Seven months after the release of its last new hero, Overwatch is finally getting a new one. Echo, who players of the popular team shooter have been salivating over ever since she made her cinematic debut in the 2018 trailer that introduced Ashe, will be playable “soon.” Today, Blizzard posted a trailer officially introducing Echo.…
Like everything else, this year’s annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco has been postponed. But now it’s been resuscitated. Sort of. If you consider a really weird MMO to be an adequate substitute. Crows Developers Conference is a free game from development studio Crows Crows Crows, which previously made Accounting+ in conjunction with Rick…
Today’s indie-focused Nintendo Direct was chock full of timed Switch exclusives. Here’s a quick rundown of what you missed if you were spending your quarantine time staring at a wall in anticipation of Animal Crossing instead of staring at Nintendo’s YouTube channel in anticipation of Animal Crossing Today’s Direct was a rapid-fire machine gun blast…
What is a bullet, I ask you, if not a small rock hurled in a creative fashion with intent to cause maximum harm? With this in mind, I’d like to posit that Call of Duty: Warzone players who’ve figured out how to kill each other with rocks are, in fact, fully within the spirit of…
I need you to do something for me right now. I need you to look up. See that image? That’s Pharah, from Overwatch. She’s wearing aviators and a leather jacket. She looks like Stephanie Beatriz’s character from Brooklyn 99. And she is gonna fuck you up That’s just one of eight new skins added to…
NYU Game Center professor and independent developer Robert Yang never thought teaching a class on Twitch would be a good idea, but only once he was in the thick of things did the enormity of the task dawn on him. “Oh hello, Amber,” he said to a student who’d identified herself in chat. “And hello,…
Overwatch League’s planned migration of teams to their respective cities for a full season of home and away games has hit yet another big obstacle. After isolated cancellations of events in China and South Korea, the league has now pulled the plug on all live events around the world in March and April. As with…
If you trace Black Mesa, the Half-Life fan remake to end all fan remakes, back to its origin as a mega-mod that rose from the ashes of two similar mods in 2005, it’s been in development for somewhere in the neighborhood of 16 years. Now, the labor of undying love for headcrabs is finally done.…
Back in December, I reported on an issue that’s been plaguing Twitch for quite some time: scammers who pretend to be popular streamers and lure people in with the promise of fake giveaways. As of now, Twitch has yet to comprehensively solve the problem. Instead, it’s played whack-a-mole with thousands of fake accounts. The playbook…
The release of Half-Life: Alyx stands to be a landmark event for two reasons. First and most obviously, it’s a new Half-Life game after 13 years of eerie radio silence. Second, it’s a prime example of gaming culture eating its own tail, since now players are breaking games before they’re even out. Granted, Valve was…
Over the past 72 hours, I’ve spent an ungodly amount of time watching TikToks created by Twitch streamers. It all began with a simple question: Can people whose whole line of work is built around creating the lengthiest, least-filtered form of pop culture possible excel in a medium where minimalism thrives? TikTok is a video…
A professional Call of Duty streamer who brandished a gun on stream and accidentally fired a round into his desk has been suspended from Twitch and dropped from his esports organization. Last night, during a livestream from inside his home, Call of Duty trickshot specialist and former FaZe Clan member Carl Riemer pulled out a…
Sometimes, you’ve just gotta flip somebody off, even if they can’t see you. Maybe they cut you off in traffic. Maybe they took your spot in the parking lot. Maybe they did a third thing involving a car. Or, as is the case 99 percent of the time, perhaps they pushed you off a cliff.…
With COVID-19, aka coronavirus, continuing to spread at an alarming rate, researchers of all stripes are racing to get a handle on it. This includes a team at the University of Washington in Seattle, who’ve taken a novel approach: a video game. The game, first released in 2008, is called Foldit. In it, players fold…
Earlier this week, a small but vocal group of what can only be described as “teabagging enthusiasts” made a discovery straight out of their darkest, knee joint-less nightmares: Overwatch’s Ana, a champion teabagger despite her advanced age, could no longer crouch over unconscious enemies. Among other skills, Ana has a sleep dart ability that temporarily…
It’s a longtime dream of mine to be extremely large and basically unkillable. I’ve yet to accomplish my goal in real life, but I will—mark my words. Until then, I’ve at least got Overwatch’s new experimental card, which turns tanks into nigh-unstoppable meat walls, to help me imagine a better world. The experimental card, which…
For a handful of weeks last year, Dota Underlords devoured my entire life. Then, abruptly, I stopped playing. At the time, Valve’s entry into the suddenly-crowded auto battler arena suffered from the same issue as its competition: Its bones, though they formed a sturdy spinal scaffolding, had no meat on them. Dota Underlords left early…
Yesterday evening, Twitch suspended a slew of high-profile streamers who, whether occasionally or full-time, cover politics. Those caught up in the snare included speedrunner Mychal “Trihex” Jefferson, lefty podcasters Chapo Trap House, and political pundit David Pakman. This happened after an organization claiming to represent CBS issued copyright claims on streams involving last night’s Democratic…
Temtem’s short-term roadmap includes quite a few oft-requested features. Spring, for instance, will hopefully bring in-game chat, ranked matchmaking, and club management, while summer is the tentative date for player housing, and fall will herald the arrival of in-game tournaments, the first mythical Temtem, and achievements. There will also be other features and new Temtem…
Nipples. They’re like fun little slices of pepperoni on the vast pizza that is the human body. Most people have them. Video game characters, though? Not so much. In fact, former Insomniac artist Xavier Coelho-Kostolny thinks there’s a credible case to be made that he’s the only person ever to sculpt Spider-Man’s nipples in a…
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