This morning, Epic Games remodeled Fortnite: Battle Royale’s map, an island death zone masked with lush greenery and quaint little towns. The updated map includes a half dozen new points of interest that are joyful to play, and also, boost the pace of each game. Fortnite, which has been downloaded over 40 million times, is…
The card game Android: Netrunner does not feel like a game. Jacked into its system, Android: Netrunner’s thorny mechanics melt away until all that’s left are electric impulses in my brain interfacing with my opponents’. It becomes a stylish dance of psychology. Android: Netrunner is not a new card game, but it’s the most captivating…
Everybody I know who plays Overwatch’s pistol-slinging cowboy McCree is coveting the digital skin worn by Do-hyeon “Pine” Kim, the world class McCree pro who stole everybody’s heart last week in his debut Overwatch League match. It’s a dreary blue skin repping New York’s Excelsior team but wearing it is aspirational. If I dress like…
A Canadian man is facing federal charges after allegedly flooding over 1,000 Twitch channels with 150,000 spam messages early last year. The messages, which included racial and antisemitic slurs, spurred the British Columbian supreme court to issue a criminal charge for “mischief in relation to computer data” in early December, CBC reports. He could face…
A horde of pirates is undermining Patreon’s financial structure, reposting paywalled pornographic images on an illicit website for free. The makers of these images are furious that internet denizens are putting their livelihoods in jeopardy to score free porn. Yiff.Party has been around since July, 2015, but has picked up speed exponentially in recent weeks.…
Kayla “Mew2Queen” Mackay was one of five players who won a fan vote to play Super Smash Bros. Melee in Genesis 5, a major tournament in Oakland, and the first to receive full funding. For Mackay, who plays as Marth, it should have been a huge moment. But in response to her nomination, Melee players…
After just a year, Amazon has gutted its hard-to-loveanime service Anime Strike, rolling the dozens of anime shows and movies Anime Strike offered into Amazon Prime’s general offerings. Reached for comment, an Amazon representative told Kotaku, “We have decided to move the curated catalogs of Anime Strike and [Bollywood channel] Heera into Prime Video so…
Your bread-and-butter Dungeons & Dragons party won’t include a manticore, a gargoyle, a hyena or a sentient fungi, but maybe it should. One D&D player spent a year and a half converting every single creature in the D&D Monster Manual into playable characters, and now players can live out their dreams of being a great…
Hero shooter Paladins is adding a new battle royale mode called “Battlegrounds,” an entirely unique addition that by no means is meant to reference any other game. Paladins already looks a lot like Blizzard’s blockbuster first-person shooter Overwatch. Its all new game mode, showcased by a song that sounds a lot like 2002’s “Headstrong” by…
Are you the next Dr. Disrespect? Are you the best Rocket League player you know? Is your incessant couch commentary so entertaining to your gaming friends that they’ve asked you to never, ever stop? Probably, then, you’ve thought about streaming on Twitch. It can look a little complicated if you’re watching professional streamers go ham…
There was a great flood of anime in 2017. Of that torrential downpour, five different shows were the rocks I held onto as wave upon wave of trash broke over me. And those five anime series are some of the best I’ve seen in years. Throughout 2017, we shared our favorite new shows of the…
Should Nintendo be looking at releasing an N64 Classic? Yes, if this year’s sales of the original 64-bit hardware are anything to go by. Sellers of vintage gaming hardware said they noticed a boom in Nintendo 64 sales this holiday season, a shift away from the previous generations of consoles that Christmas shoppers had coveted…
My game of the year for 2017? Obviously Overwatch. Oh—sorry. *Puts finger to earpiece*. That came out last year? Well. Hm. In all honesty, I’ll echo the “2017 was a stellar year for games” consensus. This was a year for experiments that worked and exceeded expectations. So many games blew me out of the water.…
A Frankfurt, Germany man who lost his Nintendo Switch at one of the busiest airports in the world was reunited with his console in mere hours after posting about it on Reddit. Juan, who asked that we not use his last name, was looking forward to whiling away the time on his flight with Floor…
Ask veteran gamers whether it’s possible to get too hooked on a game and they might have stories of a World of Warcraft raiding buddy who used to pee in a can that lived next to his Alienware tower. Or they might confess they got so into their Zelda: Breath of the Wild playthrough that…
Hooray—you got an Xbox One X for Christmas. And instead of dwelling on the sentimental value of the 2013-minted Xbox One you’ve shared so many memories with, you’re ready to toss it in a landfill and move onto your new, 4k life. Here’s the thing, though: Old consoles aren’t like your Pablo Honey Radiohead t-shirt…
It’s days into your family vacation and you’ve run out of things to talk about. Your brother has hashed out all the hometown gossip, and you and your father have dutifully avoided talking politics—all that’s left to do is watch the Food Network and eat leftovers. It’s this situation that board games were made for.…
Winter vacation is for binge-watching anime. It’s what you’re probably going to do anyway between family meals and sleeping, so let’s just be honest with ourselves. [This article was originally published 12/27/2016.] Binge-watching isn’t for the faint of heart. Tearing through 12 episodes of Madoka Magica does not constitute a binge. Rapid-firing 700 episodes of…
What’s that adorable little Inkling is posing with? Why, yes, it is a champagne gun that spews bursts of ink. Splatoon 2‘s latest weapon, in the style of our favorite holiday bubbly, shoots more pressurized ink after the player holds down ZR.
Nintendo’s carnivalesque boxing game Arms, released in June, just received what looks like its final content update. Arms 5.0 just dropped along with the new fighter Dr. Coyle, the “empress of the ARMS lab,” and was appended by an announcement that, from now on, Arms will only be receiving balance patches. “As a big update,…
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