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Every now and then, somebody has the marvellous idea of developing technology that makes video games smell. I have never been more grateful for this recurrent Quixotic daydream's mass market failure than when watching trailers for Urge, an open world survival shooter that is both fuelled and plagued by piss.

"But hold your horses, young Edwin," you sternly interject. "I do not wish to hear about, let alone play an open world survival shooter that is both fuelled and plagued by piss, on a website that children might read. It sounds like a cheap, taboo-jabbing gimmick." Friend, I once thought as you. But then I did a little research, as is my journalistic responsibility, and it turns out Urge's notions about piss - bladdergold, as they call it in the West Country, or Crusoe Cola, as it's known in the States - are rather in-depth. I'm still very glad I can't smell the game, but I definitely have the urge to play it.

Events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, while devastating on the emotional wellbeing of hardware editors, are as useful for knocking a few more quid off already-cheap bits of gaming gear as they are for saving hundreds on big-ticket luxuries. It’s the re-bargainating aspect we must concern ourselves with here, as the Logitech G413 SE – already a premier choice of affordable mechanical gaming keyboard – is now more attainable still, dropping to £65 / $56.

Anyone with the need for a new CPU and even the slightest inclination towards tech envy is currently waiting for new stock of the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the unbeatably powerful new chip that our boffin friends at Digital Foundry are calling the fastest gaming CPU ever. If, however, you’re hoping to switch to the 9800X3D from an older system with DDR4 RAM, you’ll need to upgrade that as well as the motherboard, as the entire Ryzen 9000 series only works with newer DDR5 memory.

Cyber Monday won’t help materialise more processors into retailers’ warehouses, but it can help you make this RAM switch on the cheap. Relatively speaking. And I can recommend a nice, fast 32GB kit of Corsair Vengeance DDR5, which is down by £43 in the UK and $22 in the US.

While Mechabellum’s disparate roster of roast ’em riddle ‘em robots might initially seem to lack the characterful coherence of a writhing Zerg ecosystem or ancient Greek phalanx, this strategy autobattler’s array of lumbering tanks, hulking automata, and zippy fliers do share a common thread: each one of them has the potential to be either the most terrifying nuisance on the field, or to instantly crumble like a soggy strudel in an angry washing machine. With each mech able to become another mech's worse nightmare, it becomes a game about stretching tight budgets to balance reactive counters with devastating offensives; about identifying the butterfly wings that can send tornados through your opponent’s ranks. It’s about the moments that eat up the hours like nothing else.

Netease's free to play open world gacha RPG Project Mugen now has a proper name: Ananta. As Edwin points out in the Maw, it is very much like Spider-Man meets Zenless Zone Zero, with its mixture of cityslinging and unabashed anime teens with long, flowy hair and a penchant for metal accessories.

If you want your next gaming mouse to be the sort of thing that feels like it might float off your desk and into the empty blue sky, disappearing forever, then have a look at this here Cyber Monday deal on the HyperX Pulsefire Haste. It’s the wireless version of an old lightweight favourite of mine, and it’s a snip at $50 (a 38% discount) and/or £43 (30% off).

Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic, the Warsaw Pact-era city-building sim from 3DIVISION and Hooded Horse, is getting eight new maps scattered across the globe. These include a map set in the Eastern United States, from approximately New York State down to North Carolina, and another one set in Rock Paper Shotgun's very own United Kingdom, where Karl Marx wrote most of his best stuff.

"Nowhere is safe from having its economy meticulously managed in minute detail by discerning comrades," explains the announcement release. I for one welcome our new socialist overlords. It's high time we sceptre-kissing Brits learned the importance of a properly joined-up sewage system. Looking at you, Thames Water. Here's a trailer.

Have you ever been pretty deep into a Steam Deck session playing a very gra[hically extensive game like God of War: Ragnarok and realised just how quickly the battery gets drained? It’s a familiar and frustrating feeling for many Steam Deck owners. Luckily, there’s a solution!

There is some spiteful drama in the Half-Life modding scene this week. The developers of a heavily criticised mod for Half-Life 2 are intentionally blocking a small number of YouTubers from playing that mod, using Steam IDs to effectively blacklist and ban specific people from running it. Instead of launching the game as expected, these players will see the first-person shooter crash, alongside an error message that reads: "STOP talking SH1T about us". This is an act of revenge for previous criticism of the mod, say the affected videofolks, who are described in the mod's code as "anticitizens".

Got yet another quality PC storage deal for ya, this time courtesy of Cyber Monday and the Samsung T7 – an almost comically dinky portable SSD that can, nevertheless, stuff itself senseless with file backups and game installations. The 1TB model in particular is going mighty cheap, falling to $88 in the US and £67 in the UK.

Today’s advent calendar window has an entire cult inside of it. Also, an alcoholic knight speaking in plummy prose between mouthfuls of booze and porridge. What’s more Christmassy than booze and porridge, eh? Not much, we’ll wager. You could pour the booze in the porridge, perhaps? You could call it ‘inebrioats’!

