The Story Behind ‘Cassandro’

Halfway through Cassandro, the biographical drama about the wrestler Saúl Armendáriz out now on Prime Video, the soaring ballad “Hasta Que Te Conocí” plays over a poignant scene.

Saúl (Gael García Bernal) and his mother Yocasta (Perla de la Rosa) have snuck into the backyard pool of an empty house for sale in their city, El Paso. It’s a pretty thing that they can’t afford with a yellow kitchen, and Saúl wants to buy it for them with money from his fights as soon as possible. They float in the abandoned pool and chat, somewhere between serene and melancholy, as the Mexican singer Juan Gabriel croons, “Yo sabía de cariño, de ternura. Porque a mí desde pequeño, eso me enseñó mamá.” (“I knew of affection, of tenderness because since I was little, my…

Best Buy and Target’s Prime Day equivalent sales are on now-

Amazon decided to stick a sale event in the summer with its Prime Day deals, which start this week on Tuesday, so naturally its competitors have followed suit. They can’t call their competing events “Prime Day,” of course, which is how we now have Target Circle Week and Best Buy Black Friday in July. Look what you’ve started, Bezos!

I’m just going to call all these sales “Prime Day,” even though that’s Amazon’s thing. It’s easier that way. So, as I was saying, Target Prime Day and Best Buy Prime Day have started, and already have some PC gaming deals to offer before Amazon’s official Prime Day kickoff.

That includes some gaming laptops, a few of which we’ve already noted in our hub of the best Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals. 

Best Buy also has deals on PC gaming…

Former dev from sunken Sims competitor Life by You alleges the team had ‘the rug pulled’ from under them—despite outperforming the company’s internal metrics-

Life by You seemed poised to corner an untapped market—that corner being a version of the Sims not bogged down by over $1,200’s worth of DLC. As PCG’s Joshua Wolens noted during a preview, it was angled to be “Sims with the brakes cut”.

Unfortunately, that didn’t materialise. A mere month after delaying its early access without a new date, Paradox released a statement that the game would go unreleased forevermore. In the announcement, the company argued that “the road leading to a release that we felt confident about was far too long and uncertain.” Within a day, Paradox Tectonic—the division of Paradox making the thing—was shut down.

However, a former developer from Paradox Tectonic alleges a very different story. In a lengthy LinkedIn post, Willem Delvent…

GTA Online’s Halloween event makes a fan rumour real and gives one of its protagonists a last goodbye-

I’ll make no bones about it: I preferred Grand Theft Auto 4 to GTA 5. The latter is great and all but I never got over the more grounded and gritty take of GTA 4 and in particular its tragic central cast, defined and trapped by their lives in the criminal underworld. GTA 4 had two great expansions, The Ballad of Gay Tony and The Lost and the Damned, both introducing their own protagonists and side stories. One of them was the biker Johnny Klebitz, who, unlike many of Rockstar’s leads, ends his GTA 4 arc in a better place.

An early twist in GTA 5 upset the apple cart: One of that game’s three protagonists, the psychopathic Trevor, finds a drug-addled Johnny and beats him to death. This has always been an unpopular twist, which perhaps indicates narratively it was a good one (boo!),…

All Genshin Impact codes from the 4.7 livestream-

The Genshin Impact 4.7 livestream codes for this version have arrived. For those that aren’t aware, or maybe just started playing Genshin for the first time recently, miHoYo presents a livestream in advance of each new update. This shows off the new characters, quests, and events that are happening, and as a little bonus incentive to watch, there are three livestream codes that get you some Primogems.

For this version, it looks like the new characters are Hydro five-star, Sigewinne and Electro five-star Clorinde, plus potential reruns for Furina and Alhaitham. As usual, I’ll add each livestream code as it drops during the special program—these codes generally expire within a day, so you should redeem them as soon as you can. There’s also inf…

Anarchist hacker exposes the TSA’s 1.5 million-name no-fly list-

First reported by the Daily Dot, an activist and hacker who goes by the name maia arson crimew uncovered a version of the United States government’s No-Fly List dated to 2019 on an unsecured server owned by regional US airline, CommuteAir (formerly CommutAir). The glimpse at this well-known, but not publicly available, US government registry is the latest in a cavalcade of major corporate security breaches in recent months.

Crimew, an independent hacker and researcher, discovered the list via a variant of Shodan, a cybersecurity-focused search engine that allows users to find unsecured servers on the net. Crimew found one such server owned by CommuteAir, a partner of United Airlines specializing in short-range flights. In addition to the list itself, preposterously named NoFly.csv…

Roblox wants you to interview inside Roblox to work at Roblox-

I suppose there was a time when the thought of conducting interviews over Zoom or Skype was unheard of, so perhaps the idea of interviewing candidates inside virtual worlds isn’t such a wild concept. Especially when, in Roblox’s case, the virtual world you’re interviewing inside is for the very platform you’re trying to work for.

