Ethan Gach

Former Xbox Executives Say Nintendo ‘Laughed Their Asses Off’ When Microsoft Offered To Buy It

Microsoft once proposed buying Nintendo in order to lock in its first-party games for the Xbox. The Japanese video game company didn’t just decline to entertain the offer; it laughed the tech giant’s executives out of the room, according to a new report by Bloomberg. “Steve [Ballmer, Microsoft’s former CEO] made us go meet with…

The Sinking City Returns To Steam As Legal Battle Between Developer And Publisher Continues

Moody cosmic horror game The Sinking City is now back up on Steam and other digital storefronts following the latest developments in an ongoing legal fight between developer Frogwares and the game’s publishing partner, Nacon, taking place in the Paris Court of Appeal. The Sinking City, an excellent open world mystery game about exploring a…

Slay The Spire Is Being Turned Into A Board Game

The incredibly deep roguelike deck-building RPG Slay the Spire will get the tabletop treatment, board game makers Contention Games recently announced, letting people explore the game’s inventive card battles together in real life. According to Contention’s website, the Slay the Spire board game will allow for up to four players, with rounds taking about 45…

Destiny 2‘s final Season of the Hunt mission is now live. It dropped out of the blue, and it’s called Coup de Grace, sending you on one last hunt to take down the High Celebrant. I hear it’s good, though also quite buggy at the moment.

Conspiracy Theories Drive Developer To Recreate Nancy Pelosi’s Vandalized Garage In VR

After a photo of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s vandalized San Francisco home started circulating online, it didn’t take long for people to call bullshit. Was the graffiti and seeming pig’s blood really the work of outraged leftists, or an elaborate psy-op perpetuated by some right-wing group to delegitimize progressives? Who the hell knows,…

Ice-Pick Lodge, makers of the atmospheric survival horror game Pathologic 2 have announced a new game called Know By Heart due out later this year on PC. Less harrowing and more chill, it’s about exploring life in a quiet Russian town.

Breath of the Wild NPCs Appear To Be Based On ‘Advanced’ Miis

If you’ve ever stared at one of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s random villagers and thought, “Hey, that looks like a Mii,” it could be because the two might be related. Overnight, Twitter user and self-proclaimed Mii expert HEYimHeroic wrote that certain non-player characters in Breath of the Wild are based on…

Sequel-sized expansion The Binding of Isaac: Repentance is out on PC March 31, creator Edmund McMillen announced on Twitter over the weekend. It’s set to come to console sometime later on. 

Super Meat Boy Forever Is Not The Sequel I Was Hoping For

After 10 long years Super Meat Boy is back, this time as an auto-runner in a sequel that channels much of the original except for what I loved most about it: snappy controls and tight platforming. In the year of Spelunky 2 and Hades, it’s a letdown to see Meat Boy return without the key…

Koei Tecmo Shuts Down Forums Following Data Hack

The Japanese publisher Koei Tecmo announced over the Christmas holiday that some personal data from 65,000 users of its English language website was hacked, leading the company to take its US and UK websites offline for the time being. “Within the website operated by KTE, the ‘Forum’ page and the registered user information (approximately 65,000…

Ethan Gach’s Top 10 Games Of 2020

2020 was a shit year for a lot of things, but a bunch of really good games came out during it. And not just your run-of-the-mill, extremely playable, very good games, but a ton of truly special ones. This is another way of saying that I liked a surprising number of games this year that…

The Biggest Video Game Disappointments Of 2020

God, this year sucked. Video games were supposed to be a reprieve from that, and in many ways they were. But in other ways they were just as messy, ill-fated, and broken as the year itself. Some of 2020’s big video game disappointments were minor setbacks or run-of-the-mill annoyances—the type of thing that might loom…

CD Projekt Red Estimates Cyberpunk 2077 Has Sold Over 13 Million Copies, Despite Being A Potato On Consoles

After a week of refunds, apologies, and patches, CD Projekt Red announced yesterday that its open world scifi RPG Cyberpunk 2077 nevertheless sold over 13 million copies total since its December 10 release. This despite the game’s busted performance on last-gen consoles and some low-end PCs, as well as the reportedly overtime-fueled labor conditions that…

Rare Gokus Possibly Lost At Sea After Major Shipping Accident

Goku collectors are left wondering what fate awaits their beautiful sons after a bad storm caused the massive One Apus container ship to potentially lose over $200 million worth of cargo in the Pacific Ocean northwest of Hawaii late last month. The ship was hit by a massive storm on November 30 that, according to…

The PS5 Now Warns You If You’re About To Play The Last-Gen Version Of A Game

After a month of some players accidently playing the older version of new games on their PS5, Sony’s next-gen console now has a feature that fires off a warning if you’re about to load up the PS4 version of a PS5 game. Originally spotted by VGC, the console now asks players to “confirm game version”…

Stardew Valley Just Got Another Massive Update [Update: And It’s Also Out On Console Now]

Pixelated farming sim Stardew Valley continues to grow, this time with a big 1.5 update for PC that adds a bunch of new stuff, including a beach farm map where veteran green thumbs can try their hand at growing crops in the sand. “This update adds some significant ‘late-game’ content to Stardew Valley,” developer Eric…

The Sephiroth Boss Fight Is The Most Fun I’ve Had In Smash Bros. Ultimate In A While

It’s been a rough year for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and me, mostly because with the ongoing pandemic I haven’t been able to play it IRL with anyone. The game’s new limited-time Sephiroth boss fight has helped me fall back in love with it though, by giving me a brief but excellent new single-player challenge…

Report: Cyberpunk 2077 Developers Grill Management Over Crunch, Deadlines, And Poor Launch

Staff at Cyberpunk 2077 studio CD Projekt Red asked tough questions of their leadership at an all-hands video meeting on Thursday, including about mandatory overtime and far-fetched production goals, according to a new report by Bloomberg “Developers asked blunt questions about the company’s reputation, the game’s unrealistic deadlines and the relentless overtime in the months…

Ghost of Tsushima is getting new costumes inspired by other PlayStation exclusives until January 15. Playing Story or Survival missions will unlock outfits from God of War, Bloodborne, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and The Last Guardian

Control Comes To PS5 And Xbox Series X/S With Ray-Tracing In February

Remedy Games’ paranormal office thriller Control will come to next-gen consoles digitally on February 2, followed by a full retail release on March 2, the studio announced on Twitter this morning. The next-gen version of the game will include a performance mode to run at 60 fps on both platforms, while the standard 30 fps…