The Beginner's Guide Review

What is a game? Why do games exist? How should you approach them? How should you perceive and engage with the games you play?

These are some of the questions posed to you in The Beginner’s Guide, a narrative-focused game by Davey Wreden, known for creating The Stanley Parable. Wreden himself is a key part of The Beginner’s Guide. He’s the narrator, directly addressing and guiding you through a curated collection of unreleased games, developed by an individual known as Coda. While doing so, he shares personal anecdotes regarding his relationship to the games and their creator.

On a basic level, The Beginner’s Guide is an interesting insight into the process of video game development. Wreden obviously admires Coda’s work, and is excited to show off …

The Sims 4 Review

Control-shift-C-“motherlode.” It’s a series of commands that every Sims player knows, the one that infuses your bank account with precious simoleans for buying the fanciest lamps, laying the plushest carpet, and landscaping with the most impressive of shrubbery. Few games are so defined by their cheat codes, yet if you want to move a digital family into an upscale abode without devoting dozens of hours to building up funds, this code is your ticket to affordable maid service and plush window treatments.

This approach treats The Sims as a dollhouse, a role that The Sims 4 fulfills with some aplomb. If you want to build but prefer not to micromanage the details, the game comes with various prearranged rooms that you can fit together like Tetris pieces, but if you’re devote…

One Of Our Favorite Pro Controllers Is Getting A New PS5 Model

PDP announced a new white variant of its modular Victrix Pro BFG wireless controller for PlayStation. We’re already huge fans of the Victrix Pro BFG, naming it one of our favorite pro controllers available for consoles and PC, and this new model looks to have all the same features as the other Victrix Pro BFG controllers–albeit with a new white color scheme and neon purple accents. Come from Sports betting site VPbet

Paper Mario- The Thousand-Year Door Preorders Are Discounted

Two decades after it first launched on GameCube, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is getting a second life with a remake on Nintendo Switch. The remake doesn’t release until May 23, but you can snag a physical preorder for just $50 (down from $60) at Geek Alliance Come from Sports betting site VPbet . That’s one of the best preorders we’ve seen for the popular upcoming title, and if you’ve yet to reserve a copy, this deal is definitely worth a closer look.

Casino du Liban Takes Content Online with TG Lab

The Lebanon-based operator will now bring its games online with the help of TG Lab, an acclaimed full-turnkey online casino, sportsbook, and agency solution. This way, Casino du Liban will be able to launch its games and offer new experiences to players in Lebanon and the Middle East in general.

Lebanon’s Land-Based Casino Giant Goes Online

Casino du Liban hopes that it will be able to secure a significant market share in the online gambling vertical through this planned launch. The legal gambling market has the potential to reach anything between $500 million and $1 billion, the company said i…

GambleAware highlights British iGaming deposit limit tool research

In the United Kingdom and the organization behind the BeGambleAware.org responsible gambling resource has publicized research from The Behavioural Insights Team surrounding the ongoing use of iGaming deposit limit tools.

The GambleAware charity used an official Thursday press release (pdf) to publicize the global behavioral science organization’s findings that the development of deposit limit tools for online casino and sportsbetting has not kept pace with innovations in other areas of product development. The revelation comes as the British government is conducting a wide-ranging review into the current state of the nation’s gambling market and followed the completion of a study involving 861 iGaming aficionados.

Analyzed approach:

Rosanna Barry serves as the Cons…

International Entertainment Corporation Takes Over Manila Casino

International Entertainment Corporation (IEC) announced that it has officially begun its limited operation of the casino at its New Coast Hotel property in Manila. The company is set to officially take over full casino operations from the PAGCOR on May 11.

The Board is pleased to announce that on 9 May 2024, the Group has commenced its limited operation in the Casino, the Group will officially take over the entire casino operation with effect from 11 May 2024 and will be the operator of the Casino under the Provisional License.

IEC statement

This announcement comes after IEC was awarded a provisional casi…

Zack Snyder's Army Of The Dead Gets Vegas-Themed Character Posters

New character posters for Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead have been released by Netflix. The highly-anticipated zombie action movie releases on May 21.

