Cognitivelenses

Sometimes, when I sit down to spend some time with a new game for a quick and simple ‘hey, this thing exists’ news story, I do so with the understanding that I’ll be playing a game—or a demo, as is the case here—and evaluating its strengths, its weaknesses, and its promises. Taking a critical and analytical eye, figuring out whether to recommend the thing I’m trying.

I have not been critical or analytical while trying out Athenian Rhapsody. Instead, I have taken a volume of mental damage that has left me certain I won’t be able to stand the full game—like how you might get motion sickness in VR. You, however, might have an utter blast.

Athenian Rhapsody’s Steam page advertises it as a “a souls-like platonic dating simulator with cooking-mama and WarioWare style battle mechanics”, though clarifies: “and by that I mean it’s a choose-your-own-adventure action RPG with the ability to trade ENTIRE PLAYTHROUGHS between friends!”

The way I would describe…

Battlefield: Bad Company 1 and 2 and Battlefield 1943 are going away forever: Electronic Arts has announced that their online services are being shut down in December, and as a result they will be removed from sale from all digital storefronts on April 28.

Those of you with good memories may recall way back about, oh, 42 minutes ago, when we reported that Mirror’s Edge was also being delisted. That, it turns out, was a mistake: Not ours, but EA’s. Mirror’s Edge, at least for now, is not being taken off sale.

All the games being delisted are elderly as these things go: Battlefield: Bad Company came out in 2008, Battlefield 1943 followed in 2009, and Bad Company 2 was released in 2010. But they were standout games in their day. Bad Company 2 was PC Gamer UK’s shooter of the year in 2010 (back in the days when the UK and US teams did things separately), and the Vietnam DLC was brilliant. (The original Bad Company and Battlefield 1943 were console exclusives.) 

Bu…

There have been a few small hints that people like poker roguelike Balatro. Our Balatro review score of 91, for instance, the 40,000 Steam reviews that average out to “Overwhelmingly Positive,” and the fact that I put 30 hours into it in a single week—and that was when I was playing the pre-launch demo, not even the full game.

Another tiny clue that Balatro is, y’know, pretty good surfaced this week: it’s now sold over 2 million copies on all platforms. That’s outstanding for a game that’s been for the most part the work of a single developer, LocalThunk. 

“I would never have thought that Balatro would be played by over 2 million people when I started working on it almost 3 years ago,” LocalThunk said in an email sent to PC Gamer. “I’m so grateful to all the players for giving it a chance and I’m excited to show everyone the next chapter for my game.”

Wait, there’s the next chapter? Yes, there is. LocalThunk is gonna put …

If you need help with your daily Wordle, I’ve got everything you need right here. Whether you’re after a tailor-made clue for the July 8 (749) game or today’s answer served up on a plate. Once you’ve won, why not spend some time reading our tips and guides too, so you can make the most of every guess.

Locking in a pair of greens usually feels good—except when they leave the board so wide open I know there’s no guarantee I’ll whittle today’s Wordle down to the answer in time. The good news is one of my guesses today ended up almost revealing the correct word, so in the end I only had to switch out a single letter to win. 

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Saturday, July 8

Today’s answer is a physical response to a frightening situation, a sort of crouching or shrinking action where someone makes themselves small. You’ll need to find two vowels to win. 

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Is there a double letter in today’s Word…

Earlier this month, Polish game devs, including several from CD Projekt Red, formed the Polish Gamedev Workers Union (PGWU). This came in the wake of further layoffs at the company in July, to the tune of 9% of its workforce. At the time, CEO Adam Kiciński explained the move as something to help make the teams more “agile and effective”, but agile and effective doesn’t pay the rent.

“This event created a tremendous amount of stress and insecurity,” explains the union’s website, “affecting our mental health and leading to the creation of this union in response. Having a union means having more security, transparency, better protection, and a stronger voice in times of crisis.”

The devs at CD Projekt Red have shed more light on the situation during an interview with IGN, saying that the aftershocks of the game’s crunch culture problems—both with the Witcher 3 in 2017 and Cyberpunk 2077 in 2019—led to that unnerving climate.

Linguistic QA Assurance Co…

Fancied some hot neural-machine interfacing action but not totally sold on a chip buried in your head by Neuralink’s slightly (completely) terrifying robosurgeon and its nightmarish needle? Then good old Zuck’ and Meta have something for you.

It’s a wristband that tracks hand and finger movements by detecting the neural electrical signals passing through the nerves in your arm using an entirely non-invasive technique called electromyography. Sounds much more friendly? Yes. And yet no.

Meta showed off the device as an experimental prototype back in 2021. Now Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the company is working on bringing it to market. “We’ve been working on this for a while, it’s not a one year project. But we’re quite a few years into it and we’re close to having something, to having a product in the next few years,” Zuckerberg revealed in an interview on the Morning Brew Daily (via UploadVR).

Now, if you’re thinking, so what, this is just a fancy way to move a mo…