Nathan Grayson

Blizzard Overhauling Overwatch‘s Mercy With New Ultimate

Overwatch’s Mercy has two roles on the battlefield: 1) stalwart, reliable healer of your team and 2) stalwart, reliable infuriator of the other team every time she nails a massive resurrection ult, canceling out all their hard work in a single, blinding flash. Blizzard’s decided to change the latter. “It’s pretty disheartening to have Mercy…

Top Genji Player Can’t Compete In Blizzard’s Overwatch League Because He’s Just 16

This week, Seoul, Korea’s Overwatch League team announced their player roster. Unsurprisingly, they opted to basically snatch up Lunatic Hai, the two-time winners of South Korea’s biggest Overwatch tournament, APEX. There were, however, a couple curious omissions. Overwatch’s pro scene, largely the result of a series of smaller, unaffiliated tournaments held over the course of…

The Escapists 2 Starts With Prison Breaks, Then Gets A Lot Weirder

The Escapists was a surprise Steam hit about breaking out of a variety of prisons, each with its own layout and routines. The Escapists 2 still has prisons, but they’re joined by a series of weirder, wackier locations and situations. Released earlier this week, The Escapists 2 has, like its predecessor, become a Steam hit.…

We Played An Hour Of Dragon Ball FighterZ And Like It So Far

Dragon Ball FighterZ, the gorgeous DBZ fighting game from Guilty Gear developer Arc System Works, won’t be out until early 2018, but Compete contributor Ian Walker and I got to play a demo at an event in San Francisco last week. After (virtually) beating the snot out of each other, we talked about it. Nathan…

New Overwatch Short Explores Mei’s Tragic Origins

There’s a new Overwatch CGI short, and no, it’s not that painfully brief Junkrat and Roadhog comedy sketch from the other day. This time around, Mei’s the star of the show, largely because all of her friends are dead. The new short is a re-telling of Mei’s origin story, beginning with a cryo-hibernation gone wrong…

Blizzard Making A Bunch Of Changes To Overwatch‘s Competitive Mode

Overwatch’s fifth competitive season was not the game’s finest hour. Doom and gloom dominated the proceedings, and no, those aren’t the names of Reaper’s shotguns. For season six, Blizzard is changing things up, albeit with a series of tweaks, as opposed to a total overhaul. The biggest news is that competitive seasons will be shorter…

Six Years Later, Bethesda’s Brink Is Suddenly Free-To-Play

Brink was weird. It mashed together multiplayer gunplay with single-player narrative, then spiced up its chunky concoction with parkour and levels set on floating cities (because global warming). It’s also telling that I speak about it in the past tense, because while it continues to exist, you could be forgiven for assuming otherwise. The Bethesda-published,…

Overwatch Pro Leaves Wedding Reception, Wins Big Match, Goes Back To Reception

Over the weekend, Overwatch pro Joonas “Zappis” Alakurtti had a decision to make: attend a friend’s wedding, or play his first match in Blizzard’s $100,000 Overwatch Contenders tournament. He chose both. Alakurtti is a member of Finnish organization Team Gigantti, a team with a solid backbone (its members previously played Overwatch for major org Ninjas…

It Was Hard Photographing The Eclipse With A Game Boy Camera

Today, the sun was devoured by the moon in an act of vore that the whole family could enjoy. Another thing the whole family once enjoyed: the Game Boy Camera. Released in 1998, the Game Boy Camera was a Game Boy game/peripheral that let you take grainy lo-fi pictures, add Pikachus to them, and even…

Pro Overwatch Had A Weekend Of Upsets

The first “real” season of Overwatch’s official minor league, Contenders, kicked off over the weekend, and it was characterized by underdog teams repeatedly flipping the script. It began on the UK side of things, with top-ranked European team eUnited losing 1-3 against the recently-founded Team Gigantti. Gigantti, a team made up of former members of…

Overwatch‘s Next Map Is Junkrat And Roadhog’s Old Home

One man’s town made of trash is another man’s treasure. Though honestly, the other man could take or leave the trash and treasure, as long as he gets to blow shit up. Overwatch is about to get a new map called Junkertown. It’s a city made of scrap and sheet metal, a slice of putrid…

Overwatch‘s Best Korean Team Loses To Underdogs’ Daring Doomfist Gambit

So far, there have been three Overwatch APEX tournaments in South Korea. Lunatic Hai has won two of them. Widely regarded as one of the best Overwatch teams in the world—if not the best—they were expected to dismantle relatively unheralded team MVP Space without breaking much of a sweat. Instead, they lost. Lunatic Hai started…

A long-awaited, much-needed report system is finally coming to Overwatch on consoles. It’ll be part of the next big patch, which is in testing but does not yet have a release date. Over the past year, Overwatch’s problems with toxicity and harassment have become dire. Jeff Kaplan says the team is working hard to improve…

Developer Jokes About Adding ‘Good’ Ending To Game, Sends Players On A Wild Goose Chase

“Added good ending,” read a recent patch note for the sci-fi Souls-like Immortal Planet. The game’s small community was thrilled. They had a new goal, a reason to put on their sleuthing caps. But after weeks of struggling to unlock this secret ending, the game’s developer revealed it was all a big joke. Immortal Planet…

Overwatch Player Creates Zombie Mode

Blizzard’s only just now getting around to FPS mainstays like deathmatch with Overwatch’s official modes, but custom games have allowed players to tunnel their way outside the box. In order to create an Overwatch-flavored variant of the ever popular “zombie” FPS mode, one player got very creative. An Overwatch fan by the name of “Deltin”…

Someone Is Trying To Remake Diablo II In StarCraft II

For years, Blizzard faithful have been clamoring for a remake or remaster of Diablo II, and now that StarCraft’s remaster is fresh out of the hatchery, they’ve only gotten louder. One fan is trying to give them the next best thing. The Curse Of Tristram is a mod project that aims to create an updated…

Zane Plays Proboid is a clever animated short from Polaris about a deep space explorer cut off from all forms of communication… except Twitch chat. Somehow, livestream viewers find his emergency channel and think it’s a video game stream. Things do not go well for him.

Ignore A Party To Pet Dogs In This Video Game

You blink. You rub your eyes. You look around. “Oh crap,” you realize, “I’m at a party.” Pet The Pup At The Party is a game even the most mildly introverted among us can identify with. You’re at a party (a procedurally generated party that seems to take place in an infinite apartment, no less),…

West Of Loathing Is A Very Funny Cowboy Game

Most of the time, it’s not terribly difficult to slot games on Steam’s best-sellers list into categories. You’ve got your multiplayer survival game of the week, your triple-A hit, your discounted indie, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, and so on. West of Loathing, though, defies categorization. It marches to the beat of its own drum, spits into its…

A Substantial And Interesting Discussion Of Pyre, Feelings, Dogs, Mustaches, And God

Every character in Pyre has a story. Some are about the nature of freedom. Others focus on religion. Others invite you to scrutinize systems that purport to offer justice while privileging a select few. But the story that helped the game find its voice and its heart was the unlikely story of a dog’s mustache.…