The Great Push (TGP) returns alongside the Arena World Championship (AWC) in Season 4. Register today for a chance to become the final champions of Dragonflight ahead of a new age with The War Within™.
08.04.2024 - 16:23 / rockpapershotgun.com / You Can
The deck-fixing roguelikelike poker of Balatro is chuffing excellent, no doubt, but my main criticism has been that the higher difficulty modes are just a bit boring. Having beat them myself, I didn't find them a fun or interesting challenge as much as an annoying one that required too much to go right. I'm glad to hear that they're being tweaked in an upcoming patch, which you can now test in a public beta on Steam, and even the lowest difficulty setting will be tweaked. Other changes include improved (hopefully) Steam Deck performance, balance tweaks, and better Joker-related Tags.
Developer LocalThunk expects to properly launch the patch in a week but you can try it in beta now. LocalThunk shared the 1.0.1c experimental patch notes on Balatro's Discord, which were then reposted to the game's Reddit board for your reading convenience. Many jokers will be buffed or depowered, so do go see what's happening with your favourites (I'll tell you what's happening with your favourite: Gros Michel "now has a 1 in 6 chance to go extinct instead of 1 in 4").
Beyond individual cards, the White Stake (base difficulty level) will become a little easier, reducing the score scaling on Ante (floor, I guess, to use a dungeon crawling analogy) 3 and 4. Climbing the difficulty ranks, Green and Purple Stakes will also reduce scaling on several Antes. Orange Stake will thankfully removing the boring problem of card packs getting more expensive each Ante, and in place give jokers "a 30% chance to have a 'Perishable' sticker, disabling them after 5 rounds." And right at the top, Gold Stake will remove the -1 hand size penalty, replacing it with a 'Rental' system which gives jokers a 30% chance to have a sticker "making them cost $1 up front and $3 every round".
I'll have to play a few hands to see how that shakes out but I like the sound of this approach to difficulty. I'll take fiendish obstacles over reduced options. Escalating prices make you customise your deck less and smaller hands make you play fewer big hands, and those are core to Balatro's fun, so I did find Orange and Gold more boring than challenging.
For me, the most interesting non-Stake balance changes are in reworking the Tags (those rewards you get by skipping non-boss battles) which affect upcoming jokers in the shop. The Uncommon, Rare, Negative, Polychrome, Holo, and Foil Tags will now make their respective jokers free, which is great. Maybe now I'll actually use more of those Tags now. After playing enough Balatro, I've reached the point of only ever taking the Negative one because a Negative joker is almost always useful. It is not worth skipping a battle (and its rewards of cash, a fresh shop reroll, and opportunities to pull tricks) just to
The Great Push (TGP) returns alongside the Arena World Championship (AWC) in Season 4. Register today for a chance to become the final champions of Dragonflight ahead of a new age with The War Within™.
Yesterday was a sad day for 3DS and Wii U players as the online services went down for both of them. This is something that sadly happens with each console as they get older and age, especially with Nintendo – it just seems to always happen way too soon. With the Nintendo Switch already almost a decade old, we knew we’d watch the other consoles fall before a new one could go live, hopefully in 2025.
It's truly the end of an era for Nintendo fans, as online services for 3DS and Wii U have finally shut down. With it, we say goodbye to online multiplayer for the likes of Splatoon, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, Pokemon X and Y, and Xenoblade Chronicles X, with everything shutting off for good at 5pm PT/8pm ET yesterday (or 1am GMT this morning for UK folks).
Buckshot Roulette is simple, and simply unsettling. Sat across the table from a mysterious opponent clad in a deeply unnerving toothy mask, you pick up a shotgun loaded with shells. Then, you decide whether to point the gun at your opponent or yourself, and pull the trigger. Some of the shells are live, and others are blanks. Guess correctly, and you get to go again.
Windows handhelds like the ROG Ally have specs that put the Steam Deck to shame, but are let down by Windows being terrible as a handheld operating system. So, what if you could have the best of both worlds?
Remember when Redbox or Blockbuster would let you rent some of the newest titles for just a few bucks a day? A new trend has emerged to fill the void left behind by the loss of rental services. Many public libraries have started to collect video games, and it doesn't cost a cent to borrow them.
Roblox allows its players to create and monetise their own creations within its ecosystem. Across the entire breadth of Roblox game makers, a lot of money is made. At the individual level, however, the vast majority of creators making work within Roblox never earn enough to cash out their earnings - and some of those creators are children. This has long led to allegations that Roblox is exploiting child labour, generating huge profits for Roblox Studio and its shareholders in the process.
Goodbye, App Store Suika Game clones. The real thing has finally arrived on iOS for players outside of Japan. Suika Game, the watermelon puzzle game that went viral on Nintendo Switch last year, is available to download for $2.99 on Apple’s App Store, making it playable on iPhone and iPad. The title for the official version is “Suika Game-Aladdin X” and it comes from XGIMI Limited.
RPS was on holiday yesterday, which is fortuitous timing because it was April 1st and it meant we missed all the "jokes" (lies) the games industry likes to spread on that day each year.
I like horror, I like bunnies, I like cool little games. Hey, y'here that, Rental? You're alright, kid. It's a free (free!) little game originally made for 2022's 32bit jam that takes about 20 minutes to play through, wherein you play a child rabbit who has arrived at a holiday cabin with her family. You're the first to head inside and, oop, the door locks behind you. Classic twist. A further twist is that, while Rental is entirely free to download and play, you can buy a supporter zine as DLC to kick some funds to the devs. Noice.
I seriously wanted the headline to be, "Own every Fallout game for less than $23" -- but that's technically a lie and we don't do clickbait here at IGN, right? In reality, you're missing out on some obscure titles (sorry) like Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel on the PS2, but this is the best we've got and it's still pretty damn good for what you're getting.
Swedish indie developer Landfall has released the brand new game Content Warning, keeping in its long-standing tradition of April Fool's Day game releases that brought fans Totally Accurate Battlegrounds and Battle Simulator, among other things.