The Roblox Career Center is touted as an “immersive experience” where would-be candidates can drop in for information all about working for the company. A blog post from VP of talent acquisition Jason Buss promises it to be a place where “candidates can learn more about the complex technical challenges we are tackling and the innovation we are driving through immersive events, podcasts and conversations with Roblox employees.”

There are places to go…

Fallout- New Vegas mod replaces techbro antagonist with an AI-created Elon Musk-

You don’t really get much more on-the-nose than this, but a new mod for Fallout: New Vegas replaces the in-game character Mr. House with the real-world character Elon Musk. First spotted by Kotaku, the Elon House mod, created by NoUsernameSelected, takes some cues from a pre-existing New Vegas mod which pulled the same trick with Mark Zuckerberg back in 2020. There’s one twist here though: the New Vegas Musk is an AI creation.

In the game Mr. House runs the Strip, one of the big New Vegas locations, and depending on your actions can be friend or foe: essentially do what he says and you’re golden, refuse to be a good dog and he’ll come for you. House is presented as a tech visionary and in a way one of humanity’s hopes, but unfortunately believes his own hype to the e…

If in doubt, use more lube- Wooting’s Lekker V2 switches now have tighter tolerances and more of the slippy stuff, insert your own joke here-

If there’s one thing that differentiates regular PC users from mechanical keyboard fans, it’s a discussion about lube. Y’see, we at PC Gamer have become converts to the benefits of lubed switches in our precious keebs, and we’re not the only ones. A good dose of the slippy stuff used to be something you had to do yourself, but now pre-lubed switches have become something we’re increasingly used to seeing in modern high-end boards. 

If you’re a keyboard connoisseur, a good dose of lube is fast becoming something expected—rather than a luxury extra—as it can lead to a silky smooth action. Yep, it’s 2024 folks, and keyboard nerds are the cool kids now. Your time has come.

Wooting has been lubing its switches for some time, but now it’s posted a tweet confirming…

Start saving, because Intel’s 14th Gen CPUs are reportedly launching in just a few weeks-

Intel’s 14th Gen CPUs are quietly but quickly approaching their launch date. We know they’re refreshes, so we have a very good idea of what to expect. Still, there will be plenty of interest in Intel’s latest wares.

That launch is not quite imminent, but it’s close. According to Videocardz, the 14th Gen Raptor Lake Refresh range will kick off on October 17, with reviews to come a day earlier, on October 16.

Over the past few years, Intel has kicked things off with the launch of K models, and it looks like this launch will be no different. We can expect the i9 14900K, i7 14700K and i5 14600K and their iGPU-less KF counterparts to come first, with 65W non-K models to follow later. CES in early January would be a safe bet as it was with the 13th Gen models earlier this year.

The Mario movie is the highest grossing videogame movie ever, knocking Warcraft off the top spot-

It’s official: at nearly $678 million in takings so far, The Super Mario Bros Movie is the biggest grossing videogame movie adaptation of all time (as well as the biggest grossing movie of 2023)—as reported by The Numbers. And given that it’s only been out a couple of weeks so far, you can expect that number to climb to even more unassailable heights before its run is over.

That’s a very healthy lead over its closest competitors, including former number one Warcraft at $439 million (despite a very lukewarm reception in the US, that one was a huge success overseas) and Detective Pikachu at $433 million. You’d think the number four spot would be one of the Sonic movies, but no—it’s Rampage at $428 million, a movie I’m convinced no one on earth could recall the plot of in…

Join me as I build a wicked gaming PC for ~$1,000 out of Prime Day sale parts-

This rhythm game just became one of Steam’s worst games of all time-

It’s very rare for a game to be so dire that it earns a single-digit rating on Steam. It certainly happens, though, as proven by O2Jam Online’s release last week. The rhythm game is currently sitting on a 4% rating, with only around 41 of its 1,000+ reviews recommending it.

It’s a pretty justifiable reception, too. The series has been largely dead for a while. It originally appeared as a PC game in the 2000s, with all of its public servers being closed down by 2012. Dedicated fans have been setting up private servers since then, and a mobile version attempted to revive the series some years later. So when the announcement for O2Jam Online came out of relatively nowhere, it was a pleasant surprise. My own friends were hyped to see classic rhythm games returning, and hopes were high…

Wait, again- War Thunder fans just can’t help themselves when it comes to posting sensitive military documents-

As reported by Aerotime, on January 18 user RanchSauce39 on the War Thunder forums shared scans of an operations manual for the F-15 Eagle fighter jet, data that is potentially against US law to disseminate, in the course of a long forum thread about the history of the vehicle and its performance in the long-running military simulator. 

