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CultureBeing Muted In A Video Game Doesn’t Violate Civil Rights, Federal Court Declares
If you or a loved one has been muted in a video game, you may not be entitled to financial compensation. Exposure to muting might finally wake you up to the idea that there are consequences to your actions. Please do wait. Do not call now! This take on a weirdly beloved commercial from the…
By Nathan Grayson Published January 27, 2020 -
CultureFive-Year-Old Batman: Arkham Knight Gets New Cosmetic DLC
Rocksteady, a studio fans have been waiting to hear something, anything, from for eons, finally emerged from its cone of silence today, but not to say anything about a new game. Instead, it announced a sorta-new, sorta-not-new costume for 2015’s Batman: Arkham Knight. If that sounds weirdly complicated to you, it’s because it is. Today,…
By Nathan Grayson Published January 24, 2020 -
EsportsOverwatch League, Call Of Duty League, And Hearthstone Esports Will Air On YouTube, Not Twitch
With Overwatch League season three set to kick off in just over two weeks, it was becoming a little conspicuous that we still didn’t know where it was going to air. Now we do: With its two-year Twitch deal now expired, Overwatch League is moving to YouTube. It will be joined by Activision’s new Call…
By Nathan Grayson Published January 24, 2020 -
CultureSuspended Hearthstone Player Blitzchung Doesn’t Regret Speaking Out About Hong Kong
Last October, Hearthstone pro Chung “Blitzchung” Ng Wai decided, during an official stream of the Asia-Pacific Grandmasters, to shoot his shot. “Liberate Hong Kong,” he said while wearing a gas mask. “Revolution of our age!” He wound up getting suspended by Blizzard. Now, in 2020, he says that if he could go back to that…
By Nathan Grayson Published January 23, 2020 -
CultureValve Is ‘Confident’ Half-Life: Alyx Won’t Be Delayed
Improbably, a new Half-Life game is coming out in just a couple of months. To celebrate, Valve hosted an AMA on Reddit today, audaciously claiming, among other things, that the game won’t be delayed and confirming a truth we already knew in our hearts: all Half-Life games must have at least one train. Given that…
By Nathan Grayson Published January 22, 2020 -
OpinionDisco Elysium‘s Dialogue Is Like A Good Tweet
The other day, I tried to recommend Disco Elysium to Kotaku traitor and noted single-player game hater Cecilia D’Anastasio. Spinning an ode to the game’s masterful mixture of character writing and subtle world-building would, I knew, accomplish nothing. Instead, I decided to appeal directly to my target demographic, who tends to prefer competitive multiplayer games…
By Nathan Grayson Published January 16, 2020 -
OpinionNetflix’s New Reality Show About Catfishing Is, Itself, A Catfish
A Netflix reality TV show lets contestants “catfish” each other in competition for a $100,000 prize. But just like its catfishing contestants, what The Circle says it is, and what it is really about, are quite different things. The Circle, which debuted earlier this month, claims to be a show in which “anyone can be…
By Nathan Grayson Published January 14, 2020 -
EsportsOverwatch League Commentators Are Jumping Ship [UPDATE]
Watching professional Overwatch matches can be chaotic. At times, team fights look less like coherent, role-driven skirmishes and more like cartoon characters punching and kicking inside screen-eclipsing dust clouds. Commentators play a crucial role, making sense of the madness to both esports fans and the uninitiated mainstream audience Blizzard hopes to attract. But with season…
By Nathan Grayson Published January 13, 2020 -
EsportsHouston Overwatch League Team Decides To Move After New Neighbors Complain
Season three of the Overwatch League kicks off next month, and that means teams are finally gearing up to live and operate out of their home cities. The Houston Outlaws, unfortunately, have not received the warmest of welcomes from their neighbors. Houston Outlaws general manager Matt “Flame” Rodriguez said yesterday on Twitter that his team…
By Nathan Grayson Published January 10, 2020 -
CultureBioShock Speedrunner Fakes Catastrophic Crash During AGDQ Run
BioShock is an especially harrowing game to watch people speedrun, largely because of all the small things that can go wrong. Unpredictable framerate and physics glitches can send otherwise flawless runs careening off the rails, and this instability makes it easy to screw up crucial skips. Speedrunner BloodThunder knows this better than anybody, and last…
By Nathan Grayson Published January 10, 2020 -
