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Hello folks. I come bearing a reasonably sensitive question for you today, and that’s how the current cost of living crisis has affected your day to day gaming habits. We know times are tough for a lot of people right now, but if you can spare five minutes to tell us about it in a new reader survey put together for us by our corporate uncle Reedpop, we’d be very grateful.
As one of the very best survival games on PC (according to us and RPS readers), Valheim is getting even more ways to play around in its Norse sandbox. Developer Jonathan Smårs took to Twitter yesterday to tease a bunch of difficulty presets and customisable sliders, letting you modify the Viking experience to your liking. The options include both a creative mode (a là Minecraft) and a more ‘immersive’ option.
The first-person puzzler Firmament is releasing on May 18th, developers Cyan have announced. The studio behind the influential Myst first teased the game back in 2018, before turning to Kickstarter a year later to fund their steampunk mystery, and now it’s ready for release, playable in both VR and “2D” – or flatscreen displays.
The Samsung 870 Qvo is one of the best large-capacity SATA SSDs, offering up to 8TB of storage in a classic 2.5-inch form factor. It normally retails for around £452, but now it’s 10% off, bringing it to the lowest price we’ve seen on Amazon UK: £408. That’s a great price for a tonne of game and media storage.
1979’s Akalabeth: World Of Doom, eventually renamed Ultima 0, is the first commercial game by Richard Garriott (himself aka’d Lord British), and one of the very first roleplaying video games to enter the market. It’s also a precursor to Garriott’s Ultima series, introducing many elements that formed the core of the following games. But everything that Akalabeth invented would eventually be abandoned, first by its sequels and then the entire RPG genre.
When I think of quintessentially British games, a few highlights come to mind. Fable‘s fairytale world of stocky goblins and poverty-stricken orphans with Victorian-era voices is definitely very British, as is Banjo-Kazooie’s dry wit and sarcasm. A decent bucket of contenders, but the crown has to go to the Greggs Simulator, a free shop sim that tasks you with managing a Greggs pasty shop that’s a staple of every UK high street.
Wonky launch woes aside, The Last Of Us Part 1’s PC release is a net positive. A new audience can now experience one of PlayStation’s best exclusives, but even better, modders can get their hands on Joel and Ellie’s trek, rejigging a familiar story in new ways. There aren’t too many exciting ones available to download just yet, but one “in-progress” mod reimagines the game in first-person, and it’s stunning.
Fans have likely spent endless seasons in the comfort of Stardew Valley, and now the chill life sim is getting even bigger. Stardew Valley’s creator Eric Barone (otherwise known as ConcernedApe) is “taking a break” from working on his highly-anticipated Haunted Chocolatier. Barone will instead work on Stardew Valley’s upcoming 1.6 update, which focuses on improvements for modders, alongside some new content as well.
For hardware that’s all about searing speed, advances in SSD tech can be a Beckettian waiting game. Microsoft’s DirectStorage has only so far only found support in the ho-hum Forspoken, and PCIe 5.0 SSDs still aren’t widely available despite the first compatible CPUs and motherboards launching in 2021.
However, the latter are coming soon, and I’ve been testing out an engineering sample of the Crucial T700 to see how PCIe 5.0 – also known as PCIe Gen5 – drives could perform in an honest-to-goodness gaming PC. The short version: with maximum read and write speeds that tower over the current generation’s best SSDs, albeit with less impact on game load times than such explosive pace would suggest.
Publisher Nexon have filed a lawsuit against Ironmace Games, the developers behind the multiplayer looter Dark And Darker, accusing the studio and two individual developers of copyright infringement. The two Korean companies recently went public with their dispute, but now their beef has extended to the US legal system where Nexon is demanding a trial by jury.
