Nightdive’s next game, about a chef in space who battles aliens with a frying pan, is coming next week-

Nightdive Studios announced today that PO’ed: Definitive Edition, its next back-from-the-dead project, is set to launch on May 16 for both PC and consoles.

PO’ed was originally released in 1995 for the 3DO, and made its way to the PlayStation the following year. It follows the adventures of a chef-in-space who, after crash-landing on a hostile planet, battles hordes of aliens using various kitchen implements and, eventually, alien weaponry. 

It’s not exactly the most serious videogame ever made, as evidenced by the game’s description on Steam: “Friggin’ aliens! They hijacked your ship and kidnapped your shipmates. It’s enough to get a guy… PO’ed!”

PO’ed isn’t nearly as well known as System Shock or Star Wars: Dark Forces, the previous beneficiaries of Nightdive’s work, but it clearly has fans at the studio. 

“Simplicity, and sandbox nature of the levels,” lead KEX engine developer Samuel “Kaiser” Villarreal said when asked why Nightdive opted to r…

Palworld’s made so much money it’s ‘too big for a studio with our size to handle’, but CEO says it’s not going to go public or sell up yet- ‘I want to make multiple small games’-

PocketPair CEO and Palworld creator Takuro Mizobe has given an interview to Bloomberg about the game’s breakout success. During the interview Mizobe puts this down to, among other things, its unusual mix of influences and it being a game that’s fun to watch as well as play with friends. But the scale of that success? It’s both almost too much for Pocketpair to handle, and something that Mizobe is determined won’t change the studio. 

Mizobe founded Pocketpair in 2015 after a stint as a tech engineer at JP Morgan, and remains the CEO and sole owner of the 55-person studio in Tokyo. The game attracted over 25 million players in its first month, albeit some of those were down to Game Pass, and at $30 a head that’s suddenly an awful lot of money. Mizobe says Palworld’s development budget was less than ¥1 billion ($6.7 million), and has now returned tens of billions of yen in profit: which Mizobe says is simply “too big for a studio with our size to handle.”

De…

Starfield players are using its character creator to fulfil mankind’s historic dream of sending Tony Soprano to space-

Starfield is finally here in its non-‘advance access’ form and its players are already hard at work. Not hard at work exploring the galaxy or cataloguing the flora and fauna of distant alien worlds, mind you. No, they’re hard at work doing the truly important stuff: making celebrities in its character creator before sending them to die in the chilly void of space. Per aspera ad astra.

The Starfield subreddit is awash with familiar faces right now. Sure, there are all the people you expect—figures from Star Trek, The Expanse, and other sci-fi—but also the kinds of baffling pop culture references you’d expect from the internet in 2023. Ever wanted to see Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul’s Mike Ehrmantraut suit up for a moon mission? Of course you have; everyone wants that. And some dreams, my friends, cannot be denied. 

Put your ship away waltuh from r/Starfield

Prestige TV is quite well represe…

Remedy plans to release a new game each year from now on-

Finnish studio Remedy Entertainment was founded all the way back in 1995, 28 years ago, and in that time it’s released seven games: Death Rally, Max Payne, Max Payne 2, Alan Wake, Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, Quantum Break, and Control. That works out to one game every four years, which isn’t bad for a smaller, independent studio. But Remedy has plans to ramp that rate up considerably, beginning this year.

Through most of its history, Remedy was a one-game-a-time studio, but in recent years it’s expanded its capacity considerably. It’s now working on multiple projects simultaneously, including Alan Wake 2, a Control spinoff called Codename Condor, a “bigger-budget Control game” known as Codename Heron, and a service-based co-op multiplayer game codenamed Vanguard, for which it partnered with Tencent. The studio now has five “AAA games” in development, which is a major change from the pre-Control days.

“The move to this multi-project model has been going well, but we a…

These are the AMD GPUs I’d build a new gaming PC around, starting at just $360. And who says there are no good graphics card deals–

Right, let’s get straight to brass tacks: Three of our collective favorite AMD graphics cards here at PC Gamer are discounted to some pretty stellar prices right now. On Newegg, the Acer Nitro RX 7800 XT is currently listed at $460 (save $60) and the Acer Nitro RX 7900 GRE at $520 (save $20). And if you don’t have $460 to spare, fear not because the Acer Nitro RX 7700 XT is also on offer, this time for $360 (save $60).

If I were building a new PC today, I’d personally opt for an AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT or AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE, depending on whether I have more or less than $500 to spend on one of the best graphics cards. I’d do this without deals on either of them, so with these discounts it’s a no-brainer if you’re in the market for a new GPU for mainstream 1440p gaming. 

