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Want to build a high-end gaming PC in the US? We’ve got you covered – or rather, Newegg has. They’re bundling an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor, one of the fastest gaming CPUs of all time, with an Asus ROG Strix B650-A Gaming WiFi motherboard and G.Skill Flare X5 32GB DDR5-6000 RAM for just $595, saving $132 over buying separately.
In fact, if you buy the same parts on Amazon, you’d still pay $119 more, making this a genuinely good deal.
Rival survival sims Palworld and the just-launched Enshrouded are now openly battling for hearts and minds on Steam, and here comes genre supremo Valheim out of the blind corner like, errrr, one of the celebrity WWE wrestlers who hasn’t turned out to be Problematic – I don’t know, maybe Zack Sabre Jr? Educate me, wrestling fans.
Valheim isn’t waving a folding chair or a small flight of stairs, mind you. It’s holding a development diary for the forthcoming Ashlands update, due sometime in the first half of 2024. The update introduces the titular Ashlands biome, a blend of graveyard and volcano level notable for the presence of burning skellingtons, some of whom emerge from glowering stone totems.
Before Doom became the lean, mean murdermachine we know and love, Id Software had far bigger plans for their seminal satanic FPS. Ideas dropped during development include a big focus on story, four playable characters, elemental shields, demonic weapons, and more. The mod Doom Delta brings to life many such ideas from sources including an old design document and leaked alpha builds, which I think makes it fanfic? A new version of Doom Delta launched last week, offering a curious vision of the many Dooms Id didn’t make.
I realised several hours into my Enshrouded playthrough that I have an unspoken internal checklist for what makes a great open-world survival crafting game. Great building, a sense of scale, a beautiful atmosphere, and the ability to die in extremely stupid ways. In Minecraft, it’s digging straight down into lava. In Valheim, it’s getting crushed by the very tree you’d just chopped down. And after dying for the third time by trying to climb a slightly-too-steep hill, slipping down and building enough momentum to send me careening off the cliff to my death, I realised that Enshrouded, too, ticks all the boxes for maybe one day being listed among the titans of the genre.
One paragraph in, and I’ve already compared Enshrouded to Valheim. You’ll see that quite a bit throughout this review, and for good reason. Enshrouded has come the closest for me to recapturing that feeling of when the world collectively discovered Valheim for the first time. But that’s both an accolade and a reservation. Because it’s not quite there… yet.
I wasn’t as sold on Half Mermaid’s Immortality as the internet at large, but I’ll give Sam Barlow as much rope for his FMV games as anyone else. He recently Xeeted about the studio’s upcoming projects C and D, described as “next level FMV, hold onto your seats”, and “reinventing 3rd person horror again”, respectively. The games now have heavily redacted Steam pages, and Barlow revealed a few more details on Kinda Funny Games (helpfully transcribed a bit by VGC if you can’t be arsed watching).
Forthcoming Palworld updates will add PvP multiplayer, raid bosses, pal arenas, Xbox feature improvements, Steam-Xbox crossplay, extra islands, server transfers, new pals and new technologies, according to an early access roadmap just released by developers Pocketpair. The monster-catching survival sim continues to set concurrent play records on Steam, and Pocketpair are presently focussed on fixing bugs. Beyond that, though, the sky appears to be the limit, as you might expect of a game that shifted a million copies in eight hours. In particular, Pocketpair seem markedly more confident about the odds of adding PvP to the game, having downplayed the idea in interviews before release.
Helldivers 2 will crashdown on our planet’s surface on February 8th, 2024, and turns the topdown co-op alien shooter into a flashier, fancier third-person version of the same. A new trailer release today details how its ‘Galactic War’ systems work – that is, the macro-scale conflict within which your missions and bug hunts take place.
Some indie hits create a legion of copycats, but others, not so much. I don’t think there are too many Papers, Pleaselikes, for example – perhaps for obvious reasons given that game’s grim subject matter.
Lil’ Guardsman is a Papers, Pleaselike though – and a seemingly delightful one. You play as 12-year-old Lil, who is a substitute guard at the castle gate for a fantasy kigndom, and you must decide who to admit and who to deny entry. It’s out now.
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420mm AiOs are quite rare – not many cases come with space for three 140mm fans in a row – but they’re the biggest size of consumer radiators currently available and offer unmatched cooling potential. Therefore, it may be of interest to you to learn that the Arctic Liquid Freezer II 420 is down to just £79 at Amazon UK, a crazy-low price for a cooler of this size and prowess.
Riot Games have announced that they will shortly fire “about 530” people, or 11 per cent of their global workforce, so as to “create focus and move us towards a more sustainable future”, in the words of CEO Dylan Jadeja. The “biggest impact” will be felt outside of core development, though they’ll affect at least one major internal team – the developers of Legends Of Runeterra. Riot are also binning off the Riot Forge publishing label, under which third-party developers create smaller-scale games based on Riot’s own intellectual properties.