This incident is not to be confused with that time in July 2021 when a War Thunder player posted classified documents related to the British Challenger 2 tank to the forums, the brisk morning in October 2021 when a War Thunder forum goer shared classified documents related to the French Leclerc Serie 2 main battle tank, that astounding day last June when a wayward child of God dropped classified deets on the Chinese DTC 10-125 125mm anti-tank …

44 years later, Atari’s making a new Lunar Lander game-

Whisper it, but decent things are once more happening at Atari. OK OK, it’s got a bizarre interest in the blockchain (though hardly alone in that) and dreams up hotels that will never exist, but under the stewardship of CEO Wade Rosen the onetime colossus is gradually remembering it used to be more than a t-shirt logo: the recent 50th anniversary collection the perfect illustration of why.

A theme of Rosen’s tenure has been returning to the back catalogue, either for remasters or in some cases new versions, and now here we are with the announcement of a new game based on an arcade cabinet from 1979. Lunar Lander was Atari’s first vector graphics game and came from a decade-old lineage of early sims all about, well, landing on the moon. That’s the whole game: y…

Worlds Collide, Brands Collab- Marvel is coming to Magic- The Gathering-

The endless parade of incongruous Magic crossovers continued today with news that Marvel, the purveyor of movies, television shows, comics, videogames, and other popular media that you simply cannot get away from, is coming to Magic: The Gathering.

Comic book superheroes may not seem like a natural fit for a fantasy-based card game, but it’s really more about mass marketing than narrative cohesion: Hasbro, parent company of Magic publisher Wizards of the Coast, said its collaboration with Marvel will see the creation of “collectible products and tentpole sets” of cards for Magic: The Gathering. It’s done similar crossovers with Fortnite, Stranger Things, Street Fighter, Warhammer 40K, The Lord of the Rings, and other multimedia giants.

“We are extremely proud to collaborate …

Unsurprisingly, the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X don’t seem to be selling very well right now-

The recently launched AMD Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X have been the subject of much… apathy? Indifference? Underwhelm? Take your pick. The epitome of these Zen 5 architecture chips has probably been the whole “Zen 5%” meme, referring to a mere 5% (or thereabouts) increase in performance. It’s not that these new chips are bad—far from it—they’re just not good enough for the cost. 

It’s of little surprise, then, that we hear they’re not selling all too well—at least if Mindfactory’s sales numbers (via TechPowerUp) are anything to go by. At the time of writing, the website says that “over 20” 9600X SKUs and “over 30” 9700X SKUs have been sold.

There are many possible reasons for these low sales numbers. For one, it’s only a few days si…

Wordle today- Hint and answer #877 for Monday, November 13-

Skip straight to the best bit and win today’s Wordle in record time—the answer to the November 13 (877) puzzle is never more than a cheeky click away. Or if you’d like guidance rather than a quick victory, keep on scrolling and you’ll find a clue written just for today’s game, as well as general tips and tricks designed to boost every guess you ever make.

I did well enough today—a win in four is fine, if not anything worth shouting from the rooftops. But I still managed to make a fool of myself when I was one guess away from today’s answer and had the majority of the word filled in. It was right there, plain as day, and I somehow still spent far too long wondering what on earth I was supposed to add to this mysterious word to win. 

Wordle tod…

Witcher author Andrzej Sapkowski says Netflix ‘never listened’ to his ideas, and as for the games ‘I have no time for this’-

Andrzej Sapkowski’s got a new Witcher book on the way, which means he’s out and about being his usual scorchingly, wonderfully honest self on the interview circuit. Most recently, he’s been at Vienna Comic Con, where he chatted with Austrian gaming website Cerealkillerz about writing (don’t do it), videogames (he doesn’t play them), and the Netflix Witcher TV series (they didn’t listen to him).

“Maybe I gave them some ideas,” Sapkowski said when asked if he ever gave Netflix feedback on the show, “but they never listened to me.” Emitting what I can only describe as a kind of cackle, Sapkowski repeated “they never listen,” before giving an impression of a Netflix exec irritatedly asking “Who’s this? It’s a writer, it’s nobody,” and dismissing Sapkowski with an airy wave of the hand…

Your RTX 40-series GPU will face its biggest challenge yet next month-

At GDC, CD Projekt Red is showing off the future of ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077, one bouncing neon light at a time. It’s set to arrive with a new graphics preset, Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode, which will come to the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077 on April 11. This gives you enough time to track down an RTX 4080 and its powerful frame-generating magic. You’re going to need it.

In what Nvidia calls a “technology preview,” Overdrive Mode will feature path tracing, aka full ray tracing, announced last year, that’ll “accurately simulates light throughout an entire scene.”. Light sources will now cast “physically correct soft shadows,” and colored lighting will bounce multiple times in a scene. In a game like Cyberpunk that’s drenched with neon lights, it’ll create more realistic direct …