‘Confident’ game design is one of those slightly fluffy critic words I sometimes find myself reaching for tenuously, knowing that - sigh - I’m going to have to do all sort of detestable nonsense like ‘back up my vague assertion with concrete examples that are useful to the reader’ if I do. Yuck. If there’s one type of design that deserves the accolade, though, it’s RPGs that are assured enough in the richness of their worlds to not feel the need to signpost every discovery.

It’s a feedback loop of charitable feelings: the game is saying "we think you’re smart enough to find this stuff on your own". "You’re right!" you respond. "I am smart! And anyone who recognises that must be one smart cookie". Joy abounds, it rains Tunnock’s Caramel Wafers, hedgehogs jig gracefully in the street, and all is right with the world. So, I must say, I’m quite pleased to hear Avowed’s environment region director Berto Ritger sing the virtues of missable content to GamesRadar.

I had a horrible dream last night that I had to spend a whole day, as well as a good chunk of the preceding week, rounding up discounted PC hardware. Chilling visions indeed. Good thing today is only Cyber Monday, meaning I can get away with spending a mere 80-85% of the day rounding up discounted PC hardware. Like this: this more powerful Ryzen Z1 Extreme edition of the Asus ROG Ally, a handheld Windows PC that beats the Steam Deck on 720p games performance. With £100 off in the UK and £150 off in the States, it’s now a much closer match on price as well.

Last week, Brendy left a note in our weekly Maw liveblog about a player-made map of Caves Of Qud, the reportedly excellent sci-fi roguelike RPG that lets you "chisel through layers of thousand-year-old civilizations", represented as 2D Dwarf Fortress-esque layouts. Glancing over that map as a newcomer to the game, my eye was caught by the creator's casual mention that Caves Of Qud is technically 2,147,483,646 levels deep.

"Is Caves Of Qud really 2,147,483,646 levels deep?" I asked Brendy, like a wide-eyed child asking whether there is such a thing as dog heaven. Brendy wasn't sure. (About Caves Of Qud, I mean, not dog heaven.) So I put the question to one of the developers, Freehold Games co-founder Brian Bucklew. In brief, the answer is yes, but with some significant caveats.

One of the many high concept ludonarrative experiments I’d one day like to bring to fruition is an immersive sim in which the player has access to many guns, but their default arsenal selection is an open packet of crisps which they hold out in front of them, in first person, and offer to NPCs. Some NPCs wouldn’t be swayed by this, but some would lower their weapons at the offer of a prawn cocktail treat, and so you’d be constantly playing chicken with various guards: edging closer toward them, your shaking hands rattling the delicious disks inside the oily packet, mentally weighing up whether it's worth risking them turning hostile at the last second.

Obviously, I’d scan some real crisp packets and just alter the logos for maximum immersion. One game that’s already taken this scanned bricolage concept and run with it to beautiful effect is Hyperdrive Inn. It’s an avant garde point and click adventure from Finnish studio Horsefly, where the entire world is constructed from scanned fabric samples. Have a looksee.

To your stations, colleagues! December has ambushed us like a hideous hairy man in a red bobble hat, and time is of the essence. In just a handful of weeks, Horace the Endless Bear shall strike the brazen gong labelled "Happy holidays" and atomise the world, that it may be born anew in 2025. Before that, we must heap the Maw high with any remaining new video games or video game news from 2024. Find below a few new PC releases for the pile. I thought it was going to be a quiet week, but it's actually quite a boisterous haul.

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! As both Ollie and this immaculately-crafted Green Stuff Slann butt have already foretold, Kiera Mills is leaving RPS for pastures more dog-like. As such, she’s joining me to talk about books! Cheers Kiera! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

December is here! It has snuck up on us once again, hidden as it always is behind November's back. It's arrival heralds the beginning of the RPS Advent Calendar 2024, the yearly list of our favourite games of the year. Step inside, open the doors, and celebrate another year's gaming survived.

This year’s RPS Advent Calendar has arrived, and it’s time for us to fill the nook behind each door with 24 delightful game-shaped chocolates. But man, it’s hard work making these chocolates. Too much manual labour. I wish we could automate the process somehow - perhaps we just need to exploit the planet’s resources and turn it into a giant chocolate-making factory spanning the entire solar system. Yes, that should work.

Sundays! Sundays are for going quickly.

Gabriel Winslow-Yost wrote for Harper's Magazine - not an outlet typically known for their videogame coverage - about Elden Ring and the role of death and failure in games.

The comments are back! The comments are back! Guys! Guys! The comments are back!

Is your Zone more Anomaly-rich than it should be? Are your corpses uncannily airborne? Do your comrades have dodgy teeth, and not in a good way? Do bits of your HUD keep disappearing? Be of good cheer, for GSC Game World have released the first proper S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart Of Chornbyl update, which patches out over 650 different bugs and issues. These range from more significant problems such as crashing and progression-blockers in certain missions, to relatively negligible stuff like wonky NPC voice volume during storms.