CulturePeople Love To Pee Outside Conan O’Brien’s House In Death Stranding
Hideo Kojima never met a celebrity he didn’t want to include in Death Stranding. As such, his latest game contains all sorts of celebrity cameos. Talk show host Conan O’Brien makes one such appearance, as a prepper slash cosplayer. For reasons that are not entirely clear, players have covered his house in pee. If you…
By Nathan Grayson Published January 8, 2020 -
CultureTwitchTwitch Streamers Raise Hundreds Of Thousands Of Dollars To Fight Australian Bushfires
Australia is on fire. Thousands of homes have been destroyed, countless people have been displaced, and 24 people have died. More than 15.6 million acres of land have burned. All this, and Australian summer is only just beginning. With the government failing to act against the blisteringly obvious effects of climate change, some streamers are…
By Nathan Grayson Published January 8, 2020 -
CultureAnnual Steam Release Numbers Used To Climb Every Year, But In 2019, They Held Steady
I’m fairly certain that I haven’t played 8,400 games in my entire life, but that’s the number of new releases that rolled up their sleeves and threw down for Steam users’ time and money last year. That is, obviously, a lot. But it’s not that much more than the number of games released on Steam…
By Nathan Grayson Published January 8, 2020 -
ReviewsYear in ReviewSeven Games That Were Almost My Game Of The Decade
When people ask me to name my game of the decade, I pause. There are so many. I took away hard-won lessons from some of them, but over time, I’ve come to realize that those lessons were probably wrong. On a more or less annual basis, my game of the decade changes. This is not…
By Nathan Grayson Published January 3, 2020 -
CultureOuter Worlds Vs. Outer Wilds: The Comparison We Had To Make
2019 was a truly bountiful year for video games. We received countless games of peerless quality, some not falling far from the hoary old tree of Genre, with others inventing new genres all by themselves. It is not difficult to draw lines between some of these standouts: Dota Underlords and Teamfight Tactics, Sekiro and Jedi:…
By Nathan Grayson Published December 24, 2019 -
CultureKind Words, A Game About Sending Nice Letters To Strangers, Is Successfully Resisting Trolls
I played Kind Words, a game about anonymously sending letters expressing fears, anxieties, and other concerns and receiving kind responses from real people, for 10 minutes today. I was immediately assaulted by a barrage of unironic positivity, I came away feeling immensely better than when I started—after just 10 minutes. Such is the power of…
By Nathan Grayson Published December 19, 2019 -
CultureCelebrated Non-Violent Indie Game Is Now A Gun In Rainbow Six Siege [Update]
Sometimes, two great tastes go great together. Chocolate and peanut butter. Peanut butter and ice cream. Ice cream and Reese’s peanut butter cups. Maybe most of my examples involve peanut butter. Point being, sometimes these things just work. Other times, you try to mash up two cool things, only to come away with a new…
By Nathan Grayson Published December 13, 2019 -
CultureGame AwardsDeveloper On Pranking Game Awards With Golf Balls: ‘It’s A Boring Show’
Some would tell you that The Game Awards are gaming’s Academy Awards. Those people are hilariously wrong, given that the show largely serves as a vehicle for commercials announcing upcoming games, with the awards themselves coming off as a distant second priority-wise. Still, the event has become increasingly glitzy, glamorous, and long over the years.…
By Nathan Grayson Published December 13, 2019 -
CultureOverwatch Glitch Allows All Heroes To Fly
Unlike most first-person shooters, Overwatch is not opposed to allowing some heroes to fly. Pharah rockets up and bonks her head on the sky’s ceiling. Sigma soars above the battlefield on an invisible cloud of psychic energy during his ult. Zenyatta hovers and should never be allowed to walk. Real flight for everyone, though, is…
By Nathan Grayson Published December 12, 2019 -
CultureTwitchPopular WoW Streamer Hires YouTubers Who Leeched Off His Stream To Run Official Channel
If you search any popular Twitch streamer’s name on YouTube, you’ll find countless videos scraped from their streams. Of these, some will likely come from the streamer, but many are the product of users who upload content that is not, strictly speaking, theirs. Recent YouTube changes, however, are apparently making that more difficult. Instead of…
By Nathan Grayson Published December 11, 2019
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