These prices are some of the lowest we’ve seen for these particular GPUs, which just happen to be two of our favorites here in the PC Gamer hardware den. There’s plenty to love about both GPUs. In …

There’s a new naming scheme for future PCIe cables but PCI-SIG hasn’t really explained what it’s all about-

Press releases from technology organisations can sometimes be really exciting, often very predictable, and occasionally rather sparse. A recent announcement from the PCI-SIG, though, that says new PCI Express internal and external cables will use a CopprLink naming scheme, but nothing else, almost seems not worth announcing at all.

All of the team at PC Gamer get countless press releases in their inboxes, which is great as that makes finding news quite a bit easier. We got one the other day from the PCI-SIG (PCI Special Interest Group) that looked quite interesting to begin with but ultimately left us feeling somewhat exasperated by the absolute dearth of information.

It said, and I quote, “PCI-SIG announced the new naming scheme for PCIe Internal and External Cables will be CopprLink. The PCIe 5.0 and PCIe 6.0 Internal and External Cable Specifications are currently in development and are targeted for release in 2024.”

That was it. Nothing about the cable…

The Last of Us TV show is a massive critical hit-

The Last of Us won’t come to PC for a couple months yet—it’s slated to launch on Steam on March 3, a full decade after its original PS3 debut. The TV adaptation arrives next week, though, and by all reports it’ll be a very good way to get your Naughty Dog fix while you wait for the game to arrive.

Movies based on videogames haven’t exactly set the world on fire, but it’s been a very different story with television adaptations in recent years. Shows like Arcane and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners have received widespread acclaim, the Halo TV series is not bad (and it gave us the opportunity to do this), and while The Witcher series on Netflix is based on the books and not the games, I’m claiming it as one of ours anyway.

If the critical response is any indication, The Last of Us is set to join those ranks, and may even be the best television rework yet. It holds a 98% rating at Rotten Tomatoes across dozens of critic ratings, and enjoys breathless superlatives like:

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This Acer Helios gaming laptop shines bright with a 240 Hz IPS display and an RTX 4070 for just $1,400-

Take it from someone who’s used many a gaming laptop as a day-to-day machine—what you’re looking for is balance. You’ll want a set of components that the cooling system can handle, a decent amount of storage space, a good-looking chassis, and a great screen. All for a price that won’t make your bank manager call you just to make sure you’re feeling ok. 

Which is why this Acer Predator Helios 16 is such a good deal, currently available at Newegg for $1,400. For a very reasonable price, you get some components that make a lot more sense than some of the overpowered (and as a result, immensely hot) combinations we see in some of the more expensive lappies on the market. 

Let’s start out with that display. This 240Hz IPS LED backlit panel is, unfortunately, not the Mini-LED model you get in the ultra high-end version with the RTX 4080. Boo. Still, with that refresh rate and a 500 nits peak brightness rating, it’s still mega-fast and plenty punchy, and will st…

Today’s Wordle hint and answer #753- Wednesday, July 12-

Improve your daily Wordle with our helpful tips, dig yourself out of a rut with a helpful clue written especially for the July 12 (753) game, or take a cheeky peek at today’s answer—it’s only a single click away, after all.

Well, this Wordle certainly took some time. I eventually uncovered a few letters, but they refused to behave and for a worryingly long while I wasn’t sure what to do with them. In these situations, all you can do is stick at it and keep guessing until a vital green or precious spark of inspiration hits, so I kept on trying until today’s Wordle answer revealed itself.

Today’s Wordle hint

A Wordle hint for Wednesday, July 12

The answer today refers to a type of movement—a sort of swift circular spin, performed by anything from trained dancers to leaves on the wind. The same word can also mean “giving something a go” too. There’s just one vowel in this one.    

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Is there a doub…

US government denies ESRB’s AI-powered face-scanning ‘age estimation’ proposal, but it’s probably not gone for good-

In 2023, the Entertainment Software Rating Board, along with digital identity company Yoti and “youth marketing solutions” provider Superawesome, filed a proposal with the FTC for a new “verifiable parental consent mechanism” called Privacy-Protective Facial Age Estimation. The FTC has now issued its response to that proposal, and the answer is “no”—for now.

The ESRB’s proposed technology stirred feathers almost immediately, and understandably so: The idea of having to essentially submit a selfie to prove to a machine that you’re old enough to play GTA 6 is inherently intrusive, and that’s before you even get into questions of technological bias and whether or not the thing would work well enough to justify the headaches that would inevitably erupt for at least some users.

The ESRB moved quickly to reassure the public that the system is not meant to identify individuals but simply to estimate age, and that it would not store any data after the analysis was complete…