It’s not easy being a non-Balatro player amidst a horde of committed fans. People say things like, “A joker duplicating the joker that gives you x4 for playing the same hand, and one that did x4 for four of a kind,” or, “If you wanna scale that kind of build you basically then need red seals on all your face cards so it all repeats again,” and all you can do is sit there quietly wondering what the hell is going on. It’s a lonely feeling sometimes.

For the record, yes, I am talking about myself versus the rest of the PC Gamer team, which is deeply enamored with Balatro, the poker-themed roguelike deckbuilder that encourages cheating at a level that would get your fingers broken at any respectable casino. And they are not alone: Publisher PlayStack announced yesterday that more than 500,000 copies of the game have been sold across all platforms in just 10 days.

That’s an awfully big number for such a small game: Balatro was made by a solo developer who goes by the name Loc…

Revenant Hill made a big impression on us when it was revealed back in May: Associate editor Ted Litchfield said it “looks to press the gas on both autumnal vibes and the themes of early industrial labor organizing,” which actually sounds pretty spot-on when you consider that developer The Glory Society was founded by Night in the Woods co-creators Bethany Hockenberry and Scott Benson.

Sadly, six months later work on the game has been halted. The Glory Society announced on Twitter that “two key members” of the studio, including Benson, have been forced to step away from the project because of serious health issues, and it has thus decided to end development.

“We are a small team and we each wear multiple hats,” The Glory Society wrote. “This is a loss of several hard to replace hats in an environment where all hats are needed. Given the realities of schedules, budgets, and the fraught task of reworking the whole project within those parameters, the team has amicably deci…

Saber Interactive, a division of Embracer Group, has confirmed that it has laid off employees at its New World Interactive studio, the developer of Insurgency: Sandstorm.

Word of the layoffs first came as a rumor that New World Interactive was being closed outright, reported on Twitter by Nick Calandra of Second Wind. In a statement shared with PC Gamer, a Saber Interactive representative confirmed the layoffs but said the studio has not been closed.

“Saber can confirm there have been restructuring changes involving our New World Interactive subsidiary,” the rep said. “This reorganization has unfortunately resulted in layoffs at the studio. We are working to fill existing open roles within Saber with individuals affected by these changes wherever feasible and we will be providing severance packages to those employees impacted.”

Saber didn’t indicate how many employees have been laid off as a result of the studio changes, but the rep said work on Insurgency: Sandsto…

When it comes to deciding on your next purchase, be that PC hardware or otherwise, you’ll probably be leaning pretty heavily on reviews to make your decision. But it won’t come as too much of a surprise when I say that some reviews are less trustworthy than others, with obvious bot accounts, paid reviews and fake testimonials muddying the waters.

Now the FTC has announced what it’s calling a ‘final rule’, aimed at combating exactly that (via PC World). It’s been in the works since October 2022 and contains some pretty sweeping prohibitions on some of the biggest bugbears faced by consumers when searching through site reviews to find trustworthy content.

The final rule prohibits fake or false consumer reviews, consumer testimonials and celebrity testimonials, as well as prohibiting businesses from “providing compensation or other incentives conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative.” It also bans reviews …

Zork was the first game made by the great Infocom, and one that would influence an entire genre. Inspired by the example of Colossal Cave Adventure, the first text adventure to gain any kind of widespread notice in the computer scene of the 1970s, Zork is a sprawling piece of interactive fiction, initially developed by four friends and coders at MIT on the PDP-10 computer. It was first released in 1977 for the PDP-10, before its original developers and other collaborators set up Infocom to polish, expand and release it as a commercial product for PCs.

The game was not only the launchpad for Infocom generally, but an entire genre. This wasn’t the first text adventure but its sophistication far surpassed what had come before (adventure used two word commands). The text parser was designed such that players could enter ‘natural’ language and the game would interpret these commands and act as a kind of narrator or dungeon master, explaining what happened and the current situation …

As a man approaching the age of thirty, I endeavor not to have an opinion on pop sensation Billie Eilish—I leave that to people who use TikTok and debate whether TV shows are “based” or not. As a games journalist, however, I am required to have an opinion on Diablo 4 and its gameplay launch trailer, which features combat from the isometric action RPG set to Eilish’s “You Should See Me in a Crown.” This trailer is largely an object of mild confusion and fascination to me.

After some buildup, the beat drops with a Barbarian doing a “this is Sparta” kick to a rude dude, quickly cutting between explosive gameplay snippets in tune with the song. We get to peep all those cool class powers, and I remain a fan of the Druid’s bear form despite it being, apparently, un-bear-able for my colleague Chris Livingston in the first beta. We are also informed by the trailer that “Hell welcomes all”—a nice message of love and acceptance from the realm of metaphysical torment in a tim…

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree raises the bar for “fashion souls” players who chase the RPG’s ultimate endgame: finding the cleanest fit possible. And by “raises the bar” I mean it establishes the concept—at least lore-wise—that you can just strap a demigod to you like you’re giving them a piggyback ride. The ultimate drip. Sadly, it isn’t possible to equip a demigod backpack in the game normally, so ApolloHoo has released a mod to fix that.

“Ranni’s Promised Consort Tarnished” isn’t the most descriptive title for a mod, but the images on the Nexus Mods page get the point across: You can wear everyone’s favorite moon witch on your back like Godfrey’s lion or a certain boss in the DLC. She doesn’t do anything special back there but if you’re a newlywed in new game+, you can think of it like a honeymoon in the Lands Between.

Comments on the Nexus Mod page say it can be tricky to install. You need to unzip the folder, which can throw up errors (it did for me)…

Walton Goggins plays The Ghoul on the Fallout TV show, who over the course of the series becomes a memorable and conflicted link between the world as-was and as it is in the present day. It’s a fantastic performance, which will be no surprise to those who’ve followed Goggins’ career, and while basking in the aftermath of the show’s success the actor revealed a surprising detail about one of the locations.

Some of the outdoor scenes in Fallout were filmed in Namibia, on what is sometimes referred to as the Skeleton Coast, including in an actual diamond mine (thanks, GamesRadar+). A new photograph released by Amazon shows The Ghoul at this location, looking downcast and moody as is his wont, but Goggins says the real explanation is a little more base. 

“[Amazon] just posted some film stills,” writes Goggins on Instagram, “this is one of them. It looks like I’m trying to look cool and all… but I’m not. See we were filming in an abandoned Diamond mine in N…

On April 30, 1993, CERN released the World Wide Web to the planet, free-of-charge.

The “collaborative information system” was used by the scientists at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, to communicate without delay across countries and continents, but deciding this tool was too useful to keep to themselves, the boffins over at CERN handed out the concept and code for everyone to use.

CERN wrote a letter on April 30 titled “Statement concerning CERN W3 software release into public domain,” (via The Register). It reads:

“The following CERN software is hereby put into the public domain:

• W 3 basic (“line-mode”) client
• W 3 basic server
• W 3 library of common code.

“CERN relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code, both source and binary form and permission is granted for anyone to use, duplicate, modify, and redistribute it.”

There’s a great interview with Walter Hoogland, former CERN directo…