There are 12 new Army of the Dead posters in total. Each one features a different cast member, with a gaudy background and tagline that ties into the movie’s Las Vegas setting, such as “Knock ’em undead,” “Make a killing,” and “Gamble with your life.” Check them out in the Twitter thread below:

Xbox Hardware Just Had Worst Sales Dropoff In Years

Microsoft has released its latest earnings report, and included in the document is an update on how the Xbox division is doing. Overall, Xbox revenue is way up thanks to contributions from Activision Blizzard, but hardware sales are down massively. And that’s not exclusive to Xbox, either, as PlayStation recently missed sales targets and Switch sales are trending down.

Microsoft said in its quarterly filing that Xbox hardware revenue decreased 31%, due to “lower volume of consoles sold.” According to GI.biz, this past quarter was the worst ever since the Xbox Series X|S launched in November 2020 in terms of a quarterly percent decline.

Florida law makers approve legislative package paving the way for Trump to offer gambling at his Doral golf resort

Yesterday, legislators in Florida approved a package that will create a major gambling expansion in the state. Within the details of the legislation, there is wording that would allow Donald Trump to apply for a casino license for a Doral golf resort he owns in Miami.

Trump’s Casino Potential

The legislation covers several aspects of gaming, including a new compact with the Seminole Tribe of Florida. The compact is set for 30 years and was negotiated with the tribe by Governor Ron DeSantis. The governor is a supportive ally of Trump. The compact has a provision that bans the tribe from interfering if the state gives a gambling license to a facility that is further than 15 miles in a straight line from the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood.

New South Wales regulator chasing Melco Resorts and Entertainment Limited

In Australia and the gaming regulator for the state of New South Wales has reportedly launched legal proceedings against Asian casino operator Melco Resorts and Entertainment Limited in an attempt to recover approximately $2.63 million.

According to a Sunday report from Inside Asian Gaming, the New South Wales Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority watchdog filed the action involving the Hong Kong-headquartered firm as part of a campaign to recoup at least some of the cash it spent in conducting its recent license suitability probe into Crown Resorts Limited.

Grievance genesis:

Melco Resorts and Entertainment Limited is responsible for the Studio City Macau, City of Dreams Macau and Altira Macau casino resorts in Macau alongside the under-con…

Ellen DeGeneres Says She's "Done" After Netflix Special

Ellen DeGeneres Says She’s "Done" After Upcoming Netflix Special

Ellen DeGeneres has plans to just keep swimming away from Hollywood.

The former daytime talk show host got candid about life since ending The Ellen DeGeneres Show during her standup set in Santa Rosa, Calif., on July 1.

When one fan asked if they could look forward to seeing her on Broadway or the big screen in the near future, Ellen was quick to set the record straight.

"Um, no," she said, according to SFGATE. "This is the last time you're going to see me. After my Netflix special, I'm done."

But the comedian is grateful for the time she’s spending on the stage in the meantime.

"Thank you for still car…

Baldur’s Gate 3’s incubus love fiend has a very revealing message printed on their bondage gear-

Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the horniest games of all time and, you know what, that’s just how we like it here at PC Gamer (well, some of us). To play Larian’s fantasy RPG masterpiece and not bump uglies with at least something is probably this game’s true hero run, as there are quite frankly a lot of alluring characters to get romantically involved with and many of them want to desperately jump you at every opportunity, too, (we’re looking at you Gale), often ambushing you with yet another proposition to remove your underwear when you least expect it.

And talking of ambushes and underwear, there is one character in Baldur’s Gate 3’s third act that it is particularly difficult to avoid doing the bedsheet shuffle with. At this point I will drop a spoiler warning to note that what fol…

Full Intel next-gen Arrow Lake CPU model list, specs, release dates, the works reportedly revealed

We’ve already spotted Intel’s next-gen Arrow Lake CPUs after they were accidentally posted on a UK etailer website. Now we can flesh out the full details even further, including pretty much every important spec for all five launch models of Intel’s latest desktop CPU, plus apparently Intel’s intended release date.

According to Benchlife, Arrow Lake is go for launch on October 24. Earlier reports indicated an October 10 unleashing, but the later date now appears to be Intel’s plan.

Five models will be offered initially, all using the new “Core Ultra” nomenclature already seen with Intel’s Meteor Lake laptop CPUs. The top chip is the Core Ultra 9 285K. It sports eight Performance and 16 Efficient cores, but no HyperThreading, so the thread count is the same as the overall co…

I tried SteelSeries’ new Hall effect gaming keyboard and I’m genuinely surprised these switches deliver such a satisfying THONK

When I stepped into SteelSeries’ Copenhagen offices and noticed what was on the table, my heart sank a little. It was another Apex Pro keyboard that, for all intents and purposes, looked the same as the last. My hopes weren’t raised by talk of the new software presets and the company’s take on SOCD, either. But then I heard the new Apex Pro 3 clack. And boy, does it clack.

