One year ago, two notable events happened in the world of video games. First, on November 12, Sony released the PlayStation 5 in certain markets—its first totally new gaming console in seven years. Then, a few days later, Kotaku assessed the new system’s features, exploring what it would take for the hardware to feel…
Phil Spencer, vice president of gaming at Microsoft, wants the industry to sell more of its older games through legal emulation. There are steep legal barriers to making widespread industry emulation a reality, but it would be a boon to making older games more accessible to players.
Harry Potter: Magic Awakened, a card-based RPG for mobile devices and PC that’s only available in Eastern countries for now, is really popular in China. However, the game is currently attracting attention not for its incredibly successful launch, but for a hilariously unfortunate “bug” that’s bolstering its online…
Last month, leaked images showing a platform fighting game featuring Warner Bros.-owned fictional properties including Batman and Steven Universe made the rounds. Today, WB Games confirmed the game, titled MultiVersus, in a trailer. And you know what? Unlike the name, it doesn’t look so bad! See for yourself:
Microsoft has announced updates to Halo Infinite’s battle pass ahead of schedule, following widespread backlash at how it awards XP. While it won’t address all of the underlying criticisms, these new tweaks will definitely make the grind a little more palatable in the weeks leading up to the game’s full December 8…
The park I’ve been cultivating in Springloaded Games’ Let’s Build a Zoo currently houses two lions. One is actually someone’s lost dog that we dressed as a lion. The other is a robot made out of dead animals that saves me money by not having to eat or drink. One could argue that my zoo actually houses zero lions, but…
Elden Ring’s recent closed network test served as a fantastic sneak peek at From Software’s upcoming Dark Souls successor. There were menacing bosses to fight, unique dungeons to explore, and vague bits of lore to deduce, but the absolute best part of the whole experience was how I found my way to a small, uninhabited…
Recorded in 1984, “Plastic Love” is the song that continues to make comeback after comeback. This month, well over three decades after its original release, the song’s full-length official video was finally uploaded to YouTube. According to Warner Music Japan, its re-issued 12-inch single also broke the country’s top…
One of the most interesting-looking games announced in 2021 was Pragmata. The debut trailer was so baffling that some mistook it for a Hideo Kojima production. That is not a bad thing! Pragmata was supposed to be out in 2022, but today, Capcom announced that the game has been pushed back to 2023.
Forza Horizon 5 is fun as hell, but I think the main reason it seems so much more popular than the last entry is how it looks. Not in terms of the number of polygons on the screen, but just the vibe of it.
Activision Blizzard has had a nightmarish 2021, with historic allegations of harassment causing enormous upheaval at the company, several high-profile lawsuits and the departure (or firings) of many key executives and developers. You would think that this mess would fall at the feet of the company’s CEO Bobby Kotick,…
Nine days after Rep. Paul Gosar tweeted a now-deleted Attack on Titan-themed video of himself and his Republican colleagues killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and President Joe Biden, the House of Representatives voted to censure Gosar and remove him from his two House committee appointments. This marks the first…
With its manga counterpart surpassing a thousand chapters and a live-action Netflix series coming, One Piece, one of anime’s longest-running shonen series, will make franchise history this week with the premiere of its 1,000th episode. The landmark episode will stream on Funimation and Crunchyroll on November 20.
As the wider gaming world reacts to yesterday’s latest wave of allegations against senior figures at Activision, including the reigning world champion of hubris-before-a-fall, CEO Bobby Kotick, PlayStation boss Jim Ryan expressed his disappointment at Activision’s response. In an email sent to PlayStation staff, Ryan…
Attorneys representing the four defendants in Take-Two Interactive Software’s copyright infringement lawsuit against a group of Grand Theft Auto modders recently responded to the video game conglomerate’s complaint, flatly denying several allegations of wrongdoing. They also argue that their clients’ work constitutes…
Yesterday, the Twitter account for the livestreaming software Lightstream accused rival streaming software maker Streamlabs of stealing marketing copy from its website. After Lightstream tweeted about how Streamlabs’ website text was modeled on its own, other companies began to corroborate with their own negative…
Reviews have started dropping for Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl on the Nintendo Switch and it sounds like the remakes are a resounding meh. For players hoping for a bit more of a shakeup of the 2007 DS games, that’s a big disappointment. For hardcore fans who will play any new release The Pokémon Company…
Yesterday the folks at whatever counts as Atari these days launched Atari XP, a series of collectible and playable Atari 2600 cartridges featuring homebrew and prototype games never officially physically released. The cartridge collection’s debut was a bit messy, however, incorrectly attributing a 2005 ROM hack of …
Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, a video game from the year of our lord 2005, is currently free to download on the Ubisoft Store. It is also on sale for 75% off on Steam as part of the company’s 35th anniversary celebration. Enjoy your scraps peons, one of the industry’s biggest publishers is now old enough to…
Smart games use smart short-cuts to fool our eyes. Hidden assets. Camera tricks. On-the-fly rendering. Yes, every video game is an exercise in perception, and Nintendo’s Metroid Dread is no exception.
