Welcome to the last gasp of July 2024, and your first inhale of a week full of pine-fresh bargains. If I didn’t already own several, the top of my To Buy list would be that 83 buck 1TB MicroSD. It’s a pretty perfect storage solution for both Switch and Steam Deck users. Oh, and you can also zip down to the Top 10 games of last week and get decent coins off a thing that everybody seems to want right now.

In retro news, I’m marking the 20th birthday of Sid Meier’s Pirates!, an arrr-rated remake of an ’87 classic I smashed repeatedly on PC. Think: a 2.5D, top-down Sea of Thieves, and you’re not far off the mizzenmast—fencing, naval battles, sniffing out treasure, and harnessing winds/avoiding reefs are your bread and butter gameplay. The long-term hook (so to speak) lay in its trading and RPG-lite elements, plus the addiction of building a multi-ship armada and a bad-arse rep. Top game. Would replay.

This Day in Gaming

Aussie birthdays for notable games.

– Sid Meier’s Pirates! (PC) 2004. Get

– King’s Quest (PS3/4,X360/O) 2015. Get

– N++ (PS4) 2015. Get