Nathan Grayson

How Counter-Strike‘s Bullets Actually Work

Counter-Strike is a game that’s defined by tiny details. So let’s talk bullets. You fire your gun, they make people ever-so-slightly more Swiss cheese-like in appearance, and that’s pretty much that. Headshots good, non-headshots less good. You’ve played video games before. You know this stuff. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive plays by those basic rules, but when…

“It’s 2002, that shit will never work.” A character in story game Emily Is Away—which takes place in a fake version of AOL Instant Messenger—finds out about Steam. They are (probably) not wrong. Emily Is Away is now free on Steam, if you’re interested.

Watch Me Play A Game That Looks Like Hotline Miami With Cowboys [Update: Finished]

12 Is Better Than 6 is a top-down shooter in the same vein as Hotline Miami. Oh, but it has cowboys. And cool hand-drawn graphics. Watch me find out if it’s as good as it looks right now. As ever, feel free to click over to Twitch and join the chat. It’ll be more fun…

Hard West Is A Wild West Strategy Game, And It’s Great

Taken at face value, Hard West looks like what would happen if you took XCOM and replaced aliens with cowboys. And it is that… sorta. But it’s also a lot more (and a little less). Let’s get this out of the way upfront: the world we live in—Earth C.117358, Dimensional Subsection IX, the sole dimension…

Nobody’s Sure How One Of Counter-Strike‘s Best Players Nailed An Incredible Shot

The weekend’s IEM San Jose Counter-Strike tournament was full of great moments, but one shot rang louder than the rest. The reason? It seemed goddamn impossible. The moment came when Ukrainian team (and eventual tournament winners) Na’Vi faced off against beloved-by-the-crowd North American favorites Team Liquid. Na’Vi’s star AWP-er (someone who specializes in Counter-Strike’s notoriously…

Modder Uncovers Secret Fallout 4 Weapon

Over the course of development, games go through numerous changes and overhauls. One modder has uncovered a lost Fallout 4 weapon that suggests some very intriguing things about the game’s direction. While everyone else picks over Bethesda’s post-apocalyptic wasteland, modder xxdeathknight72xx has decided to look under it—rifle through the couch cushions a little, see what…

Valve Is Changing Steam Sales

Since the dawn of recorded time, big seasonal Steam sales have included daily deals that make the whole process downright ritualistic. Wake up, check Steam sale deals, feel the life being drained from your wallet, etc. Soon, that will no longer be the case. Instead, games will just be at their lowest prices for the…

Star Wars: Battlefront: The Kotaku Review

Star Wars: Battlefront wants you to believe you’re in a Star Wars movie, but at heart it’s one of the video-game-iest video games I’ve played in ages. This is the source of both its greatest triumphs and its worst failures. Star Wars: Battlefront is a large-scale multiplayer shooter loosely set during the original movie trilogy.…

The Steam Stream Plays Hard West, Aka Wild West XCOM [Update: Finished]

An XCOM-style strategy game set in an occult Wild West? Hard West is trying to do a lot of things. Is it good, though? Let’s find out. Watch me play it right now. I have high hopes for this one, given that it combines many things I love (XCOM-like tactical gameplay, saloons, pentagrams), but that…

Ark: Survival Evolved Mod Lets You Play As A Dinosaur

When I was young, I always hoped against hope that I would grow up to be a dinosaur. This is probably as close as I’m going to get. FinntasticGames “Play as a dino” mod is exactly what it sounds like: it lets you be a dinosaur in Ark, a game about punching trees and pooping…

Top Counter-Strike Team Pulls Out Of Tournament After Paris Terror Attacks

This weekend’s star-studded IEM San Jose Counter-Strike tournament just lost one of its biggest attractions. Team EnVyUs—considered by most to be one of the top five Counter-Strike teams in the world—just announced that they won’t be competing this weekend in San Jose, California after all. The reason? They’re based out of France, and the recent…

Pissed At Valve, Modder Lets Left 4 Dead Players Shoot At Virtual Steam Servers

Think nobody plays Left 4 Dead 2 anymore? You’d be surprised. According to Steam’s stats page, Left 4 Dead 2 is still one of the 40 most-played games on the service every day. As of writing, the game had nearly 8,000 concurrent players… on a random Wednesday afternoon. So yeah, thanks in part to things…

Why A ‘Bad’ Steam Game Has Good User Ratings

Dispatcher is not a very good game. And yet, it’s a got a “very positive” review average on Steam. What’s going on? Dispatcher is a game I decided to check out on a whim. The horror pseudo-RPG been out for a few days, and I noticed that its 227 user reviews averaged out to “very…

Coming soon to Steam… Bubsy? You remember Bubsy, right? It’s OK if you don’t. He was a—shall we say—less-than-beloved platforming mascot from gaming’s early days. A company called Retroism got the rights, and they’re trying to make it through Steam Greenlight. Good luck?

Fallout 4 Mod Replaces Mini-Nukes With Your Baby

Babies can be like ticking time bombs. You never know when they’re gonna go off. In Fallout 4, they can also be literal bombs. The game’s main quest sees you searching for your lost son, Shaun, who was abducted as a baby. Trainwiz’s Atom Bomb Baby mod makes the hunt for your babbling bundle of…

Fallout 4 Mod Lets You Have A Deathclaw Follower

Why settle for dumb old Dogmeat or sadly unromanceable Codsworth when you can roam the wasteland with a loyal deathclaw? It’s a question I ask myself every day. BOTLANNER’s “Creature Follower” mod lets you replace your follower with your choice from a handful of creature types. Here’s the description: “You can have either a deathclaw,…

Ronda Rousey Is Still Great

I’ve seen a lot of people contending that Ronda Rousey was “exposed” over the weekend—that Holly Holm’s kick-heard-‘round-the-world is proof that Rousey was never all that good in the first place. Those people are wrong. To recap for the 2.47 people who don’t know: former UFC women’s bantamweight champ Ronda Rousey, one of the most…

The Most Exciting Women’s UFC Fight This Weekend Doesn’t Involve Ronda Rousey

Joanna “Champion” Jedrzejczyk is one of the UFC’s least-known champs, but these days she might be my favorite fighter, period. Jedrzejczyk, whose last name is pronounced “nope, I give up,” has only been competing in MMA professionally since 2012. She’s the UFC’s strawweight (115 lb) champion, and she’s undefeated. Before leaping into the burgeoning shark…

Fallout 4 Fan Mods Their Actual Dog Into The Game

Dogmeat is quite a companion—almost like a real dog when he’s not doing egregiously silly/suicidal things. One Fallout 4 fan, however, didn’t think he was real enough. Over on Nexus, modder 7iger explained: “I created this texture using photos of my pup, ‘Pirate.’ He’s a kelpie x blue cattle dog and a lovable mutt. After…

Players May Never Solve Undertale‘s Final Mystery

Undertale, the Steam RPG hit where you don’t have to kill anyone, is loaded with secrets. Dedicated players have unearthed every last one… well, except for the last one. (Big Undertale spoilers ahead.) I addressed Undertale’s last big mystery a bit in my piece on the unique ways the game weaves its web of secrets,…