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Worth your time when it’s too frosty outside Lunistice Possibly my most magical Christmas as a kid was in 1997, aged 12. I got a Saturn and an issue of the UK’s Official Sega Saturn Magazine that had a ChristmasNiGHTS Into Dreamsdisc on the cover. I reckon that it was my favourite, most unabashedly fun time for gaming ever (outside my decades fiddling around on PC, obvs). Indie platformerLunisticeis a blatant love letter to the 32-bit era, and the kind of game that largely skipped the poor old Saturn....

That’s a lotta games Valve launched theSteam DeckVerified system to make it easy for folks to spot what games on their digital store would work with their handheld gaming PC. As we careen into the new year, there are now over 7000 games marked as “playable” or better on Steam Deck. Pulling the figures fromSteamDB at the time of writing(as spotted byGamingOnLinux), there are 4419 games marked as “playable” and a further 2709 marked as “verififed”....

Let’s make resolutions we fail to live up to Acceptable answers include: what hardware you hope to buy; a general desire to play more on your Steam Deck rather than your desktop; new genres you wish to finally conquer; or the joke, “My new year’s gaming resolution is 1920x1080.” This is a time for naive proclomations and bold commitments. Personally, I feel like I’ve already shifted into a new way of playing over the past 12 months....

Hints and the answer to Wordle #560 Looking for today’s solution? Check out theWordle hint and answer for Thursday 12th December! Wordle December 31 hints The Wordle answer today isn’t the toughest we’ve seen recently, although it is likely to foil some of the more common starter words. If you’re struggling to figure it out, here are three clues to help you do it yourself: It’s time to reveal the answer to today’s Wordle....

From virtual bicycles to cyberpunk novels It’s been a weird year at RPS for me. After eight years as news editor, I started the nebulous new role of associate editor. This brought a broad mandate to cover indie games andPC Game Passand to do, like, whatever else I think might be fun or good. It has been weird to not clock in and just Do News, and to have responsibility only over myself....

Nearly as fast as the 990 Pro, and considerably less expensive. The Samsung 980 Pro, a ‘PCIe 4.0 SSD speed demon’ with ‘absolutely barnstorming… read and write performance’ and a former ‘fastest PCIe 4.0 SSD’ pick has been reduced over at Amazon UK. There, you can pick up the 1TB model for £98, and it’s even the premium version that includes a high-grade heatsink preinstalled. In terms of the specs, the 980 Pro uses Samsung’s own flash memory and controller for some impressive speeds - it’s rated for 7000MB/s reads and 5100MB/s writes, with impressive random performance too at up to 1000K IOPS on both reads and writes....

Some favourite games which didn’t make the RPS Advent Calendar I confess: I usually did my damndest to rig the RPS Advent Calendar vote. When every year has so many more than 24 good games, I always tried to tactically vote and reshuffle points to wedge in a few wee great games I knew not many people had played. But with a change to voting procedure this year, I simply couldn’t get some games on our list....

Messed with the format a bit A little known fact is that all of the RPS staff are complex clockwork automata, designed and built by a little gnome with the kind of inch-thick glasses that make your eyes look comically large. We’re each powered by a spell that lasts but 12 months, so every Christmas we fall over like sad marionettes. The gnome has to spend a couple of weeks trekking up a mountain to see the fairy who can recast the spells on us....

Hints and the answer to Wordle #559 Below, you’ll find a trio of hints that’ll lure you gradually closer to the Wordle answer today. If you’re here to maintain a streak, the answer to today’s Wordle puzzle lurks farther down the page, like a trapdoor spider awaiting a passing cricket. Looking for today’s solution? Check out theWordle hint and answer for Thursday 12th December! Wordle December 30 hints The Wordle answer today is hard in more ways than one....

And Dishonored 2 is free from Amazon Prime The Epic Games Store’s festive season of freebies has drawn to a close. The Epic Games Store’s weekly freebies have therefore resumed. Right now and until January 5th you can grabDishonored: Definitive Editionfor free, which includes Arkane’s first-person stealth playground and all its expansions. You can headto the Dishonored: Definitive Editionstore page before 4pm GMT on January 5th to add the game permanently to your account....

A great deal for a high-end NVMe SSD. Sabrent’s Rocket PCIe 4.0 SSD is one of best cheap PCIe 4.0 SSDs that doesn’t cut corners in terms of NAND type (it’s TLC, rather than the cheaper QLC) and cache (it’s got a DRAM cache). This makes it a good performer even in sustained write scenarios, as you might encounter in video editing and the like, while its good random read/write speeds are good for gaming....

I would simply go live somewhere else Stalker 2: Heart Of Chornobyldevelopment has continued even during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where developers GSC Game World are based. Now there’s a new trailer which shows combat against humans and mutants, scavenging in the Zone, comforting inventory management, and dialogue from several high-strung NPCs. Like the hugely ambitious (and also much delayed) original, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is an open-world survival game set within the nuclear exclusion zone formed around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant....

You’re all bestest bests in my heart Much to enjoy in Hayden’s piece about how his zombie-apocalypse survivalist dreams hit the wall ofProject Zomboid. Both funny and well considered. CORALLL! (That’s the only Walking Dead joke I know). Apparently Brendygot a jobor something, so isn’t contributing as much at the moment, but this is my favourite thing he did for us this year because it made me laugh a lot....