from James that explains how the T500 has edged above the competition:
If you’ve been narked about favourite bits of Fallout not yet appearing in Amazon Prime’s unexpectedly good live-action show, hold your horses. In an interview, the showrunners have talked about holding back certain “iconic elements” to do them in a hypothetical second season right rather than cram in all the greatest hits—and also so the show didn’t “seem like it was written by people who just like spent 10 seconds reading the Wikipedia page for Fallout and didn’t bother to like bring in some deeper cuts.”
