Gita Jackson

The Sims‘ Caribbean-Inspired Outfits Are Lackluster

The Sims 4 got an update last week that gave the game some Caribbean themed hair, clothing and furniture in honor of Carnival. While the hair is phenomenal, the rest has me a little confused. The Sims as a franchise has had a hard time with black hair. Curly hair is harder to model than…

We Can’t Fix The Internet

As a teenager in the early 2000s, I was a member of a large, passionate, and loosely affiliated community of Harry Potter lovers (known, like other, similar communities, as a fandom), mostly gathered on LiveJournal. We discussed the books and characters; we wrote fanfiction and long diatribes about the movie adaptations; and we formed friendships…

A Game That Lets You Solve Crimes By Yelling At Your Computer

Ever looked at a blurry photograph on your computer and wanted to yell “enhance!” at it like they do on police procedurals? Well, now there’s a game just for you. Enhance.computer is a browser game where you have to search an image to find a secret code that will stop a crime. You navigate around…

You Can’t Keep Sims Sober

The Sims is a pretty good simulacrum of human life. Sims fall in and out of love, move, change careers, have families, and grow old. It’s easy to see the ups and downs of life reflected in this game—Sims even endure the mundanity of catching a cold and getting bad grades. One thing Sims can’t…

Decoding Smash Ultimate‘s Apparent New ‘Spirits’ Mode

In the last Nintendo Direct, which was all about Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, game director Masahiro Sakurai said that there’s still one more game mode that he can’t talk about yet. Fans think they’ve figured out what it’s called, but they still don’t know what it actually is. I’ve got a few ideas. At the…

New YouTube Series Explores The One Sided Relationship Between Creators And Fans

When you watch a YouTuber for hours, you can feel like you know them. That’s called a “parasocial relationship.” It’s an uneven relationship between a fan and a creator, sometimes even fostered by creators for financial gain. YouTuber Shannon Strucci is taking an in-depth look at the phenomenon in a series of documentaries. Shannon Strucci…

No Man’s Sky’s Latest Trend: Elaborate Espionage

Even with the addition of multiplayer and some limited ways for players to grief one another, No Man’s Sky still isn’t built for large scale warfare. Player-made civilizations are finding other ways to resolve their differences. Namely, they do it through espionage. Since the release of No Man’s Sky, which infamously launched with no multiplayer…

The Super-Fans Of Detroit: Become Human Hate Most Of The Game

Quantic Dream’s Detroit: Become Human doesn’t seem like the type of video game that would spawn an enthusiastic fandom on Tumblr. It’s a sci-fi game about robot civil rights that sometimes stumbles in its political commentary, and there’s nary a romance plot in sight. Nevertheless, fans are writing fic, making art and finding virtues in…

Fan-Made Olive Garden LARP Has Unlimited Breadsticks And Heart

Role-playing games can take many shapes and forms beyond the dice-rolling of Dungeons and Dragons. One game designer wrote a live-action role-playing game meant to be played specifically at the chain restaurant Olive Garden, and it’s strangely heartfelt. Jeff Stormer, a podcaster and game designer living in Philadelphia, told Kotaku over Twitter DMs that his…

Hello Games has been releasing hotfixes for No Man’s Sky’s big Next update, and today they dropped a huge one. This update fixes issues with crashes on freighters, ships shooting themselves, and reduces the radius where sentinels will check you out, and it’s now live across all platforms.

Overwatch Heroes Are Looking Sporty For Summer

The Overwatch Summer Games event is now live, and as we’ve come to expect, it’s accompanied by a bunch of new skins. This time, all your favorite characters are playing sports ⚾️. The internet already went wild for the latest D.va skin, but the new skins for Roadhog, Reinhardt, Winston, Ana, Moira, Brigitte, Sombra and…

Quiz: Which Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Character Are You?

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has a whopping 73 characters. From standard picks like Luigi or Ness to newcomers like Castlevania’s Simon or Metroid’s Ridley, players will have a bounty of characters to try and best their friends with. Which one are you?

The Sims 4 Has Always Been Good, Actually

Nitpicking is easy. I can always spot the one dirty dish in an otherwise flawless kitchen. Likewise, small flaws in a video game can stick out to me. The Sims 4 fandom loves to nitpick, and although I’m also really bothered by that one lot in Bedrock Straight where a single tile is mismatched from…

No Man’s Sky’s Sentinels Need To Chill

Ever landed on a planet in No Man’s Sky, minding your own business, mining some carbon, when a sentinel comes over, scans you and brings the fist of God down onto your cheerful space adventure? Fuck those guys. I understand why sentinels exist. There has to be some friction to harvesting rare resources in No…

The World Ends With You: Final Remix is coming to Switch on October 12th Really looking forward to racking up a few hundred more hours navigating the interpersonal issues of my favorite dead teenagers.

The Internet Reacts To D.va’s New Summer Skin

The Overwatch summer event is starting on August 9th, and Blizzard has slowly been revealing new skins in the lead-up. D.va’s new beach-y look has captured fans’ hearts. Reinhardt and Ana have also had new skins revealed to promote the new Summer Games event, but given that it will take place in a new map…

Two Very Different JRPG Approaches To Old-Fashioned English

Sprawling role playing games often come with an abundance of proper nouns and a medieval flavor to their setting. Sometimes games like this try to make their dialogue match the olden times vibe. Getting this antiquated English to sound right is pretty hard, though. I first started thinking about this when I started Octopath Traveler,…

No Man’s Sky Bug Causes Ships To Shoot Themselves

In a game as big and complex as No Man’s Sky, some things are bound to go wrong. Some players in this vast virtual universe have been running into an unusual problem: their ships appear to be shooting themselves. Players on the No Man’s Sky subreddit have been noting the bug since the release of…

The Best No Man’s Sky Bases We’ve Seen So Far

No Man’s Sky’s latest update allows players to build bases anywhere, unlike the previous version of the game, where you could only build in preset locations. The update also added some new kinds of building materials, and allows players to build their bases up to delirious heights. Here are some of the coolest and wildest…

The Junji Ito inspired horror game World of Horror is inching ever closer to a real release date, and more importantly, is coming to Switch. Publisher Ysbyrd Games announced today that the game is coming to PlayStation 4, Steam and Switch in 2019. We played an early demo in January 2017 and loved it—check it…