EVGA RTX 2060 - £212 (was £330) Taking a look at the reviews of the era (2019) can be helpful in evaluating the RTX 2060’s performance even today. Erstwhile hardware editor Katharine scored the card highly on launch, calling it ‘just as good as the GTX 1070 Ti for a fraction of the price’ - unaware of the horrors of the GPU price surges to come. Regardless, the card is shown to be a dependable performer for 1080p and 1440p gaming, with even a (now-dated) Core i5 8600K system producing 75+ fps in titles like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Total War: Warhammer 2, Monster Hunter World and The Witcher 3 - and that’s at 1080p max settings....

Taking over from last week’s Cave Story giveaway, both sword-and-sorcery adventures are free to download and keep forever over on the Epic Games Store all week - with Epic’s next freebie keeping itself under wraps till Thursday 17th. Pillars Of Eternity is the ur-throwback RPG, a grande olde fantasy romp harkening back to the days of Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment. We still reckon it’s one of the best RPGs you can play right now, with RPS exile John Walker calling it “a classic in every sense” in his Pillars Of Eternity review....

It also adds “Styles”, a substantial change to how modifiers work. Find trailers for both below. Here’s the Smoke & Thunder trailer: Each of Pistol Whip’s levels is a straight line which you slide through like a Guitar Hero level. Enemies run into view and shoot at you in time to a pulsing soundtrack, and in VR you dodge, reload and fire back. I like it better than Superhot VR and almost as much as Beat Saber and it is one of the best VR games....

Here’s the two minute trailer, that sets the scene: It’s Ori And The Limbo Of Unravel, but who cares. It’s very pretty. The game is using a mixture of hand-painted backdrops and 3D animation to create its look, and I’m particularly fond of the skittering robots and big beastie in the header image. Planet Of Lana tells the story of Lana and the little creature she meets in the trailer, called Mui, as they venture out to save Lana’s sister....

A lot of the early game focuses on the overrun city. Everyone you meet has a tale of woe, or worries that there’s no hope for progress without reclaiming the city. When the fight to take it back starts, you’ll have already had a number of conversations about the best approach to take with a variety of NPCs. What path you follow will affect the battle for Drezen, with a number of starting off points and subsequent routes to follow....

In the days of Windows XP, Microsoft’s Raymond Chen says, a manufacturer discovered that playing Rhythm Nation—and apparently only Rhythm Nation—could crash some of their laptops. It was able to crash some of their competitors laptops too. But this was nothing to do with a virus or corrupted file or anything, it was all about the music. “The weirdest thing was if you played this song, it not only crashed the laptop playing it, it also crashed a laptop that was sitting next to it, that wasn’t playing the song at all,” Chen explained in a video....

Please make a game that is basically Strange Horticulture, but about a weird book shop. Possibly a book shop with a small coffee shop attached. I’m not going to be too strict about it, you know, I’m not a monster. It could, for example, be a library. Or maybe there isn’t another business attached, or the business attached to it is a bakery instead of a coffee shop. This isn’t just my personal hobby horse, either....

The games below the cut are a mishmash of things – games with peaceful meditations, games with poems, games to celebrate and bemoan being in isolation, and a rhythm game so difficult I might as well be Miles Teller in Whiplash. Wherever you are, I hope you’re well, safe, and taking care of each other. They Came From A Communist Planet from Colestia Another week, another Colestia game. I am not sorry....

Paramo is still well in teaser territory, as PUBCorp’s new videos are just some quick shots of players dropping in to the new map. There may be some clues to excavate in any case, eh? They call Paramo’s landscape “dynamic” which is right up there on my list of favourite game buzzwords. At a minimum, it looks like the map will have a pre-eruption and mid-eruption version. You can spot players dropping in during both, so whether it’s “dynamic” in the sense that the map can be either or “dynamic” in the sense that it could change during the course of a match isn’t super clear....

As someone who’s owned a couple of Dell XPS 13s in her time, I adore this form factor like nothing else. 13.3in laptops are just the most perfect thing. They’re way more practical for travelling and working on the go (remember that?) than their larger 15.6in counterparts, and they’re so much lighter and easier to move around your own home. Their only real flaw is that they’re often missing that one vital ingredient that sits at the heart of our favourite past time: a dedicated graphics chip....