I was mighty impressed by the unadulterated thockiness of the Apex Pro 3, given it’s a Hall effect gaming keyboard and that weighty thunk is traditionally a more mechanical affair. Still, after the SteelSeries representative had given a tantalisingly short demo of the Pro 3’s clickety clack, all talk of its newest bells and whistles fell on somewhat deaf ears.

I didn’t care about software features; I nee…

‘Aiming is optional now’- Overwatch 2’s bigger bullets divide players as they adjust to Blizzard’s season 9 rework-

In Overwatch 2’s newest season, every hero shoots bigger bullets and it’s driving players mad as they watch clips of the most egregious examples.

It was hard to visualize just how much Blizzard had increased the size of weapon projectiles in Overwatch 2’s newest season until a bunch of people started firing at a Tracer bot in the game’s practice range. While some don’t seem to have changed much, others are so big now that you don’t have to aim even remotely close to the enemy’s character model to score a hit.

Heroes like Sojourn, Widowmaker, and Hanzo can shoot air and still hit headshots, which has some players jokingly (and sometimes not jokingly) claiming that aiming is optional.

As a regular Overwatch player since 2016, I can tell you that some heroes have always b…

18 years on, The Elder Scrolls 4- Oblivion’s unmatched comedic timing is still enough to go viral-

Oblivion isn’t many people’s favourite Elder Scrolls game—that title usually goes to either its predecessor or successor—but it’s unquestionably the funniest. Yes, Morrowind had The Lusty Argonian Maid and Skyrim sent you to the Moon every time a giant took a swing at you, but Oblivion’s technology and acting combined in perfect alchemy to produce effortless comedy entirely without trying.

It’s so good, in fact, that clips of the game’s unintentional comic genius have gone viral on Twitter over the past few days, after a tweet from New Blood’s Dave Oshry called attention to an accidentally hilarious Vinesauce video (posted by another Twitter user, NotRollingTim) of the game’s Whodunit quest, in which the paranoid Neville absolutely annihilates Nels the Naughty with a b…

If an irradiated wasteland filled with murderous monsters isn’t bad enough on its own, now you can add AI Joe Rogan to it-

If you’ve ever thought to yourself that what the gently crackling quiet of Fallout: New Vegas really needs is the endless nattering of a credulous media personality, then I might have just the mod for you: The Joe Rogan Experience, in which the bafflingly popular presenter gives voice to eight sponsor messages and nine interviews with various high-profile characters.

Of course, it’s not actually Joe Rogan’s voice: The mod uses AI-powered voice synthesis to recreate Rogan in the game. The big giveaway is that it doesn’t really sound like him, particularly during the interview with Caesar in the first part of the trailer. Rogan has a distinctive voice, which I’ve grown passingly familiar with through UFC broadcasts and the occasional brief clip from his podcast that’s passed around …

Robocop- Rogue City’s surprising success proves there’s still room in the business for mid-tier games with good licenses-

Nacon has announced that Robocop: Rogue City, the future of law enforcement shooters, is its “best ever launch,” racking up more than 435,000 players and 2.7 million game sessions in its first two weeks of release.

“RoboCop: Rogue City has exceeded our expectations, and achieved a genuine feat as far as Nacon is concerned,” CEO Alan Falc said. “We are really proud to have been able to work with the studio Teyon on this game created by and for RoboCop die-hards. We would also like to thank MGM for the trust they placed in us throughout this collaboration, as well as all the players who have contributed to making this release such a great success.”

The PC version of Robocop: Rogue City holds a 75 aggregate score on Metacritic, which seems about right. We scored it 65% in our r…

Steam smash hit Content Warning has sold over 700,000 copies after giving away 6 million free copies-

I imagine all game developers get butterflies in their stomachs when they’re about to push their game live, but it’s not often a game previously given away for free suddenly starts asking for money. That was the deal indie studio Landfall made with players when it surprise-released Content Warning on April Fools’ day.

