Culture

Life, And Seven-Year-Old Jurassic Park Mods, Find A Way

All the way back in 2013,a scrappy young writer by the name of Kirk Hamilton wrote about an ambitious Half-Life mod called Jurassic Life, which wanted to bring some aspects of Jurassic Park—namely the dinosaurs and firing a shotgun at them wildly—to the Source Engine. As you do with ambitious mod projects about 10 minutes…

GameStop: We Can Stay Open During Lockdowns Because We’re ‘Essential Retail’

The struggling video game retail chain GameStop told all of its stores this afternoon to stay open even in the event of state or city lockdowns to protect against the covid-19 pandemic, emphasizing that it is “essential retail” alongside groceries and pharmacies and should therefore be exempt from enforced closures. “Due to the products we…

Division 2 Players Are Struggling To Find 2 Well-Hidden Enemies [Update 2: They Have All Been Found!]

The recent Warlords of New York expansion added a whole new lower Manhattan map to The Division 2, complete with new missions, enemies, checkpoints and gear. For players willing to search and explore, there are secret hunters, elite enemies, who are hidden in the new city. While most of them have been found so far,…

Microsoft’s AI Experiments Are Creating Unbeatable Raid Bosses

Raid bosses are the toughest fights in any massively multiplayer online game, but eventually players always find ways to crack them. Now developers are looking at ways to use cloud computing to give raid bosses a way of fighting back. During one of Microsoft’s Game Stack developer livestreams yesterday, software engineer James Trott said that…

How Breath Of The Wild Helped Me Love Food Again

Playing video games is a personal experience. Sometimes it’s surprising just how personal it gets. The first time I booted up Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, I was looking forward to the mind-boggling puzzles and a more fleshed-out version of the Princess Zelda character. I didn’t think that what I’d adore the most…

Ask Dr. NerdLove: How Do I Rebuild My Marriage After An Affair?

Hello, all you frightening skin machines, and welcome to Ask Dr. NerdLove, the only advice column to survive the Corrupted Blood Plague. The world may be in crisis, but love, dating and relationships are still going on, and with them come relationship troubles. So let’s distract ourselves from the world and solve the problems we…

How’s It Going?: Music Edition

Good morning! Welcome back to our daily thread, which is hopefully more comforting/less maddening than staring at your Facebook feed. With the bar under my house closed, it’s really quiet in my apartment. I’ve taken to playing some music while I sleep, mostly classical. Why does Spotify have so many classical playlists for babies? Is…

Razer Is Making Surgical Masks To Help Combat Covid-19

Gaming hardware company Razer is getting into the medical supply business, pledging to manufacture and donate up to a million surgical masks to health authorities around the world to help combat the spread of covid-19. In a Twitter thread posted earlier today Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan said the company’s engineers and designers have been working…

Track: My Back Pages | Artist: Bob Dylan | Album: Another Side of Bob Dylan 

Byodoin. Uji, Kyoto. By Scott Bartley. JPGs is a photo peek into wherever gamers might find interesting. If you’re a photographer and have images you want to share, drop us a line 

You Look Great, Mr. Head

Jeremiah Lee is an artist at Cloud Imperium, the studio that’s been working on Star Citizen for almost eight years now. You can see more of Jeremiah’s stuff at his ArtStation page

GameStop Selling Doom A Day Early As A ‘Safety Precaution’

Doom and Animal Crossing were supposed to be out on the same day (Friday), but as a “safety precaution,” GameStop has made the move to sell id’s shooter a day early to avoid crowds. The two games, once thought inseparable, will now release separately as a precautionary measure to adhere to the CDC’s guidelines on…

PlayStation 5 Versus Xbox Series X: The Tech Specs

This week we learned the technical specs for the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5. How do the two consoles stack up so far? Despite only knowing what one of the two looks like, they are not so different, X and 5. Before we get into it, keep in mind these are just numbers…

PlayStation 5’s Backward Compatibility Won’t Arrive All At Once

PlayStation 5 will be backward compatible with PlayStation 4 games, but Sony said today to expect it to be a gradual rollout that needs to be tested on a per-game basis. “We recently took a look at the top 100 PS4 titles as ranked by play time, and we’re expecting almost all of them to…

White House Doctor: We Need Millennials To Stay Healthy Because They Know How To Speedrun Video Games

During today’s White House press conference the Trump administration’s Coronavirus Task Force response coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx, called on millenials to take the threat of infection more seriously. Why? Because they are “part of that group that brought us innovation, particularly throughout all of their ability to look around corners and skip through games.” “I…

Physical Copies Of Final Fantasy VII Remake May Be Delayed Due To Pandemic

The current covid-19 pandemic has left many things uncertain. As businesses struggle to adjust to the situation, video game publishers are preparing players for unexpected disruptions to their gaming plans. Square-Enix is now cautioning players that while the Final Fantasy VII Remake will release as planned, physical copies might not reach everyone who ordered them.…

Animal Crossing Taught Me How To Be An Adult

Much of the time, but especially right now, the world doesn’t feel like it makes a whole lot of sense. It’s chaotic, it’s unpredictable, and things always seem to come up that completely derail the best-made plans. I learned that as a kid by playing Animal Crossing, a game that, much like life, doesn’t have…

Satirical Twitch Streamer Kaceytron Suspended For ‘Insensitive’ Coronavirus Joke

While Twitch has not explicitly stated that dark jokes about covid-19 are grounds for an indefinite stay in the site’s purple-barred slammer, it’s now spoken with its actions. Popular satirical streamer Kaceytron has been suspended after making such a joke last week. Kaceytron (real name Kacey Caviness) was on an episode of reality show streamer…

Microsoft Adds More Stuff You Probably Won’t Use To Game Pass Ultimate

Today, Microsoft announced it’s expanding the Game Pass Ultimate subscription to include “perks,” extra goodies like in-game currency and cosmetic packs for certain games available through the service. While it’s a small gesture, it’s part of the company’s ongoing attempt to make subscribers feel like they’re getting their money’s worth. The first set of games…

Here Are The PlayStation 5’s Technical Specs

It might only have 10.28 teraflops to the Xbox Series X’s 12, but the PlayStation 5 is still a pretty powerful machine. Check out the hardware powering Sony’s next-gen console, including its custom AMD Zen 2 CPU and super-fast SSD. As PlayStation 5 lead system architect Mark Cerny does a deep dive into the engineering…