Cecilia D'Anastasio

Overwatch Director Says Balancing D.Va Was His ‘Low Point’ Of The Year

It’s no secret that Overwatch players are precious about the game’s balance changes. On the internet, fans act as armchair game devs, flooding the Overwatch forums with strongly-worded opinions whenever there’s an unpopular or surprising change. Most recently, the forums overflowed with salt after the popular tank hero D.va received a brutal nerf, making her…

Minecraft Patching Out Controversial Parrot Feeding Mechanic

After a minor controversy, Minecraft will change up the way players tame parrots, VICE Motherboard reports. And while it sounds like the least controversial mechanic in gaming history, the patch was spurned by a Reddit post with 37,000 upvotes that accused the game of potentially endangering real-life parrots. In Minecraft, players feed chocolate chip cookies…

For Honor’s Second Season Adds New Fighters, Maps

Medieval fighting game For Honor’s second season, Shadow & Might, is available on PS4, Xbox One and PC today. Three months post-release, after some pretty damning technical issues, the game is in good shape and getting some anticipated new content. Last month, For Honor’s Viking class emerged victorious in the game’s first season of faction…

In anticipation of Final Fantasy XIV’s upcoming expansion Stormblood, composer Nobuo Uematsu just released the expansion’s theme song. It’s gorgeous.

How To Trash Talk

Trash talking is divisive among gamers. If you go too far, you run the risk of sending your friend home crying and never again playing another round of Mario Party against them. Or, if you’re conflict-averse, a few unsavory words over Madden could make you think worse of your good buddy. Some stand by trash…

Smash Champion Loses First Tournament This Year In Wild Match Against Top Player

Super Smash Bros. Melee champion Adam “Armada” Lindgren lost his first tournament this year against crowd favorite Joseph “Mango” Marquez at yesterday’s Royal Flush tournament in Atlantic City, New Jersey. After it looked like Lindgren would take home #1, Marquez made an adrenaline-fueled comeback that made the audience go wild. Leaving few openings for Marquez’s…

The Five Best Anime Moms

Three cheers for moms. Single moms, cookie-baking moms, strict moms, workaholic moms, martial arts master moms, bike gang moms, wolf child moms and actually-giant-mecha moms—we appreciate you, in life and in anime. And there are some very, very good moms in anime. In celebration of Mother’s Day, we’re honoring our five favorite anime moms. Here…

I Paid Women To Play Overwatch With Me, And It Was Fantastic

Earlier this week, on Fiverr.com, I selected Biu’s “Basic” package which, in exchange for $5, granted me her company for five Overwatch games. In her profile’s image, a helicopter selfie, Biu is wearing a t-shirt with Zelda’s Link and sticking out her tongue. “If you want a good healer,” her gig page reads, “I’m a…

Payday 2 Makers Donate DLC Profits To Help Big YouTubers Fight Legal Battle

It’s not often that game devs raise money for celebrities, but Ethan and Hila Klein aren’t ordinary YouTube stars. Right now, the comedy YouTubers say they are fighting an extraordinary—and expensive—legal battle over their right to make “reaction” videos for their 4 million YouTube subscribers. On April Fools, Overkill Software introduced Ethan Klein into first-person…

Musician Arranges Jazz Set For Pro Smash Matches

Music student Nicholas Caleb Goss sees melodies when he watches Super Smash Bros. Melee champion Jose “Mango” Marquez flit across a stage. “He likes to style,” Goss said, describing a fight against Marquez as “energetic, surprising.” To Goss, Marquez’s playstyle is jazz, which is exactly what he turned it into. This month, Goss composed a…

Four months after Ubisoft released multiplayer hack-and-slash game For Honor, players continue to report frustratingly slow matchmaking times upwards of a few minutes. But yesterday, Ubisoft told Kotaku that matchmaking takes 45 seconds on average. What have your experiences been? Tell us in the comments.

Graphic Novel About D&D‘s Creator Is Enchanting, But Falls Into A Familiar Trap

Storytelling was never the same after Dungeons & Dragons. When players, guided by a dungeon master, knit a dense narrative whose many threads are each supported by their neighbors, it makes the case that many voices are greater than one. This is the pitch on which Dungeons & Dragons stakes its brand. We see the…

Overwatch YouTuber Gets Harassed After Redditor Makes False Accusations

Over the past few years, Reddit has become the go-to destination for those who feel they have been mistreated and want to hold powerful figures accountable. But the popular website, which refers to itself as “the front page of the Internet,” is also a breeding ground for mobs that require little evidence before embarking on…

Watch Someone Speedrun Portal Without Using Any Portals

Speedrunner 097AceOfSpades beat Portal in 52 minutes using no portals and a lot of airboat cheats. Usually, Portal takes about three hours to complete. And, as the title implies, you complete it by using portals to solve the game’s tricky puzzle-based campaign mode. 097AceOfSpades relies on one main hack to get through the game sans…

YouTubers Say They Can’t Make Money Covering Call of Duty: WWII

Since March, YouTubers have watched their revenue plummet as advertisers bleed out of the platform. Some videos containing violence, real or fictional, are considered “inappropriate for advertising.” First-person shooter Call of Duty, a massively popular game on YouTube, is no walk in the park. So, the huge community that’s formed around it is getting hit…

Fans Keep Trying To Revive Smash Bros. Brawl‘s Competitive Scene

Super Smash Bros. Brawl is the problem child of the Smash franchise—at least when it comes to its esports scene. Not as quaint as Smash 64, as technically rich as Melee or as polished as Smash 4, Brawl is considered a fun but flawed game exclusively for casual players. So, while other competitive Smash scenes…

When Fans Take Their Love For Twitch Streamers Too Far

It was one in the morning when the Twitch streamer Ellohime heard a knock at his front door. He had been grinding away at a PC game that night in December 2015 while his infant daughter and fiancée slept. His 22-year-old brother was crashing in the central Florida home, too, and it wasn’t unheard of…

Therapists Are Using Dungeons & Dragons To Get Kids To Open Up

Adam Davis, co-founder of the Dungeons & Dragons therapy group Wheelhouse Workshop, thinks kids with social issues aren’t being asked the right questions. In a dreary school counselor’s office, it can be hard to engage with “Why aren’t you doing your homework?” and “Have you tried joining clubs?” For Davis, more fruitful lines of inquiry…

Magic: The Gathering Issues Rare Emergency Card Ban

Magic: The Gathering has issued a rare emergency card ban effective today. One card in a popular but dramatically overpowered two-card combo is now illegal in Standard play. Publisher Wizards of the Coast announced Felidar Guardian’s emergency ban two days after they put out their April “Banned and Restricted” cards list, prompting players to raise…

I Can’t Stand Overwatch‘s Quick Play Anymore

I have a confession: I have become an Overwatch meta slave. I rarely pick heroes other players think are “bad.” I won’t take risks with our tank-healer balance. And, most important, I will seethe when my team doesn’t reflect the holy comp du jour Did you pick Hanzo on an attack map? I probably scoffed…