The Lethal Company-like horror game that challenges friends to record scary videos and go viral on SpöökTube would be free to claim for its first 24 hours, after which Landfall would start charging $8. Over six million copies of Content Warning were claimed during the free period, a response that Landfall CEO Wilhelm Nylund tells PC Gamer was “completely unlike anything” they’ve experienced.

Landfall has created its own holiday around making gag games…

The best budget wireless gaming mouse is now even budget-ier thanks to Prime Day-

When it comes to gaming mice, sometimes all you really need is something that’s fast, lightweight, and reliable. Sure, ultra-fast optical sensors and sky-high polling rates are nice to have but they really bump up the price and can seriously eat into the battery life.

That’s why the Logitech G305 Lightspeed is the best budget wireless mouse you can buy. And thanks to the Prime Day sales event, it’s even budget-ier, with a decent amount of dollars hacked off the price tag.

  • We’re curating all the best Prime Day PC gaming deals right here.

Although to be fair to other retailers, Amazon’s low price is exclusive to Prime members only, and the white and mint colored versions are $29.99—the same price that Ne…

Streamer sets sail for the surface of Pluto in Starfield—and spends 7 hours to reach a cursed orb she can just fly through-

Starfield‘s fast travel and loading screen-heavy approach to space exploration has become something of a thorny subject—PC Gamer’s own Morgan Park felt the sting of the game’s boundaries recently, with some players upset they’re getting something closer to Mass Effect than No Man’s Sky.

Pre-release, Todd Howard spoke with IGN about Bethesda’s decision to keep surface and space separate, explaining that “the on-surface is one reality, and then when you’re in space it’s another reality.” When it comes to zipping around in-game, unless you’re grav-jumping your ship isn’t fast enough to get much of anywhere. It’s mainly there for ship-to-ship interaction, dogfighting, and getting prank called.

Undeterred, games writer and streamer Alanah Pearce…

This RTX 4080 gaming PC deal has dropped to a new low price at $2,550-

Nvidia’s 40-series graphics cards are beginning to make their way into decently-priced pre-built gaming PCs. By that I mean you can pick up this smartly spec’d RTX 4080 gaming PC for $2,550, which is still a lot of money, but is notably a lot less than the $3,000+ early-bird machines we were seeing all too much of at launch.

A high-end PC in 2023 is a big investment—if you want top performance you have to be prepared to pay for it. Luckily, there are some clever ways to shave some cash off the grand total for a pre-built machine without sacrificing performance. That’s what I like about this ABS Stratos PC over at Newegg, it’s not needlessly overkill.

Take the CPU, for example. This machine comes with AMD’s excellent Ryzen 7 7700X, an eight-core/16-thread CPU w…

Today’s Wordle answer for Monday, February 19-

Start your week with a Wordle win. Keep on scrolling and you’ll soon find everything from general advice you can use every day to a helpful clue written just for today’s Wordle. If you want more, the answer to the February 19 (975) game is here if you need it, too.

The dreaded “one missing letter in a row after row of greens” reared its head again today and snatched my chances of securing an early win. Thankfully, this happened early enough that I was able to guess my way to today’s Wordle answer, I just wish I’d found it a few rows up the board. Hopefully tomorrow’s game will be less stressful.

Wordle today: A hint

Wordle today: A hint for Monday, February 19

The answer today refers to the cost of something, usually how much money you’d expected…

Valve lured 40,000 Dota cheaters into a trap before banning them in one day-

With more than a little braggadocio, Valve has announced that it’s permanently banned over 40,000 Dota 2 accounts for cheating. In a post to the official Dota 2 blog yesterday, the company revealed that it had constructed a cunning trap to catch thousands of players that were using “third-party software” to “access information used internally by the Dota client that wasn’t visible during normal gameplay,” lending them an unfair advantage in-game.

It worked like this: Once it became aware of the exploit, Valve released a patch that created “a section of data inside the game client that would never be read during normal gameplay, but that could be read by these exploits”. Valve says that every single one of the accounts banned yesterday had read from that secret data, giving the com…

‘Not to interrupt, but they just laid us all off’- Unionised YouTube workers in Texas are told in the middle of a live City Council meeting that they don’t have jobs anymore-

YouTube Music contractors were informed mid-speech, during a publicly-recorded and broadcast meeting with the City Council of Austin, Texas that they’d just lost their jobs. 

