Culture

Valorant Tournaments Will Have To Turn Off Blood

In a recent blog post detailing their plans for Valorant esports, Riot esports director Whalen “Magus” Rozelle provided a long list of guidelines community organizers will need to follow in their competitions. These include restrictions on event sponsors and a requirement to disable in-game blood. Valorant, despite its fantasy elements, is still very much a…

Selena Gomez Suing Game For $10 Million For Stealing Her Likeness

Selena Gomez has filed a $10 million lawsuit against the companies responsible for Clothes Forever – Styling Game, a phone game that will, by its own account, “allow you to live out all your fantasies and become the fashionista you were born to be!” In reality, it’s a cheap dress-up game that, like most mobile…

Final Fantasy VII Devs Wanted Sephiroth To Feel Like Jaws

Like many things in Final Fantasy VII, the main antagonist Sephiroth is an iconic part of gaming history. He’s a striking, menacing presence throughout the classic roleplaying game. Much of Sephiroth’s reputation has to do with the way the developers took cues from an entirely different piece of media: Steven Spielberg’s 1975 thriller, Jaws During…

Fallout 76’s NPCs Don’t Care About Getting Nuked

This week’s Fallout 76 Wastelanders update added human non-player characters to the game for the first time. Naturally, one of the first things players tried to do was nuke them. Players have been finding all sorts of curious new details in the game thanks to its burgeoning populace, from the return of pizza rolls to…

Destiny 2 Is Getting Its Own Version Of The Olympics

Destiny 2 is getting a new limited-time event called Guardian Games next week. The event will have players try to out-compete one another for the honor of having their guardian class represented in the Tower for the rest of the year. The Guardian Games were teased in this season’s roadmap but didn’t have an exact…

Ask Dr. NerdLove: Should I Ask Out The Worker At Cheesecake Factory?

Hello, all you sexy angels of the Abyss, and welcome to Ask Dr. NerdLove, the only advice column that can help you manage your relationships in real life AND in Animal Crossing We may be under self-isolation and social distancing, but just because life is on pause doesn’t mean that love is too. Sometimes love…

Gamescom 2020 Won’t Happen In Germany, Goes Digital

Gamescom, one of the biggest gaming conventions in the world, won’t be happening in Germany this year. Gamescom 2020 is canceled, its organizers announced today, but a digital version of the event is in the works. “It’s official: unfortunately, gamescom will under no circumstances take place on site in Cologne this year,” the German Games…

How To Lose Friends And Alienate Villagers

The heart of Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the friendships you build with your animal neighbors, each with their own quirks, aesthetics, and personality traits. So when Tom Nook announced that the humble island of Bussy Beach had its very first visitor at our brand new campsite, I was ecstatic. I rushed to the campgrounds,…

How’s It Going?: Improvement Edition

It’s Thursday! It’s very pretty outside where I live, which seems like a cruel joke. Welcome back to our daily open thread. I didn’t get the chance to reply to the comments on yesterday’s thread, but I wanted to share here how much I appreciate them. You all are staying so strong through so much,…

Track: Zettai Zetsumei | Artist: Tokyo Jihen | Album: Ultra C

Crysis Remaster Appears To Be Coming To Major Platforms, Including Switch [Update]

It was there and then it was not there, as multiple people spotted a teaser image on the website for the first-person-shooter Crysis this morning. That teaser promises that a Crysis Remastered will be released for PS4, Xbox One, PC and Switch. Update: It’s official and coming out this summer. The main image hyping the…

Report: Sony Is Making Fewer PS5s This Year Due To Its Price And Not Covid-19

Sources tell Bloomberg that this year, Sony will be producing a lower number of PlayStation 5 consoles. The cause, reportedly, isn’t due to the novel coronavirus covid-19 pandemic, but rather, the hardware’s high price at launch. The console’s technical specs are expected to be reflected in the pricing, Bloomberg added, and there has been speculation…

Looking Out. Taiwan. By Jeremy Lim | Official Site JPGs is a photo peek into wherever gamers might find interesting. If you’re a photographer and have images you want to share, drop us a line

Nathan Drake’s Misadventure

Samuel Smith is an artist at The SPA Studios, creators of Netflix’s Klaus movie. You can see more of Smith’s stuff at his ArtStation page

Riot Tries To Force League Of Legends Player Named Corona To Change His Username

Joao Corona’s League of Legends name had never been a problem in the past. But earlier this month, Riot told him he had to change it to something else if he wanted to keep playing. A year ago many people knew Corona as the overpriced Mexican beer for impromptu beach parties by rich and beautiful…

World Of Warcraft Fan Server Unleashes Days-Long Virtual Plague To Teach Covid-19 Prevention

During a pandemic, illness isn’t the only thing that spreads. Fear and panic set in, leaving room for misinformation to seep into newly formed cracks in society’s foundation. Some people believe that sunlight kills covid-19. Some think that drinking water is enough to keep it at bay. Some don’t know what to believe. In light…

Reno Forced Me To Use Parries In Final Fantasy VII Remake

Shocking though it may be, Final Fantasy VII wasn’t part of my childhood. As such, Remake has given me a great opportunity to learn more about this iconic roleplaying game. I’ve fallen in love with the bumbling members of Avalanche and find the overarching eco-terrorists vs. exploitative megacorp narrative compelling. And now the game is…

18 Months After Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar Has Made Big Cultural Changes

Last fall, nearly a year after the release of Red Dead Redemption 2, top Rockstar executive Jennifer Kolbe sent out an email to staff with a list of bullet-pointed initiatives to improve Rockstar’s culture. Rockstar, the game developer behind Grand Theft Auto and many other highly selling, often controversial games, had been widely criticized a…

Latest Cooking Mama Game Was An Unauthorized Release, Say Creators [Update]

The creator of the Cooking Mama games says it pulled the plug on the latest game, Cooking Mama: Cookstar, over quality concerns. Except the publisher went ahead and released it anyway. Controversy has been swirling around Cooking Mama: Cookstar ever since it temporarily went up for sale on the Nintendo Switch eShop at the end…

How’s It Going?: Zen Edition

We’ve made it to Wednesday. Welcome back to our daily open thread. Yesterday was not a stellar day for me. I made the mistake of reading some articles about what the future could look like, which sent me into a spiral of anxiety and despair. As human brains often do (or at least my brain),…