After Fortnite Battle Royale exploded in popularity, developers over at Epic Games focused their attention on regular updates that, some players say, has inflated the game with too many items. Sure, some players might appreciate boogie bombs, guided missiles, remote explosives and launch pads, but to players who prefer a more streamlined game, Fortnite has…
Skins uploaded to the official Minecraft site have affected over 50,000 Minecraft accounts with malware, according to a report by security firm Avast. The skins are pretty typical-looking: One’s a yellow suit with a face mask, another’s a blue hoodie getup. In the last 10 days, Avast’s antivirus software has blocked a reported 14,500 attempts…
A super-dedicated Super Smash Bros. Melee player broke a 14-year record yesterday for the game’s “Break the Targets” mode. Break the Targets is a classic Super Smash Bros. minigame in which a character must break ten targets as quickly as possible. Each character has their own moveset and target test layout. Right now, the record…
The long, contentious list of things that divide us—dogs vs. cats, Democrat vs. Republication, ketchup vs. mayo—has an entry just for gamer aesthetes. There’s a war among Discord users over whether people who use the gaming chat app’s “light” theme are wicked, infernal hellbeasts or normal humans who like white backgrounds. Discord’s signature look is…
Blizzard sneakily announced a short Competitive 6 vs. 6 Elimination season for Overwatch’s arcade mode, which lasts until May 7. First team to win three times—that is, eliminate the enemy team—wins. Once a player wins with a hero, that hero is locked for the remaining rounds. Players have wanted this forever
You know the romantic cliche, “We’re so in love, we can finish each other’s sentences”? Last week, Google made a game just like that, except instead of being romantic, it’s a little creepy. Semantrisis a fun, addictive game that asks players to come up with a word that relates most specifically to another word. The…
Last night, as a tornado ravaged Greensboro, North Carolina, a local teen was just staying put trying to survive the storm in Fortnite Battle Royale, he told local news station WXII 12 The 135 mile-per-hour tornado, which prompted a state of emergency, did significant damage to Greensboro homes and has claimed one life. Tens of…
It’s not easy to make the perfect Fortnite fort, especially in the time it takes to save your butt from 360 degrees of bullets. Earlier this week, developer Epic Games gifted port-a-fort grenades to Fortnite players, which instantly spawn glorious defense towers right at players’ feet. Sure seems like a great way to defend yourself…
I never really thought about this, but dinosaurs were kind of OP. That’s probably why they dominated the earth for so long. In a video on the YouTube channel TierZoo titled “Earth’s Worst Balance Patch,” I got to hear why. It’s a video about the Triassic Period, which, he explains, was “an expansion sandwiched between…
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds’ latest patch gives the meditative survival shooter a big, welcome change of pace. Battlegrounds’ blue circle, which progressively makes the playable area smaller, got tweaks to its speed and damage. Now, players who survive longer in Battlegrounds’ death blender will face more interesting survival conditions as they pursue the number one spot. Battlegrounds…
When Overwatch pro Jonathan “DreamKazper” Sanchez followed Anna* back on Twitter, she was in shock. A 16-year-old high school junior, Anna had only just purchased Overwatch for her Xbox One but was sold on the league of charismatic pros championing the blockbuster first-person shooter. The first game she tuned in for was New York versus…
Overwatch got its spring event yesterday, which includes a new player-versus-environment mode where players can take down swarms of killer soldiers in a picturesque, futuristic Venice. Retribution, the new PvE mode, is absolutely the best of its kind yet. It might have players asking why Overwatch can’t get its own story mode already. Retribution is…
Slinky boxing game Arms got a sleek user interface makeover. Its new dashboard makes it easy to find players’ worldwide, regional and Party Crash rankings. Tips, tutorials and tournament clips also feature on the dashboard, so it’ll be handier for Arms players to get a grip.
A new malware locks infected computers’ files unless they fire up PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. Unlike other ransomware, PUBG Ransomware doesn’t want infected users’ money; it just wants them to enjoy a game of Battlegrounds. MalwareHunterTeam first discovered the malware, which BleepingComputer originally reported on. When a computer is infected by ransomware, the software makes its files…
Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether an anime premise was lovingly crafted by humans or assembled by a robot with a list of popular Google search terms. Uma Musume Pretty Derby, one of the most popular anime of the new season, might break the anime Turing test. Uma Musume Pretty Derby, which is real despite…
Overwatch League team Boston Uprising has suspended star player Jonathan “DreamKazper” Sanchez, 21, following allegations that he pursued a romantic and potentially sexual relationship with someone he believed to be a 14- or 15-year-old girl. [Update 4/9/2018, 2:47 PM: The Uprising cut Sanchez today after a second woman accused him of similar behavior. The original article…
Six months after gritty survival shooter PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds’ debut, the cartoony, lighthearted survival shooter Fortnite Battle Royale came along. If Battlegrounds is the pitbull of this genre, Fortnite is the golden retriever. One of its weapons is the “boogie bomb.” There’s a gingerbread man skin and a “bear force one” glider. Lots of kids play,…
Isao Takahata, co-founder of Studio Ghibli and director of such animated films as Grave of the Fireflies, passed away today in a Tokyo hospital at the age of 82, according to various Japanese news sources. Takahata’s distinguished career as a producer, director, and animator began in 1959 when he joined Toei Animation as an assistant.…
When CrackerJess, the wife of my Overwatch buddy CrackerJack*, heard there were no women in the Overwatch League, she was livid. She’d never played a first-person shooter before, preferring Lindy Hop dancing to long computer sessions yelling over a microphone. She had no attachment to the scene, no serious gaming ambitions. What set her off,…
Overwatch’s Mercy is a “support” hero, which in layman’s terms means she’s mopping up trails of blood left behind after Overwatch battles. Mercy’s job is to heal her weak teammates, assisting them as they lay waste to enemies. It’s an apparently subservient job often painted as easy, and therefore, undervalued—that is, unless you’re Hong “Ark”…
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