Cecilia D'Anastasio

How To Get Decent At Overwatch

Overwatch is a very approachable first-person shooter, but if you’ve watched the pros, then you know that the game has a high skill ceiling. How the hell do they do thing with the backline flank and the Pulse Bomb without dying? Surely you want to do that, too, and feel like a champ. (Maybe you…

Tabletop role-playing game Pathfinder recently announced its second edition ten years after Paizo published its first. “We can do a much better job now than we did 10 years ago,” Paizo said. Paizo hopes to make the Core Rulebook more approachable, streamline combat and include more art. Playtesting begins August 2nd.

Players Are Putting Fortnite‘s New C4 Explosive To Good Use

Fortnite’s new remote minesare incredible fun, unless, of course, you’re on the other end of one. Released last night, the C4 mines are inspiring strategies that take down huge player-made buildings and wreck existing zones in exciting battles for area control. Detonating a C4 mine is simple. I’ve picked them up in packs of 4…

Woman Stabs Boyfriend With Katana, Citing Cheating And Too Much PUBG

Police arrested a Washington state woman earlier this month after she stabbed her boyfriend with a Japanese-style sword purchased at the mall. She told the police that she stabbed him because she believed that he was cheating on her, and also because he played too much PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds Barber Emily Javier, 30, had been living…

Haunting, but whimsicalWorld War II anime movie In This Corner of the World, which saw a limited U.S. theatrical release last year, is on Netflix today. It’s very, very good.

Self-Appointed Anti-Boob Police Are Trolling Twitch Streamers

According to some Twitch streamers, vigilante viewers are making a sport of trolling through the streaming platform’s directory and searching for broadcasters violating Twitch’s terms of service. She Snaps was streaming to a couple hundred viewers in Twitch’s IRL section when a stranger wandered in. Chatting with her fans about mental health, She Snaps, who…

Junkrat Sucks

The worst feeling in a first-person shooter is having absolutely no idea why you died. Overwatch took that feeling, compressed it into a small Australian man, and armed it with grenades. Junkrat is Overwatch trash. Every game against him turns Overwatch’s impeccably-designed maps into booby-trapped dumpsters overflowing with exploding little Junkrat shits. As his teammate,…

New Overwatch Fan Animation Shows Dva As An Irredeemable Jerk

Overwatch is a game that demands respect, or at least, a little reverence. That’s why Dopatwo’s profane and ungodly Overwatch parodies are so righteously funny. No hero escapes with their dignity. Dopatwo is a YouTube channel featuring animations about games like Dota 2 and Overwatch. Many of the shorts satirize particular Overwatch heroes.Yesterday’s cartoon, “Enemy…

Now That I Own A Car, Burnout Isn’t The Same

I have an early copy of Burnout Paradise Remastered, and I cannot enjoy it. Yes, I have, as EA suggests, sent my car “launching, spinning, and scraping through the city.” I have followed instructions to “smash” through traffic and leave a “very expensive trail of wreckage” in my rearview. And I am playing it on…

Fortnite Players Are Getting Fraudulent Charges For Hundreds Of Dollars

Dozens of Fortnite players say hackers have infiltrated their accounts. Over the last month, players have noticed fraudulent charges of up to hundreds of dollars on their Epic Games accounts. Epic says it’s aware of the problem and is working to resolve it. Tyler, who plays Fortnite Battle Royale, says he received a text message…

Magic: The Gathering Is Getting Some Big Changes

As Magic: The Gathering approaches its 25th anniversary, head designer Mark Rosewater is perched at a crucial point between past and future. The game’s next set of cards will reprise Magic’s classic Dominaria setting, with the game’s original creator Richard Garfield tag-teaming design with Rosewater. But while it looks back, it will also look forward,…

Fortnite Seems To Be Overtaking PUBG 

For a long time, the love affair between PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Twitch looked like it was meant to last. The blockbuster survival shooter captured the hearts of Twitch’s biggest streamers all through 2017, and, in August, finallydethroned Twitch mainstay League of Legends in the “most hours watched” category (73.7 million to 71.9). Now, Battlegrounds is…

I Thought Fortnite Battle Royale‘s ‘Stairway To Heaven’ Would Be A Good Idea

Among Fortnite Battle Royale players, there’s an oral culture of trading tricks: building zig-zag stairways along hillsides, searching every attic for hidden treasure, that sort of thing. It’s not all intuitive. Some things need to be taught. On Sunday, a buddy came over with his laptop and asked if I’d ever heard of Fortnite’s “Stairway…

Yesterday, Overwatch gamedad Jeff Kaplan shared the top ten most played heroes across all skill tiers. Guess what? D.Va’s number one. Also widely played are Moira and Roadhog. The people have good taste.

Fortnite Battle Royale’s $10 Battle Pass Is Nice But Not Essential [Correction]

Games aren’t made for free, so when they’re sold for free, something’s got to give, and a lot of the time, developers’ solutions come off as skeezy or predatory. Loot boxes are passe. And don’t even get gamers started on pay-to-win buffs. Free-to-play survival shooter Fortnite Battle Royale is doing something different, using a crowd-pleasing…

The Switch Apparently Stops Counting Your Play Time After A Year [UPDATE]

Switch users are discovering that the console has reset their logged playtime a year after purchase. Although the Switch didn’t come out in the U.S. until March 3, 2017, players who received Switches prior to then have been noticing an unwelcome surprise next to their Legend of Zelda “Profile” entries. The Switch tracks users’ playtime…

Ubisoft just scooped up the studio that makes free-to-play Smashlike Brawlhalla, amajorly fun platform fighter. It’s Ubisoft’s second acquisition this week after 1492 Studio, which makes mobile visual novels.

Microsoft Says It’s Fixed Xbox Bug That Exposes People’s Real Names [UPDATE]

Xbox users have started to notice an unwelcome surprise: Their first and last names are suddenly visible to other people without their permission, a problem that Microsoft says it is fixing. Redditor Nadia C. says she received a message this morning alerting her that, instead of her Xbox nickname made of emoji symbols, her real…

Overwatch’s Newest Hero Makes Supporting On The Frontline Fun

Overwatch’s newest hero, released onto the test server yesterday, is a well-rounded hybrid character whose extensive skill set is a delight to play, and to play with. She’s the turret-maker Torbjörn Lindholm’s daughter, a born mechanic who, later in life, traveled alongside the shield-knight Reinhardt. Brigitte takes a Reinhardt-like shield, Torbjörn-like armor and a rocket…

The Overwatch–Paladins Clone Wars Continue

Since 2016, hero shooter Paladins has been deflecting accusations that devs copied Blizzard’s massively successful hero shooter Overwatch. Yesterday, in a turning-of-the-tables tweet, Paladins’ president Stewart Chisam side-eyed Overwatch’s newest hero Brigitte for her similarities to the Paladins hero Ash. Paladins developer Hi-Rez Studios has denied cloning Overwatch since Paladins went into open beta in…