As reported by Ars Technica, the NiFTy Arcade was a bit different from most of the NFTs on offer in GameStop’s marketplace, selling the ability to access certain games from one’s wallet, rather than (receipts for) JPEGs. However, these games weren’t made by the person minting them, and the actual creators had not given permission for them to be used in this way. The games, made in the (excellent, undeserving of this mess) Pico-8 engine, include Worm Nom Nom and Galactic Wars, both of which were and remain freely playable on the developers’ itch....

The full list of supported games is easily one of the biggest improvements there’s been to GeForce Now in the year since it came out of beta. You see, unlike other cloud services such as Google Stadia where you have to pay for special cloud versions of a game, GeForce Now lets you play games you already own in your various game libraries. Not all games are supported by the service, however, and previously you had to go through the laborious process of searching for games individually, or syncing up your Steam library with it to find out what you could actually play on it....

According to The Long Dark’s director Raphael van Lierop, Nvidia apologized for the lack of communication and asked if Hinterland would like to keep The Long Dark on the streaming platform. Hinterland declined. Previously, Bethesda removed nearly all their games from GeForce Now. Activision Blizzard removed theirs due to a “misunderstanding” between them and Nvidia. They aren’t the only ones either. After the beta period of Nvidia’s service ended, Capcom, Konami, Rockstar, and Square Enix all declined to make their games available in the full release of the streaming library....

Running from now until midnight on Monday August 31st, you won’t find these Bethesda deals anywhere else this weekend, as Gamesplanet have teamed up with the publisher to become their exclusive promotion partner for this year’s online Gamescom show. The half price Doom Eternal deal is particularly timely at the moment, too, as it’s due to get its first story campaign expansion, The Ancient Gods: Part I, on October 20th....

Get a Crucial BX500 2TB SATA SSD for £126 (was £172) The BX500 is able to be cheaper than its better-known cousin, the MX500, by omitting the DRAM cache used on higher-end SATA SSDs. The BX500’s more simplified design is nearly identical in performance in most scenarios, but slower during sustained random I/O operations - ie when you’re reading or writing nonsequential data, like booting an operating system, compared to copying a single large file from one drive to another....

Get a Crucial P5 Plus 1TB SSD for £80.69 (RRP £152) So who is this drive for? I’d suggest almost anyone that doesn’t already have a PCIe 4.0 drive but does have a motherboard that will support it*. This gives you access to higher transfer speeds, which is handy for moving large files like video files around, and more importantly ought to give you full access to the advantages of DirectStorage - assuming that actually appears in a shipping game before the sun slowly fades away and all life on Earth vanishes....

*OK, the Ryzen 9 5950X is technically faster, but it costs way more and the difference in gaming performance is miniscule. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D also looks promising, but hasn’t yet been released and will likely cost more than this 5900X while packing fewer cores. Get an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X CPU + Xbox Game Pass for PC (3M) for £345 w/ code SAVE20 I’ve used the Ryzen 7 5800X in my own work PC for months, and I’ve been incredibly impressed with the single-core speed AMD managed to unlock with its Ryzen 5000 processors....

Get the SteelSeries Arctis 7P+ for £79 w/ code BOXING-20 (was £129) The Arctis 7P+ is a comfy headset with a neutral sound profile, offering a competitive advantage in FPS titles and immersive simulated surround sound in more experiential games. The headset uses 2.4GHz wireless, providing lower latency than Bluetooth, via a USB-C dongle (full-size USB-A adapter is also provided). That means you can plug it into basically anything with a USB port and it’ll work, with the notable exception of the Xbox consoles which require their own special proprietary wireless connection....

The map supports up to four players in multiplayer, which is rad, but Floo Network say they aren’t planning to host a server. You’ll also need to be playing on the Java edition of Minecraft, not the newfangled Windows 10 version. Specifically, the mod is compatible with version 1.13.2 of the game. The launch trailer above is a merciless nostalgia tour that I feel entirely compromised by. Look at those brick blocks fold away to reveal Diagon Alley....