“To be supported by the city of Austin, and also our allies in the labour community—[it] gives us the motivation to keep this fight going,” says Jack Benedict as he speaks to the council—though he trails off as he turns to his co-worker Katie Marie Marschner, approaching the podium. Composing herself, Marschner then says: “Not to interrupt but they just laid us all off.”

“As I was sat behind him, filming him, I got a text message from my co-worker letting them know that they had all just been laid off in our weekly team meeting,” says Marschner in a later video posted to the union’s Twi…

Someone put the Armored Core 6 maps in Elden Ring, for reasons-

Ever wondered what it would be like to run around the maps of Armored Core 6 with your Elden Ring character? If not, why the heck not? I’m sure this modder who imported the AC6 maps into Elden Ring surely can’t be the only one interested in exploring them, sword drawn, and ready to fight mechs with magic.

Having posted the flythrough video on their YouTube account, there’s been quite a positive response to Dropoff’s idea to waltz around the Armored Core 6  maps with their Elden Ring character. Not least as it puts the maps into a human perspective, and manages to vindicate Redditors’ praise for the AC6 graphics.

You don’t usually get a chance to appreciate the detail when you’re speeding around in your mech going pew-pew.

Recently we wrote about Armored Core 6’s b…

Baldur’s Gate 3’s next patch will fix the game thinking so hard about your crimes it breaks the fabric of existence-

Baldur’s Gate 3‘s next major patch is on its way—scheduled to release this week, according to Larian Studios’ director of publishing, Michael Douse. Announced in a Twitter post yesterday, Douse reassures players: “we caught the nasty bug causing slowdowns and the good news is: it’s fixed in Patch 5!”

For context, Patch 4 tackled a few things, adding colourblind filters, fixing storyline hiccups, and tweaking kiss scenes, leading to some adorable head-bumps with Karlach while leaving poor Astarion lovers feeling like they were about to be broken up with whenever they went in for a smooch. 

It also introduced a game-breaking bug that caused some massive slowdowns in Act 3, as highlighted in this thread from the game’s subreddit. “Companions do…

With Shadow of the Erdtree, FromSoftware wanted to build a map ‘that’s not quite open field and not quite legacy dungeon,’ but instead ‘blends the two together’-

As we noted in our preview of Shadow of the Erdtree last week, the expansion’s new map is notably different from the Lands Between, which we explored in Elden Ring. It’s smaller, yes, but also denser with enemies, activities, and notable locations, and not quite so simple to navigate. You’ll find more cliffs, valleys, and bridges blocking off new areas you may have first thought you’d be able to gallop to. 

FromSoftware boss Hidetaka Miyazaki said that the team planned for this expansion to be big from the start, because they wanted players “to experience that sense of discovery, and that sense of wonder and exploration again,” and they needed a large scale map “to uphold and bolster that.”

But how did the more intricate design of the new world map come about? When we s…

With a roguelike time loop twist, Every Day We Fight takes a whole new approach to the turn-based strategy genre-

We’ve all had that experience in XCOM where you’re so determined to get yourself out of an impossible situation that you just keep reloading your save and trying different approaches as your soldiers die over and over. Now imagine that instead of that just being an embarrassing memory, it’s the basis for a whole new approach to the genre. 

In Every Day We Fight, just shown off at the PC Gaming Show 2024, you take charge of a group of civilians caught in an alien invasion Groundhog Day. Thanks to some strange sci-fi tech tech, every time your untrained fighters die, they wake up back at the start of the day, ready to go again.

Battles are turn-based, but you’ll also be exploring in real time, and the time loop structure gives it a roguelike flavour. As you make your way …

You can avoid the blood, sweat, and tears of planning your own custom loop PC with EK’s pre-configured kits now 24% off for Cyber Monday-

You can spend a long time trying to nail down the exact parts required for a full custom loop build. In a way, that’s a part of it. You really come to appreciate the PC you’ve built by the end of the process, as it’s one you’ve created from the ground up. 

But if you’re less sentimental, you might just want someone else to put together a parts list for you. EZ PZ. That’s what EK does with its ‘Loop’ builds, and right now everything on its store is 24% off, which makes such a build that little bit more affordable.

Alright, affordable these builds ain’t, but every little helps when investing in something as expensive as a fully liquid-looped build. You’re looking at spending anything from $1,284 for the cheapest all-inclusive kit to around $2,628 for the so-called “Golden…