For the past week and a half, Twitch star Ludwig Ahgren has been on the clock. Whether asleep, awake, or drowsily somewhere between, Ahgren has kept his stream running to fulfill the terms of a “subathon” where every subscription adds ten seconds to a timer. So far, he’s pulled in nearly $500,000. He says, however,…
A blue car pulls up to a stop sign. Against all odds, it briefly, miraculously comes to a halt. Twitch chat goes ballistic. Numerous people spam “I was here” as pogchamp emotes flood in. This is Stopsigncam, a Twitch channel that suddenly has over 125,000 followers even though it’s just a camera trained on a…
Do you want to turn your Valheim character into a chimera creature with a skyscraper torso and legs that resemble a barstool? Me neither, but, uh, now you can! An0nymooose’s “BoneMod” (via Rock Paper Shotgun) lets you customize the scale of your character’s bones via in-game chat commands. Whereas normally, Valheim character creation is a…
Yesterday, a shooter opened fire at the King Soopers store in Boulder, Colorado and killed 10 people. Not long after the attack, a streamer, Dean Schiller, arrived on the scene and broadcast to an audience that topped out at nearly 30,000 concurrent viewers. The resulting video has been viewed over 650,000 times. Despite the visible…
I have a complicated relationship with Genshin Impact. I adore its vast, lovingly handcrafted world and charming characters. I hate how its intertwining systems whisper to me in a million different voices: “Spend money.” But there’s no denying that the system works; to date, I’ve probably spent around $60 on the technically free game. Now,…
Video games are expensive. They have been expensive for a very long time, and they keep getting more expensive. To an extent, it makes sense: Game developers need to eat! But after a certain point, it gets excessive. Loot boxes, gacha, and now NFTs are signs of that excess. On this week’s Splitscreen, we talk…
Look at that smoke! Holy smokes, that’s some good smoke. This smoke—some of the best I’ve seen in a game—is brought to you by Teardown, a heist game where everything is destructible. It rules. Yesterday on Twitter, developer Dennis Gustafsson trotted out his intangible Mona Lisa like it was no big deal. “A lot of…
Today, Twitch banned and de-partnered Ali “Gross Gore” Larsen, a longtime streamer and subject of controversy, after sexual assault allegations old and new came to light last weekend. Allegations emerged after the 28 year-old Larsen, who’s been suspended by Twitch numerous times over the years, made a post on the RoastMe subreddit on Friday. This…
As part of today’s Square Enix showcase, the publisher showed another snippet of its “narrative-driven adventure set in a beautiful yet cruel world,” Project Athia. Only it’s not called Project Athia anymore. Now it’s, uh, Forspoken, a name that, if nothing else, was not previously spoken for. Forspoken will be out in 2022. Last year,…
While playing Valheim the other night, a friend and I spent an ungodly amount of time digging a trench and physically pushing Greylings through it, into a house, so they could be our pets. It was fiddly, sometimes infuriating work. Also, deeply unethical. If we had this mod, it would have at least been easier.…
Ludwig Ahgren, a Twitch streamer with nearly 2 million followers, has never been one to shy away from stunts. His latest is especially audacious, albeit probably not great for his long-term health: He’s running a “never-ending” marathon stream powered by subscriptions. Each subscription adds another 10 seconds to the total amount of time he’s required…
It might be an understatement to say that popular Minecraft YouTuber and streamer George “GeorgeNotFound’’ Davidson had a weird weekend. Within two days, he got banned from Twitch, possibly un-banned, definitely banned again, and unbanned (again?). Why? “Harassment via username,” according to Twitch. Problem is, the only person he could have possibly been harassing was…
Somehow, horrifyingly, it has been nearly a full year since most of us went into lockdown to wait out covid-19. And while there is a light at the end of the tunnel in the form of a slowly, confusingly distributed vaccine, we’re still in the thick of it. On this week’s episode of the Splitscreen…
The question at the heart of this week’s incessant NFT debate is one of ownership: How, in the digital age, can one really own anything? And when somebody purchases a glorified gif or jpg for mind-boggling amounts of money, what do they even own? Not rights. Not the sole copy of the image. So what?…
Last month, the entirety of Texas ground to a halt after a colossal winter storm pushed the state’s cordoned-off power grid to the brink. Power and heat outages, as well as resulting food and water shortages, led many businesses to temporarily shut down. This included a large number of Texan video game studios. Of those…
You know how Valheim has spooky little mounds that spawn infinite enemies? And you know how you can use your hoe to move earth around and create, say, a pillar? And you know how it’s possible to surround that pillar with, say, fires? And build, say, a fence around all of that? You can probably…
It is one thing to give Doom’s Cacodemons legs. That’s a felony, at least. It’s another to identify the specific, worst-imaginable legs they could possibly have and then, heart and mind heavy with that knowledge, unleash it upon the world. That’s exactly what modder The Kinsie has done, for some reason. As part of their…
There’s elaborate performance art, and then there’s what renowned Twitch jester Jerma did over the weekend. In a truly inspired stream, he parodied the recent Pokémon booster pack craze by going out into the Nevada desert and pretending to excavate a chest seemingly full of unopened Pokémon cards from 1997. They turned out to be…
Survival is a term you hear a lot in video games, but what does it actually mean? For some, it’s all about crafting and base building. Or eating and sleeping. Or razing other people’s bases in the cold, cruel night. For others, it might mean a totally different genre—like survival-horror—or, curveball, The Sims. It’s a…
CodeMiko is nervous. I can tell because she tells me. “This is, like, my first interview ever,” she says over a Discord call. “I’m sorry, I’m a little shy.” It’s December of 2020, and Miko’s entire life is about to change. Miko does not know it yet. She is, after all, not a fortune teller,…
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