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CultureTwitchTwitch Streamer Gives Away $5,000 After Failing To Catch Shiny Pokémon In 15 Hours
You win some, you lose some. Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you. Long have these sorts of aphorisms existed in the cultural lexicon. Now, thanks to popular streamer Jeremy “DisguisedToast” Wang, we’ve got a new one: Sometimes you catch the shiny Pokémon as part of two streams that last…
By Nathan Grayson Published November 19, 2019 -
CultureThe Internet Reacts To The Announcement Of A New Half-Life Game
It is 2019. Valve just announced a new Half-Life game. All bets are off now. Quit your job. Buy a lottery ticket. Fail to win the lottery. Buy several more lottery tickets. Fail again. Give up. Sell your car so you can make rent. Go online. Find out that the new Half-Life is a VR…
By Nathan Grayson Published November 19, 2019 -
CultureUpcoming Undertale Live Show Will Let Audiences Choose The Outcome
Many games have multiple branching paths where players decide who lives and who dies, indie role-playing game mega-hit Undertale chief among them. Very few (possibly zero?) concerts can boast the same thing. Undertale Live, then, will be a unique experience pretty much no matter how it pans out. Undertale Live is, first and foremost, a…
By Nathan Grayson Published November 18, 2019 -
OpinionIn The Era Of ‘Live’ Games Like Fortnite And Overwatch, Sequels Are Changing
There was a time when a sequel meant something. I don’t mean that in a wistful, “back in my day” sort of way. I mean that it largely meant one thing: A separate, new game with a shiny “2” somewhere in its title. Then expansions blurred the line, and patches blurred it even more. Now…
By Nathan Grayson Published November 18, 2019 -
CulturePath Of Exile Is Getting A Sequel
After a years-long ascent from action-RPG also-ran to PC gaming mainstay, Path of Exile, the free-to-play game that has, for many players, usurped Diablo as the premiere grimdark monster-mashing loot fest, is officially getting a sequel Announced today during ExileCon in New Zealand, Path of Exile 2 was originally set to be a large update…
By Nathan Grayson Published November 15, 2019 -
CulturePokémon Sword And Shield Players Report Alarming SD Card Issue, But It’s Fixable
Pokémon Sword and Shield are out today. It should be a joyous occasion, except that some players have hit quite a snag: They say that the downloadable versions of the games are deleting all of their Switch save data. In reality, that’s not quite what’s happening, but the glitch in question is certainly alarming. It…
By Nathan Grayson Published November 15, 2019 -
CultureTwitchFirst Streamer To Hit 60 In WoW Classic Kicked From Top Esports Organization For Stealing Item
Before the tail end of August, Daniel “Jokerd” Gobey was basically a nobody. Then he won the worldwide race to hit level 60 in WoW Classic and became an overnight Twitch sensation, with over 300,000 people tuning in to watch his big moment just three days after Classic’s launch. But the 22-year-old player from Malta,…
By Nathan Grayson Published November 14, 2019 -
OpinionImpressionsObsidian’s Next Game Is A Survival Adventure Where You’re The Size Of An Ant [Update]
Today, as part of Microsoft’s XO19 conference in London, Outer Worlds developer Obsidian announced its first project under the Xbox Game Studios umbrella: a survival adventure game called Grounded Grounded, which is releasing in early access on Xbox One and PC in spring 2020 (digitally and as part of Xbox Game Pass), is an up-to-four-player…
By Nathan Grayson Published November 14, 2019 -
CultureDueling Translations Of Hideo Kojima’s Thoughts On Critics Cause Confusion
Whatever you think about Hideo Kojima’s latest fever dream—which imagines a world exactly like our own, except that Norman Reedus can’t walk good—you likely figured it was going to be divisive. Initial reviews lent credence to that idea; some critics adored Death Stranding despite its sharp corners and long, uneventful stretches. Others thought Kojima sacrificed…
By Nathan Grayson Published November 13, 2019 -
CultureTwitchEverything You Always Wanted To Know About The ‘Omegalul’ Emote (But Were Afraid To Ask)
Some memes explode into the collective consciousness with no remorse or regret, frothing at the mouth and daring hapless bystanders to remain out of the loop. One way or another, you’ll learn what they mean, and you’ll get sick of them in two weeks, just like God intended. Others, however, slink around in their own…
