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I can confirm the land is full of sand Shown off at this year’sSummer Game Festshowcase,Sand Landis an upcomingRPGfrom the folks over at Ilca Inc, the developers of One Piece Odyssey, and the creator ofDragon Ball, Akira Toriyama. It’s an adaptation on one of Toriyama’s lesser-known mangas, which features a band of misfits who aim to right the wrongs of a king who’s hogged the desert’s vital water supply. I got to play it for all of 20 minutes, in a demo that was as stripped back as a grated cactus....

Feeling blue We can almost definitely expect to seeSonic Superstarsagain, considering it’s the only upcoming game in the series. So far it’s definitely looking like a title that willsatisfy old-school fans, but that doesn’t mean our own Ed is one of them. Elsewhere on the games front there’s still moreSonic Frontiers updatesto come, like the second update which is meant to introduce Sonic’s Birthday, whatever that means. Funnily enough, it actually is his birthday tomorrow, as June 23 is the day the original game launched in the US, so it’s probably a safe bet we’ll hear something about the next update....

No strings attached Evening Star, a new studio made up of the team that madeSonic Mania, have announced their first game,Penny’s Big Breakaway. While Sonic Mania was a 2D platformer, the studio’s first game under their new name brings them into the realm of 3D, taking an incredibly vibrant colour palette that would certainly work in any classic Sonic game, and marrying it a world that one could say is mildly reminiscent of the hedgehog’s rival Mario....

Everything is better with friends, especially really hard puzzlers When Alice Bee selected thriller-puzzlerThe Tartarus Keyas this month’sRPS Game Clubpick, I naively signed up for it thinking I’d be fine tackling a game where most puzzles can’t be solved with a few trigger pulls. So, I did the smart thing and roped in my pal Ed. Yes, my pal is also called Ed, so parts of this post sound like I’m referring to myself in the third-person....

That’s $400 below the price of a new headset. Valve’s Index remains one of the very best PC VR headsets for playing games likeHalf-LifeAlyx,Beat SaberorStar Trek: Bridge Crew, but it does cost a fair amount - $999 for the full kit in the US, for example. However, it is possible to get used/refurbished models for much cheaper, including at GameStop where you can now pick up the full kit for just $599, a solid $400 off the usual price....

A new lower price for the best value DDR4 RAM spec. A few days back, we spotted a16GB Corsair Vengeance RAM kit at a low £36- and today the bottom has dropped out even further with a deal on Adata’s XPG Gammix D10 RAM, where a 16GB DDR4-3200 CL16 kit costs just £29.99 plus £1.50 shipping at Ebuyer, versus their previous price of £38. These RAM kits are functionally identical and offer the best bang for buck in terms of both capacity, speed and latency, so it’s great to see them just barely above the £30 mark....

This game is very chef’s kiss “Olivia, get the bowls and chopsticks ready to eat dinner,” my mum asks 10 year old me. I do as I’m told, taking them to the dinner table. In childish, whimsical fashion as a childish, whimsical child, I grab my pair of chopsticks and start hitting them together as if I’m a drummer. “Olivia, don’t do that,” my mum scolds me. “Your grandma always used to tell me off when I did that as a child....

Joining MGS1 and 2, plus the original Metal Gear games. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eaterwill see its first-ever release on PC thanks to the upcoming release of the series’ Master Collection, freshly confirmed for a Steam release this autumn. As Alice wrote last month, hopes that MGS3 might finally make it to PC - having not been given the PC treatment handed to both MGS1 and 2 around their original releases - were raised by Konami’s announcement of theMetal Gear Solid: Master Collection Volume 1 during the recent PlayStation Showcase....

After player says Mark of the Conclave flavour text ‘brightened up my day’. The world ofDiablo 4is full of misery and sadness. There are flayed corpses everywhere, fathers are haunted by the ghosts of their dead sons, blokes cram flaming eyeballs into their skulls andsometimes a guy turns up at random just to stomp you(and a lot of other people) into fleshy jam on the ground. Given all the abject suffering that the game and its predecessors make their stock and trade, it was an especially nice surprise to see real, genuine positivity emerge out of the literal hellscape of Sanctuary....

A great upgrade option for old machines and new builds alike. This makes it an awesome choice for a cheap PC or laptop upgrade, offering a big improvement in access times, sequential speeds and random speeds compared to SATA SSDs which top out at 550MB/s. The Samsung 980, by comparison, is rated for up to 3500MB/s reads in its 1TB configuration, nearly five times faster. The difference in game load times isn’t quite that much, but it’s still a noticeable improvement… and with more DirectStorage games on the horizon that can better take advantage of these higher speeds, ensuring your OS and game storage is on NVMe should pay dividends....

NASA-punk limited edition. Microsoft has done a great job making some truly inventive special edition Xbox Series controllers, and their latest effort is one that uses the ‘NASA-punk’ aesthetics of upcoming big budget Bethesda RPGStarfield. The controller looks phenomenal, but it does cost a fair bit - so I thought it was worth letting you know that the early adopter tax has been lifted, and the controller is now down to £65....

Today is always a good day to replay Prey The next bonus freebie will drop on June 27 and is classic RPGBaldur’s Gate 2: Enhanced Edition. After that, on July 6 Prime subscribers can getShovel Knight Showdown, the series' take on a fighting game. Lastly, hack-and-slash gameStar Wars: The Force Unleashedwill be available from July 10. These can all be claimed through the Amazon Games App. There’s also bonus in-game content which players can claim for a range of titles, includingOverwatch 2,Diablo 4, andCall Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2....

Which will support creators' “expression and monetisation” Robloxis launching new regulation in order to allow creators to make content specifically for users aged 17 and above. From what Manuel Bronstein, Roblox’s Chief Product Officer, shared in anofficial blog postyesterday, it seems that it’ll be on creators to label their experiences as mature, which “may contain more violence, blood, or crude humour” than usual experiences. The introduction of age appropriate access is not for safety primarily, as Roblox say they want to “simulate and even go beyond what’s possible in the real world”....