Rumours earlier this month said that Capcom had started production on a full remake of RE4. They’re only rumours for now, but it does seem inevitable considering how popular Capcom’s recent RE remakes have been. Albert Marin, one of the two fellas behind the project, addressed the remake rumours in a blog post on Saturday: “Right now it’s just a rumour, but I don’t really care if it’s done or not....

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order came out in 2019 and a sequel has been long rumoured. According to the announcement, Stig Asmussen is again leading work on the sequel, although there are no other details on what the game is about. There are similarly scant details on the other two games. The FPS is being led by Peter Hirschmann, who holds credits on a slew of mid-2000s Star Wars games, including Force Unleashed, Empire At War and the original (not DICE) Star Wars Battlefronts....

It’s not like anyone’s going out dancing right now, anyway - so why not make a competitive swordfight out of it with some strangers online? Rather than face off against each other in a virtual fight to the death, Beat Saber’s multiplayer update pits you and up to five friends or strangers on parallel catwalks, facing your own battles side-by-side. There’s scoring, of course, to see who’s the best musical Darth Maul on the block, but it’d have been nice to see a little more interplay....

Rocker protagonists Mayday and Zuke are on mission to save Vinyl City by taking over concerts by the corrupt EDM empire No Straight Roads. They’ll take on big bosses of various musical genres, pitting their rock rhythms against other styles. You can get a gander at Mayday and Zuke’s battle of the bands in the new trailer below. I’m not sure how opinion will break down here, but one of the coolest bits of NSR to me is that it’s got a beat to play to but isn’t actually a rhythm game....

The key elements remain the same. This programme is open exclusively to applicants from ethnic minorities who live in the UK, because we are keen to invest in and nurture talent from diverse backgrounds, and to make our industry as inclusive as it can be. How does it work? You will join us to shadow what we do day to day, for four weeks. You’ll get experience with writing news, reviews and features, get advice on how to pitch articles as a freelancer, and, of course, bylines on the website....

You may remember some of these little booth details from my photo post of the best (and most cursed) things we saw on the showfloor - the cursed Chernoylite babies, the overgrown arcade cabinets for Terra Nil, Larian’s actual fort for Baldur’s Gate 3 - but here you can see them in all their physical, moving glory, plus loads more I didn’t get round to taking pictures of yesteday. There was a good sense of bustle on the show floor considering it was only Thursday when we made this....

If you believe the rumour, it started life as Revelations 3, a more experimental spin-off game, but testers liked it so much that developers Capcom decided to turn it into a full fledged entry in the main series. AestheticGamer has some credibility. They correctly said the Resident Evil 3 Remake was going to arrive earlier than we thought, but elsewhere, Konami denied their claims about there being multiple Silent Hill games in development....

Get the Samsung Odyssey G7 for £429 (was £550) Our first pick is Samsung’s Odyssey G7, a 2560x1440 240Hz monitor which has dropped to £429 today from its RRP of £550. I’ve been using the 32-inch size of the same monitor for a year now, and its contrast, motion clarity and overall immersion continues to impress. It gets bright enough to deliver impactful HDR, with a DisplayHDR 600 rating, and the picture quality is generally strong all-around....

The changes to weapons include nine new ammunition types for the Rebar Gun, Nobelisk Detonator and Rifle. The new ammunition includes things like homing bullets and cluster bombs. There are also new body equipment slots, with each player able to socket new equipment for their head, back, body adn legs. When Coffee Stain first discussed update 6 earlier this year, they said they were transitioning to a phase in development where updates would take longer as they polished the game for 1....

I’ll never cease to be amazed by folks who manage to make Unity scenes look like works of art, as is once more the case in this week’s first outing. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Manage cookie settings — Cedric Babouche (@Cedric_Babouche) October 31, 2020 There’s no getting around that Dordogne, from French studio Un Je Ne Sais Quoi, is absolutely bloody gorgeous. An illustrator by trade, Cedric Babouche has painted a forest scene with staggering depth, drawing us into just one step in the game’s nostalgic narrative adventure....