Cecilia D'Anastasio

Tower defense/shooter Fortnite is getting a horde bash event on October 5th. With unlimited time and limited resources, players will build forts, party up and then defend their bases against waves of husks.

Smash 4 Characters, Ranked By How Annoying They Are

What makes a Super Smash Bros. character annoying? It’s a very specific cocktail of repetitive, invulnerabile, low-effort or spammy moves that, together, make you want to throw your controller at the television Everybody has that one Smash fighter they hate playing against. But one thing I realized after setting out to list the top ten…

Overwatch Hasn’t Felt Quite As Toxic Lately

Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot more “Great ult!” and “Thanks for switching!” in Overwatch than “Get wrecked, you useless piece of s***.” After toxicity in Overwatch’s competitive mode reached critical saturation last season, this season, which began September 1st, has felt markedly more positive. Doom and gloom marked Season 5 of Overwatch’s competitive mode,…

Battlegrounds Players Are Buying A Virtual Bandana For Nearly $1,000

Why invest in Boeing and Bitcoin when you can earn a slick $1,000 from selling a virtual red bandana you got in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds? You can pick one up in Steam’s Community Market, a hub for users to buy and sell in-game items like weapons for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and skins for Rust characters. Right…

Cowboy Bebop Director’s New Blade Runner Anime Is Killer

It was obvious that an anime reimagining of Blade Runner by the director of Cowboy Bebop would be killer, but it surpassed my high expectations. The recent anime short Blade Runner Blackout 2022 is 15 beating kick drum minutes of stoical one-liners, waltzing fight scenes and, because it’s still Blade Runner, philosophical riffs on the…

If you were hoping that Assassin’s Creed: Origins would offer lessons in the history of evisceration alongside its gory adventure, you’re in luck. Today, publisher Ubisoft announced the “Discovery Tour,” which will let players “explore Ancient Egypt and learn about its history from guided tours” without combat, story or time constraints. The free update will…

Striking Voice Actors Didn’t Get Everything They Wanted, But It Was A Start

After a year of striking, countless career sacrifices and some thorny negotiating, the video game voice actors of the Screen Actors Guild‐American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) finally came to a tentative agreementwith the 11 struck game game companies last night. Without some big demands met, it’s easy to consider the tentative agreement…

Fortnite‘s Battle Royale Is A Delight (And A Whole Lot Like Battlegrounds)

The prospect of besting 99 other gamers through sheer resourcefulness and daredevilry is why the battle royale genre has become so compelling to millions of gamers. Survival shooter Battlegrounds now has the second all-time highest concurrent player count on Steam, and today, Fortnite, a multiplayer game about building forts and defending against zombie swarms, just…

Video Game Companies Reach ‘Tentative’ Agreement To End Voice Actor Strike

After nearly a year striking, unionized video game voice actors just tentatively agreed to end their boycott against 11 games companies, a new Screen Actors’ Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) press release said today. Voice actors had demanded residual payments, better protections for their voices and more transparency about what projects they…

Not Everyone Should Be The Driver In Battlegrounds

Anyone asking me to chauffer them around PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds had better be prepared to kiss any of the following things: a large tree, the ground, a wall or a puddle of their own blood. Thankfully, somebody has outclassed my worst Battlegrounds driving moments, and watching them royally blow it in a recent video made me…

I Tried Remaking My D&D Adventure In Divinity: Original Sin 2, And It (Mostly) Worked

Divinity: Original Sin 2 has a mode that lets players design their own Dungeons & Dragons-esque adventure inside the role-playing game, and in case you were wondering what kind of dweeb would port their homebrew D&D game into DoS: 2, the answer is me. My experiment was instructive and, I think, says a lot about…

Some GameStops Refuse To Sell Switches Without Bundles, But GameStop Says That Shouldn’t Happen

At least four GameStops were refusing to sell the Nintendo Switch on its own without a warranty or game attached, Kotaku has learned. And although GameStop’s corporate office says stores shouldn’t be doing that—and that, after being contacted by Kotaku, they have asked those stores to stop—an employee tells us that stores are incentivized to…

A very weird anime called Neo Yokio, which stars Jaden Smith and features Steve Buscemi, Jason Schwartzman, Tavi Gevinson and Jude Law, has arrived on Netflix. I am very skeptical.

Student’s Overwatch Concept Art Is So Good, Even Blizzard Is Talking About It

One Thai computer art student gave the Overwatch community something we didn’t even know we wanted, and now, a lot of us want it very badly. Yesterday, student who goes by RM-Parfait posted a concept design (a project for her Master’s) for a Thai support hero on the Overwatch forumsand, in response, fans begged the Overwatch team…

Games Are Finally Getting The Part Of Me That Grew Up Online

What nostalgia looks like in 2017 isn’t what it looked like at the dawn of video games. The virtual worlds in which we play have long hinged on callbacks to outdoor things, countryside adventures, wooded escapes or play-fighting in the grass. Yes, many of our childhoods were spent in backyard kid gangs, dreaming of brotherly…

Hackers Say Nintendo Switch Contains A Game That Unlocks On The Date Of Satoru Iwata’s Death

When a Switch owner named Setery told a gaming forum about how NES Golf randomly appeared on her Switch’s screen, commenters accused her console of being haunted. Switch hackers’ subsequent race to unearth NES Golf now indicates that there’s a hidden game on the console and, actually, it appears to be a heartwarming tribute to…

Here Are D&D‘s New Official Dinosaur Racing Rules

Dungeons & Dragons’ selling point is that is lets players be and do things they’ve always dreamed of. Dinosaur racing has never been one of those things for me, but if it is for you, D&D’s newest adventure, which launched today, delivers on that very specific fantasy. Tomb of Annihilation is a campaign set on…

Epic Accidentally Allows Xbox And PS4 Cross-Play In Fortnite, Disables It [UPDATE]

Oops, it looks like for a brief few hours PS4 and Xbox One cross-play was available in Fortnite. Now, Fortnite developer Epic Games says that feature was actually a bug, which the studio is referring to as a “configuration issue” that it says it has fixed. Console cross-play opens up games’ player bases so friends…

Sure Looks Like This Guy Won Battlegrounds While AFK

It looks like one ludicrously lucky Battlegrounds player managed to be the last one standing and win the game, all while AFK. In survival shooter Battlegrounds, the playable area constricts around a seemingly random point on the map. The game’s inherent tension is that, to stay alive, players must travel to the playable area, thereby…

Smash Players Thought They Were Friends With A Reclusive ‘God’ Developer, But Now Suspect She Duped Them

Over the course of three years, an impostor convinced the Smash community—as well as her friends, housemates and girlfriend—that she was a reclusive and revered programmer behind the famous Smash mod, Project M, several sources close to the issue say. The supposed impostor, who goes by many names and who we’ll call Katy for clarity,…