Down in the cavernous cellars of Château Guillard, it’s just me—playing as Mei—and an enemy Soldier 76. I freeze him, but at the last second he throws down an HP-restoring biotic field, negating much of my hard work. I freeze myself to heal, as well. Then, with our safety nets gone, we dart, dodge, and…
Hey, remember when Blizzard callously killed the “Battle.net” name, a beloved moniker for its online service in games like StarCraft, Diablo, and Overwatch that dates all the way back to 1996? Well, the blue giant has now decided to un-kill it. In a blog post, Blizzard explained that it’s forcing us to ride this rollercoaster…
Watching this video of an army of Crash Bandicoots leaping at a man who has a gun but is unable to escape the screams—oh god, the screams—it strikes me that what’s considered scary in the year 2017 is very different from what frightened us back in ‘90s, when the original Doom first came out. The…
There’s no such thing as a happy ending—at least, not for everybody. Warning: this article contains Pyre spoilers. Go to any story-driven game’s forum, and you’ll come across multiple threads asking the same thing: “How do I get the best ending?” Who, they ponder, should they rescue, backstab, and/or have sex with to avoid producing…
Blizzard is launching a “global diversity and inclusion initiative” aimed at raising the percentage of women and underrepresented minority groups in its workforce and improving the work environment for those groups, according to an internal company email recently received by Kotaku Only 21 percent of Blizzard employees are women, wrote company president Mike Morhaime in…
For the longest time, Blizzard has been staunchly against the idea of deathmatch modes in Overwatch. It’s a game about teamwork and objectives, after all. Deathmatch has a way of drastically de-prioritizing both of those things. Now, though, the dev team has had a change of heart. In a new video, Jeff “From The Overwatch…
Games have been letting us play as soldiers and combatants for decades, but there’s far more to war than fighting. Popular war shooter Arma III’s upcoming “Laws of War” DLC will let you play as part of a new faction, the International Development & Aid Project (IDAP), and will introduce scenarios based on International Humanitarian…
Terrible news, everyone: professional doof McCree, a fake cowboy who can’t even quote a more famous fake cowboy correctly, got hot. The Overwatch community is struggling with this sudden and confusing development. Yesterday, Blizzard updated Overwatch with a new Summer Games event that includes a bunch of themed skins, among them a lifeguard skin for…
When Valve first announced that it was taking a long-overdue crowbar to Steam Greenlight and replacing it with a new system called Steam Direct, people weren’t sure what would happen. Some thought Steam was about to get more exclusive again. Others feared that Valve was only widening the floodgates. Now we’ve got numbers. Since Steam…
Skrollox and his friends were playing a PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds squad match when they encountered an odd sight: roughly 20 enemy players prancing down the street. In their underwear. This would normally be cause for concern. After all, it’s technically against the rules for players to form alliances with folks outside their squad. Also, the whole…
I went into Hellblade expecting another fast, fun action romp from the folks at Ninja Theory, who previously made Enslaved and DmC: Devil May Cry. After playing for about 20 minutes, I had to put the controller down. I was so stressed out that I couldn’t take it anymore. Minor Hellblade spoilers ahead. It was…
Remember sexy skateboard Geralt? From the beach and also your dreams? Yeah, well you can play basically as him in The Witcher 3 now. Geralt of Rivia’s Pro Witcher 3 mod imbues Geralt with the ability to slide—ala when you’re coming down a steep hill or mountain—everywhere. Oh, did I mention the ludicrous speeds? Because…
As one astute observer on Reddit pointed out, South Korea’s Overwatch World Cup team hasn’t just deviated from the meta; they’ve used nearly every hero in the game. Even Hanzo Going into Blizzard’s big, multi-national bash, South Korea was a heavy favorite, but I’m not sure anybody expected them to clean up to this degree.…
Derek Yu’s platformer roguelike Spelunky is quietly one of the most influential games of the past decade. Now he’s back with a team of indie standouts, and they’ve collaborated to make 50 new games with a twist: the story is that they were created by a fictional company in the ‘80s that was “obscure but…
I opened my “eyes.” I was a baby dakotaraptor striding behind my parents with my siblings, like a flock of ducks. My parents would hunt and provide for me, I thought. Nurture me until I was strong enough to fend for myself. Maybe even love me, in their own simplistic dinosaur way. About a minute…
In the year 2017, games either die in obscurity, or they live long enough to see players spending $486.93 on a purple mini-skirt. This week, the wildly popular online shooter PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds added a handful of paid cosmetic items as a “test” of a key and crate system that’ll be added to the game when…
Tacoma’s space station corridors, seemingly cold and barren, are alive with story. You can explore them to your heart’s content, piecing together a tale about the station’s crew—and much more. Or you can just stand around and do nothing, if you want. Your character, Amy Ferrier, is a corporate contractor responding to a distress call…
“There’s nothing worse than getting stream sniped,” streamers said a mere week ago. Oh, how naive they were. The latest major update for PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds added, among many other things, car horns. Suddenly, as though exposed to a moon stone, stream sniping—the practice of watching somebody’s stream of a game and using it to gain…
Pyre, the new game from the creators of Bastion and Transistor, is full of difficult choices. This, however, is easily the roughest. What will you do? Please vote, you guys. This is really important. A dog’s mustache hangs in the balance.
Stand-up comedy can be a fraught profession. If you’re not knocking the audience dead after a minute or two, you’re dying up there. Sometimes, you even get hecklers. If, however, you think you’re funny enough to do stand-up on the internet, where everyone’s a heckler, Comedy Night might be up your alley. Comedy Night is…
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