Unfortunately this deal is only live for the next six hours, so I hope that you see this post in time! Get the Kingston 1TB DataTraveler Max USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C Flash Drive With that urgency in mind then, let me quickly run you through the relevant specs. With 900MB/s writes and 1000MB/s reads, this is about half the speed of the very fastest external SSDs, such as the WD P40 and Kingston XS2000, but just as fast as the rugged Samsung T7....

Rockstar have thus far only officially said that the terribly named Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition exists, and that it would bring “graphical improvements and modern gameplay enhancements.” Vague! User alloc8er on GTAForums has been posting seemingly legitimate leaks about the game for a while, and yesterday posted a more detailed description of the remasters: The post also contains information of a supposed discount deal for folks who buy the game via Rockstar’s own game launcher....

Supergiant explained the process on Twitter: Along with your unlock and progression, certain cheevos will carry over from Switch to PC too. Supergiant say, “Story-based, one-time achievements all should have registered. Ones that should be completable within a reasonable amount of time may need to be earned again.” But they do warn you should use different save slots on PC and Switch. After nine months in early access, Hades launched on PC and Switch in September....

Supergiant say that Blood Price is the biggest update for Hades so far, summoning more bosses, minibosses, upgrades, story, and more. Sure enough, a skim through the new patch notes shows a huge chunk of the list marked as “new!”. There are dozens of new boons and blessings that you can acquire from fellow Olympians. The Daedalus Hammer has a ton of new abilities available to unlock as well. A bunch of new enemies and mini bosses are joining hell, from the horrifying-sounding Bloodless Bone-Raker to the Doomstone....

I have to confess that I haven’t played H4lo, but generally speaking, John Chief is fighting an “ancient evil” on a “mysterious world”. Aside from the campaign, there are 25 multiplayer maps, plenty of armour options, and Spartan Ops, which is an episodic co-op campaign that carries on from the singleplayer story. Beyond that, there’s now input-based matchmaking and crossplay for every game in the collection, meaning you can choose what device your multiplayer opponents have so you don’t bring a pad to a keyboard and mouse fight when console and PC players play together....

I am partial to top-down wizards. It’s a perspective that makes plans as important as reaction speeds, where every spell and step is clearly visible to everyone. Battling in Battlerite isn’t about who gets the jump on who, it’s about who can bait out a jump and counter it with their own wizard nonsense. It’s all so psychological. Matches start with you tiptoeing around your two to three opponents, feeling out their movements....

Far Cry New Dawn is all about little tweaks: weapons feel earned because you craft them using scrap you scavenge; liberated outposts can be relinquished and liberated once more for sweeter rewards; and there’s two charismatic villians instead of one. But the best thing about New Dawn is Ubi saying “fuck it, why not?” to superpowers. The series has always flirted with the supernatural – and I can only imagine it always will – but it was a marvellous decision to embrace the silliness here....

Captain Spirit is my go-to title when a friend who doesn’t play video games asks me for a recommendation: it’s short, it’s free, it packs a massive narrative punch but doesn’t have high stakes or complicated controls, and if you like it there’s the whole Life Is Strange franchise for you to move onto next. Of course, since you’re here reading this on a website dedicated to PC gaming, I’m guessing you’re probably not looking for this sort of entry-level recommendation; but maybe it’s one for you to pass on to a non-gaming friend someday....

Guillotine! Guillotine! We. The Revolution (that punctuation is important, if irrationally annoying) stirs up a lot of feelings and thoughts. The French Revolution is one of the richest, but also most complex and difficult settings for any game. A game very much about politics, justice, and the infinite greyscale of morality, set at the very heart of the Reign of Terror? My god, do we even deserve such a valiant game?...

I adore games with high skill ceilings, which is why you’ll most often find me neck-deep in the latest battle royale or FPS. Squadrons was a big departure from my usual genres in many ways, but that high skill ceiling hooked and reeled me in as inescapably as any game before it. I found the singleplayer campaign to be supremely mediocre, so I spent most of my time from the very start in the practice map, flying about wreckage and finding just how much there was to learn about piloting your ship properly....

The 6.2 patch is a major update for Final Fantasy 14, and the addition of your very own island getaway spot is a nice bit of solo stuff to dig into. I say dig into because you can set up a farm there, without having crafting or gathering experience in the game. There’s room to pootle about hoovering up materials to erect yourself a house and farm buildings, and round up animals to husband....