Culture

Binding Of Isaac Mod Helps Woman Propose To Her Significant Other

I’ve never proposed to anybody, but I can imagine it would be pretty anxiety-provoking. I totally understand why some folks prefer to let their favorite video games do the talking. Last week, an Australian woman sat her significant other down to play a modded version of The Binding of Isaac that included a special marriage…

Red Dead Redemption 2 Comes To Game Pass

Red Dead Redemption 2 goes free to download as part of Xbox Game Pass starting May 7. The blockbuster western, which former Kotaku editor Kirk Hamilton called “exhaustively detailed and exhaustingly beautiful” in his review, is the latest in a series of big games that have recently come to Microsoft’s subscription-based download library. The Witcher…

How’s It Going?: Mistakes Edition

Happy Thursday! Welcome back to our daily open thread. I made some apple muffins yesterday with the over-abundance of apples I got in a temporary CSA share. (I’m really excited about this: I’ve always wanted to do a CSA but thought it was too much food for one person, but now I’m home all the…

Stop Killing This Poor Fallout 76 Radstag

There’s a new mutant in town, and it’ll lead you to treasure if you’re not a sociopath. If you’ve been playing Fallout 76 since last week’s Wastelanders update went live you may have run into a new type of irradiated deer called an Observant Radstag. It’s friendly and won’t attack you. That hasn’t stopped many…

Nintendo Slashes Interest Rates In Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Animal Crossing’s latest update cuts the amount of money players can earn just by letting all of their bells sit in the bank, a lesson to all you hoarders out there to get out and spend. The news came by way of a letter from Tom Nook. It was waiting in players’ mailboxes following last…

Track: Nostalgia | Artist: Joe Hisaishi | Album: Dream Songs

Sharp-Dressed Sith

Jonathan Wenberg is a freelance artist based in Adelaide, Australia. You can see more of Jonathan’s stuff at his Instagramand ArtStationpages.

Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Ghostbusters And A Tale Of Licensing Hell

We all know about games that have had individual licensing issues, and games that have been changed for different markets (hi, Super Mario Bros. 2), but the story of this old Kemco Roger Rabbit title, released on the NES in Japan, is something else. Stumbled upon and shared by the magical kitsune, this excellent video…

When Final Fantasy VII Remake Broke My Heart, Chasing A Pig Proved Strangely Therapeutic

I recently hit an emotional low point with Final Fantasy VII Remake. It was hard to watch my favorite side characters suffer and Avalanche members Tifa and Barret grapple with their culpability in Shinra’s latest attack. I even took a day off to decompress. When I returned, however, I was greeted by a ridiculous mission…

Bugged Fallout 76 NPCs Are Looting Some Players’ Corpses

Sharing is caring, right? At least it is when the person you lend your stuff to eventually gives it back. Some of Fallout 76’s newly added NPCs aren’t doing that, though. Thanks to a bug, they can occasionally nab your prized loot when you die and keep it for themselves. “I was playing the riding…

How’s It Going?: Plans Edition

It’s Wednesday; we’re halfway there! Welcome back to our daily open thread. None of us really know what the future holds—I guess that’s always true, but it feels especially true now. I’m a big planner, so I’m finding this a bit difficult. For instance, I’m supposed to run my first marathon in the fall—I have…

Track: Under the Table | Artist: Fiona Apple | Album: Fetch The Bolt Cutters

Track: Coming Home | Artist: The Four Owls | Album: Nocturnal Instinct

You Have Chosen The Way Of Pain!

Valerio Buonfantino is a freelance artist from Italy working in the games business. You can see more of Valerio’s stuff at his ArtStation page

A Video Game Halloween Costume Is Not Appropriate Covid-19 Protection

Halloween costumes always seem like such a rip-off. They’re really only appropriate for one day out of the year and kids usually grow too fast to use them again before the next Halloween rolls around. I don’t blame anyone for trying to find a way to repurpose a costume that would otherwise be gathering dust…

GameStop Will Reopen Some Stores In The Middle Of A Pandemic

GameStop’s CEO is taking a 50% salary reduction as part of pay cuts across the company as it prepares to re-open stores in some states, the company announced today. “The Company has begun the process of re-opening stores in Italy, Germany, Austria and the states of South Carolina and Georgia and is preparing for the…

Doom Eternal World Record Speedrun Uses Secret Teleporter Room

You never know what you’re going to see in a speedrun. The players working on beating Doom Eternal as quickly as possible, for instance, have found a way to enter a secret developer room that allows them to grab a BFG and complete the Mars Core mission much faster. Doom Eternal is a big, wonderful…

Animal Crossing Fans Improve Classic Album Covers With K.K. Slider

Crafting a memorable album cover is a nearly unfathomable art. An artist must catch the zeitgeist with their bare hands and run it through a prism that spits out something equal parts strange, broadly appealing, and impossible to look away from. Weirdly, though, very few of these so-called “geniuses” add cartoon dogs to their masterpieces.…

Broken Valorant Skin Gives Players Better Vision While Scoped

“Pay-to-win” is one of the ugliest phrases in gaming, especially when it comes to a competitive game like Valorant. Players recently discovered that a paid skin in Riot Games’ shooter allows for a wider field of vision while scoped than should be possible with a sniper rifle, leading to player outcry and a promise of…

Nvidia’s Streaming Service Keeps Losing More And More Games

Games like Oxygen Not Included, Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, and the entire Arkham series are set to be pulled from GeForce Now on April 24. Nvidia announced the latest round of departures in a blog post last night about the future of its fledgling video game streaming platform. “We’re transitioning as many games to GeForce…