Chinese Gamer Almost Dies After Gaming Marathon

Long gaming sessions are excruciatingly hard and tiring. They often require a superhuman constitution to endure, but gamers beware, all that stress can lead to terrible things. One gamer in Fuzhou, China had a gaming marathon during the Chinese New Year and is now in the hospital. Thirty-six year old IT administrator Xu Yi spent…

One Way Sony Could Fight Piracy: Load Times

Piracy is bad news! That is, if you are a big game company. If you are a pirate, then, I’m sure, it’s all gravy. But big game companies like Sony are hoping to put an end to that freeloading gravy train. A Sony Computer Entertainment patent from August 2011 that was published this month and…

Pikachu Used To Be Way Cuter (and Fatter)

Pikachu, the iconic Pokémon from Pocket Monsters, looks slightly different these days. Adorable, sure, but not nearly as adorable as in 1997, back when the Pokémon anime first debuted. Not nearly as fat, either. Over the weekend, a thread called “Pikachu in the early days was way too cute” (初期のピカチュウかわいすぎ) appeared on 2ch, Japan’s largest…

This Japanese Popstar Has Truly Insane Gaming Hours

If someone played a video game, any video game, for a couple hundred hours, you’d say, wow, that person must really like that game. If someone played a video game, any video game, for a couple thousand hours, you’d say, woah, that person is hardcore. How about seven thousand hours? Popstar Maki Goto is taking…

Japan Lists Its Favorite Studio Ghibli Flicks from Hayao Miyazaki

Do you have a favorite Studio Ghibli film? You know, the anime house behind such wonderful movies as Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, and Castle in the Sky. In Japan, kids and adults alike love Ghibli films. But is there one Ghibli film—rather, Hayao Miyazaki-helmed Ghibli film—that the country likes best? According to Shunkan News,…

One Of The Most Underrated Racing Games Of Our Time Might Be Making A Comeback

Both the series and the studio kinda lost their way eventually, but for a while there, Bugbear’s FlatOut—which combined ugly racing with brutal damage—was the most interesting thing in racing games. So it’s nice to see them returning to their roots. With what, exactly, I have no idea, this is just a teaser trailer, but…

Sometimes, You Need To Build A Video Game House In The Real World

Death Inc. is an upcoming strategy game where you play as Death. Not the badass one like you see in Darksiders. More like, the one who’s running his business from the basement of his gran’s house. It’s a quaint setting, especially when you consider the fact his “business” – and the aim of the game…

Persona 4’s Chie Is High-Kicking Onto Your Desktop

Oh look. Just in time for my delayed-thanks-to-a-late-PAL-release playthrough of Persona 4 Golden. It’s a terrific figure of Chie, the game’s loud-mouthed ass kicker. She comes with two outfits and glasses, but also a strangely absurd pricetag; ¥9,400 (USD$100) is a lot for a 1/8 scale figure that doesn’t really do anything.

This Is Not A Borderlands 2 Screenshot. It Is, Somehow, Cosplay.

And not even that heavily-photoshoped kind, either. I mean, outside of the obvious effects, that is just one absolutely incredible costume, right down to the smallest detail. It’s a great photo by Jesús Clares, too. It shares the spotlight this week with a bunch of other cosplayers who, whether it be Zelda, Skyrim, Star Wars…

It Will Blow Your Mind To See How Much It Costs To Add ONE New Character To A Fighting Game [Update]

Lab Zero Games, the guys behind 2D fighting game Skullgirls, want to add a new character to the game’s roster. To do this, they’re going to set up an IndieGoGo on February 25. And ask for $150,000 This has, understandably, led to some puzzled looks and unkind words being hurled their way. If all they’re…

Custom Interactive GIFS Will Make/Ruin Your Day

The Gifmelter takes an animated GIF file and can, through the powers of dark magic, transform them into interactive images. Imagine that “moving” part of the file as a paintbrush, and you’re on the right track. It works for any GIF—just bookmark Gifmelter and click on it when you’ve got an image open—but it really…

In The Video Game Alphabet, Link Is Crushed By The Moon

Comic artist Brentalfoss has come up with a video game alphabet that I would buy as a poster in a heartbeat. Oh, it’s available as a poster? Wonderful. Based on vintage child-death catalogue The Gashlycrumb Tinies, the temptation is there to put it on a kid’s wall, even some of these are actually pretty dark.…

Skyrim Mod Videos Look Like A Next-Gen Elder Scrolls Game

It’s one thing to look at screenshots and gape, but video of Skyrim looking like a next-gen game is something else entirely. Austrian PC gamer SkyrimTuner runs a YouTube channel where all he does is post footage of the game running with all kinds of mods, sometimes with over 150 going at once. It’s basically…

No, the Government is Not Paying $1 Million for People to Play Video Games

Did you know the government is spending $1.2 million to pay people to play World of Warcraft? I didn’t either! Maybe that’s because it ain’t true, but truth is a relative thing when you’re one of the assclowns leading an intellectually bankrupt legislature that can’t go two months without a self-inflicted hostage crisis. That describes…

Mojam is over; you may download the nine titles it spawned—like Endless Nuclear Kittens and donate here until March 2.

Watch the Oscars pre-show from your console. Xbox Live Gold subscribers get the AP’s red carpet coverage beginning at 6.

Ready for Some Football? On the PS4, Not Really …

David Halberstam was killed in a car wreck the day I bought my Xbox 360. I don’t mean to trivialize the death of a great writer—October 1964 is one of my favorite books, in any subject—but it’s God’s honest truth that his death is the only reason I remember anything about the day. The rest…

What If Sony Hired Leonard Nimoy to Pitch the PlayStation 4—in 1981?

Hats off to IGN for making the past into a prologue with this PlayStation 4 hype video demake starring a pornstached Leonard Nimoy from 30 years ago. My God, I think the last time I heard that opening synthesizer anthem was in a Raycom highlight show before Maryland and Duke played in the 1984 ACC…

The Week in Games: Brütal Retürn

You know it’s a slow cycle when Brutal Legend—remember that?—makes its PC debut, nearly five years after it came out on console. Star Wars Pinball, DLC for Borderlands 2 and Skyrim (on PS3) round out the week’s highlights. Monday • Dungeonland Dungeon Maestro Grimoire Pack (PC) Tuesday • Star Wars Pinball (PS3, Vita) • Driftmoon…

Cops Say Dad, Visiting Badly Burned Son, Stole Three Game Consoles From a Hospital

A five-year-old boy playing with a cigarette lighter set his shirt on fire and went to the hospital with serious burns on Wednesday. Cops allege that his father went to the hospital’s family waiting room, and consoled himself with a Wii, PlayStation and Xbox raided from a supply cabinet. Pittsburgh police say that Jim Skursky…