By Nathan Grayson Published November 12, 2019 -
FairTube, a group pushing for YouTubers to unionize that has backing from the largest trade union in the EU, has commented on YouTube’s controversial new terms of the service The new terms give the company “sole discretion” to remove videos that are “no longer commercially viable,” which has led to renewed calls for unionization from…
By Nathan Grayson Published November 12, 2019 -
CultureThe Internet Reacts To The Sonic Movie Redesign
Movie Sonic is back. After dying earlier this year so that we could be saved from his own sinful visage, Sonic has been reborn as a cutesy blue baby child who would not spit out a mouthful of human teeth if you reflexively punched him while recoiling in terror at the thought of how he…
By Nathan Grayson Published November 12, 2019 -
CultureYouTube Changes Renew Calls For YouTubers To Unionize [Update]
To say that YouTubers have an uneasy relationship with the company that hosts their videos would be a massive understatement. It’s not uncommon for YouTube to demonetize videos with little in the way of explanation and, as a recent terms of service update reminded users, it can also just straight up remove videos and channels…
By Nathan Grayson Published November 11, 2019 -
CulturePlanet Zoo, As Told By Steam Reviews
If you’re the sort of person who sees packs of animals majestically gallivanting about in forests or on the National Geographic channel and thinks “I need to manage those,” you’re in luck: Planet Zoo is now out on Steam. But does it have Steam users squawking, or do they want to lock it up and…
By Nathan Grayson Published November 8, 2019 -
CultureElite: Dangerous Players Compete To Decide The Fate Of The Ancient Ship
There’s a meditative quality to soaring through Elite: Dangerous’ vast reconstruction of outer space, but every once in a while, players discover something that jolts them out of their hyper-space stasis. Earlier this week, it was an ancient ship full of still-living passengers that turned heads, reinvigorating the game’s community after a sleepy few months.…
By Nathan Grayson Published November 8, 2019 -
CultureWorld Of Warcraft Will Reduce Everyone’s Level To Avoid A ‘Grind’
After 15 years and seven expansions, World of Warcraft has become the content equivalent of a foot-tall (not -long) sandwich constructed by an overly ambitious stoner. At this point, it’s teetering under the weight of pieces that, in hindsight, don’t really fit. That’s why the World of Warcraft team has decided to cut the leveling…
By Nathan Grayson Published November 7, 2019 -
CultureOverwatch Stagnated Because Of Its Sequel, Says Director
Conspicuous is the word you might use to describe the lack of meat on Overwatch updates’ bones for the past couple of years. Seasonal events like summer’s Lucioball, fall’s Junkenstein’s Revenge, and winter’s Winter Wonderland have ground to such a screeching standstill that players don’t get excited about them anymore. What happened? Here’s a hint:…
By Nathan Grayson Published November 6, 2019 -
CultureWorld Of Warcraft: Shadowlands‘ Designers Are Learning From WoW Classic‘s Success
If you’ve been following Blizzard news lately, you could be forgiven for thinking that the company had bulldozed its meticulously expanded World of Warcraft and replaced it with the humble township of Warcraft Classic. Modern WoW, however, is still kicking, and at BlizzCon, Blizzard announced a new expansion, Shadowlands. That said, even Shadowlands’ designers can’t…
By Nathan Grayson Published November 6, 2019 -
CultureElite: Dangerous Players Discover Ancient Ship Full Of Living People
Despite being largely empty, outer space is just full of distress. Distress signals here, distress signals there—it all gets to be old hat after a little while. Today, though, the developers of Elite: Dangerous buried an extremely cool storyline about a ship from the distant past in what appeared to be just an ever-so-slightly anomalous…
By Nathan Grayson Published November 5, 2019 -
CultureOverwatch Director Says There Are Story Reasons For Saving The First Black Woman Hero For The Sequel
Overwatch currently has 31 playable heroes. One of them is a gorilla from the moon. Another is a hamster in a mecha ball. None of them are black women. This has led to a series of increasingly exasperated pleas from fans over the years, to little avail. Now, finally, Blizzard has confirmed the existence of…
By Nathan Grayson Published November 5, 2019