The Samsung Pro Plus is, alongside the Logitech G502 Hero, one of those hardware products that rocks up at literally every single sales event in the calendar. Just an endless cycle of microSD cards, mice, microSD cards, mice. At least it’s a good'un, though - the best Steam Deck-compatible microSD of them all, in fact. Previously, its one weakness was the lack of a truly cavernous 1TB model, but that was amended earlier this year, and now that capacity is getting its first major saving as part of Black Friday 2024.

Cyber Knights Colon Flashpoint does not lead with its best foot. This is easier to shrug off while it's still in early access, but I will confess some relief when I read that the Trese Brothers (It's pronounced "Trese") nudged their estimated release date back to 2025. It needs a bit longer. But I'm about ready to start recommending it.

I'm a tad biased by my love for their previous Star Traders Colon Frontiers, an interest in mercenary management, and a wish for more turn-based tactics games that aren't bloody XCOM again. That I have reservations about what CKF hasn't yet nailed down is in part a symptom of high expectations. And because despite carrying over some design ethos from Frontiers, Cyber Knights is a very different kind of game.

Back when Digital Extremes were largely known for collaborating with Epic Games on the Unreal Tournament series, they made a little game called Dark Sector. Released in 2008, it's part of the fine tradition of post-Gears double-A actioners that basically consist of taking a gruff man, throwing him into a world of grit, gravel and burning oil drums, and handing him a murderous gimmick. Dark Sector's gimmick was the glaive, a pointy boomerang you could use to scoop up objects, solve puzzles, and kill stuff in third-person view.

If you don't secretly spend most afternoons plotting an eventual career change to one where you're surrounded by animals, then I'm sorry, but you're just not welcome in the RPS treehouse. Today, Kiera is taking a definitive step forward in that plan: she's departing RPS for a new playthrough of life, one where the animal sliders are all cranked up to max. Join us in saying fare-thee-well below.

To be clear, I still think the best graphics card deal of Black Friday week is that RTX 4070 Super offer and oh no wait that one’s gone now. But even if hadn’t been ecommerced to death, there’d still be a way to get the upgraded ray tracing and DLSS 3 frame gen tools of the RTX 40 series for less cash still: plucky 1080p contender, the RTX 4060, whose deals are still very much available and kicking.

In the UK, the best available prices are for the MSI GeForce RTX Ventus 2X Black edition, which is the partner card I happen to own myself – and has become the effective go-to GPU for RPS game performance tests. Over in the US, meanwhile, the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4060 Gaming OC is the most affordable of all; it’s a chunkier design than that of the compact Ventus 2X, though that’s mainly just the tradeoff for having an extra fan. These cards were already on the cheaper end of the RTX 4060 spectrum, and now they’re £30 / $35 off in the sales. Bargain.

A pirate must acquire gold to become a pirate worth the name, and so there’s nothing so perfectly Guybrush Threepwood as the first real treasure he acquires being a gold tooth stolen from an aging chicken restaurant owner. My vague awareness of The Curse Of Monkey Island’s place in history tells me it’s generally not as well regarded as its predecessors, but it holds a special place in my wooden heart, and this one puzzle always sticks with me. It’s very colorful, for one, and it’s also the first real bastard when you play the game again in the harder ‘Mega Monkey’ mode.

9-Bit Armies: A Bit Too Far is, I fear, one of those games I'll have to figure out exactly how I feel about by writing about it and seeing what happens. You can tell just by looking that it's visually striking, all high definition yet tiny, colourful buildings and units that people use the word "voxel" about when we're pretending anyone knows what those are. It's a Good Thing.

It's also a deliberate throwback to the original RTS days, with harvesters effectively collecting cash from fixed map points, and a very Command & Conquer building/training panel with unit portraits and spinning progress dials. It's pretty faithful, and stops short of slavishly cloning. This is, I suppose, a good thing. Still, I'm not sure whether my lukewarm feelings are because it's doing something wrong, or I'm just not that interested in doing all that mid-late 90s stuff again.

As far as Black Friday deals go, the Logitech G502 Hero isn’t so much low-hanging fruit as it is a root vegetable. Every year, this damned multi-buttoned mouse goes on sale, and every year, I’m powerless to avoid writing about it. Can’t even be bothered to take a different header image photo. It’s partly your fault, you know. You like it too much.

This time it’s down from £80 to £26 in the UK (£27 outside the Bezos Empire), which isn’t quite an all-time low, but is pretty close – and a silly-good price for such a capable mouse in any case. Its US discount price of $35 ain’t half bad either, though I notice Amazon US is shouting louder about knocking the newer G502 X down from $80 for $45. That’s mostly a fine mouse as well, though I find its redesigned scroll wheel a bit too much on scratchy side. Of the two, I’d stick with the classic.