As someone who had been enjoying Genshin Impact’s main story since launch, I wanted to like the core storyline of the game’s Inazuma region so badly. But while it grapples with interesting political and philosophical themes, unfortunately it doesn’t quite land in the execution. Since I didn’t have any attachment to…
Update 11/18/2021 1:18 p.m. ET: Advocacy group ABK Workers Alliance recently published a document signed by 500 employees calling for Bobby Kotick’s removal as CEO of Activision Blizzard.
Not satisfied with the copious Elden Ring content provided by last weekend’s brief, intermittent network tests, players figured out a way to escape the bounds of the demo’s map and explore the lands beyond its limited scope, discovering new aspects of the highly anticipated game along the way.
Cryptocurrency and NFT exchange Crypto.com has announced it’s struck a twenty-year name-licensing deal for the Los Angeles arena, currently known as the Staples Center, in what could be the biggest American venue naming deal ever.
Volition’s Chief Creative Officer Jim Boone has announced that the release of the Saints Row reboot has been pushed back, over quality concerns.
The less-silly Saints Row was scheduled for release on February 25, 2022—a month already packed with games. It will now be released on August 23, 2022.
I wanted to do a Fine Art on Unpacking from the first moment I saw it. But given this is a feature mostly about concept art, that also presented a problem: pretty much everything in the game was drawn first as pixel art, then just lumped straight into the game. Getting hold of work-in-progress stuff that didn’t simply…
NFTs, otherwise known as An Enormous Fucking Scam, are taking root everywhere where someone smells a fast buck and someone else is dumb enough to join them. Which in 2021 is, sadly, a lot of places! So it’s a slight relief, even if it’s only temporary, to see Xbox boss Phil Spencer speak publicly on how wary he is of…
When the hotly-anticipated open world sci-fi RPG Starfield comes out next year it won’t be coming to PS4 or PS5. That’s a fact that seemed obvious the second Microsoft announced it was buying publisher Bethesda over a year ago in a groundbreaking $7.5 billion deal, but it took the Xbox team until just a few months ago…
Yesterday, Microsoft surprise-released Halo Infinite’s multiplayer mode on Xbox and PC—albeit in a beta state—weeks ahead of its planned December 8 target. Feedback thus far is largely in lockstep: Hot damn, this shooter is fun to play, but, um, what’s up with the more-withholding-than-a-rich-parent battle pass? And…
Earlier this year, an email was sent to all employees of Activision Blizzard from the email account of chief compliance officer, former executive sponsor of the ABV Employee Women’s Network, and former torture apologist, Fran Townsend. Sent in the midst of historic allegations of harassment against the company, it was …
Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — Definitive Edition may have shredded some signature tunes from the series’ radio stations, and may, in just about every conceivable way, make the descriptor of “Definitive” sound like a joke, but—at the very least—you can still make an invulnerable, wiggly, and constantly swelling car…
Fandom, the company that now hosts a solid majority of video game and other pop-culture wikis, recently updated its “community creation policy” with a new section stating that it will no longer host pages that contain “fetish” content. Thanks to this policy update, the Monster Girl Encyclopedia Wiki, a compendium of…
Amongst the latest wave of troubling revelations to come out of Activision Blizzard, the Wall Street Journal reports that former exec Jennifer Oneal’s incredibly brief stint as co-head of Blizzard ended due to her being “tokenized, marginalized, and discriminated against.”
Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick claimed to be in the dark about widespread allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination that surfaced at the company earlier this year, but according to a new bombshell report by The Wall Street Journal, Kotick wasn’t just aware of the misconduct, he was also involved in…
Dragon Ball villains Cell, Buu, and Frieza might not be much of a threat to Super Saiyan God Goku With Cheese, but to normal, non-fighting characters they’re downright terrifying. Bandai Namco harnesses that terror in Dragon Ball: The Breakers, an asymmetrical survival game that pits seven non-powered players against…
While Fortnite’s Naruto crossover was teased on Twitter last week, the developers finally confirmed the details of the collaboration today. Starting right now, players can purchase costumes of Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura, and Kakashi from Naruto Shippuden. Yes, at long last, Sakura can make short work of Sasuke with a…
Did you just eek out a nail biting victory in a Big Team Battle Slayer match? Bash a bunch of your fellow Spartans’ heads in with a flaming skull in Oddball? Capture a ton of objectives in Total Control, putting big numbers on the board for all your PVP comrades to see? Halo Infinite’s battle pass does not care. It…
As threatened back in September, the lovable childhood heroes known as the Neopets have turned to the dark side, transformed randomly into a series of non-fungible tokens and sold to folks interested in owning their own small slice of the death of our planet. Of the 10,000 tokens created less than half were purchased,…
It’s hard to believe, I know, but there are other games coming to Xbox that don’t start with Halo and end with Infinite. Over the next two weeks, Microsoft will add 10 more games to Xbox Game Pass. Here’s what’s struck me: I’ve been watching these rollouts like a hawk for several years. For the first time I can…
Dying Light 2 was announced all the way back at E3 2018. A lot has happened in the three years since, including multiple delays and the departure of RPG writer/designer Chris Avellone from the project following sexual harassment allegations. Now set to come out in February 2022 (alongside a bunch of other games) Dying…