Culture

Activision Blizzard Boasts Record Results While Employees Protest Pay Inequity

Activision Blizzard boasted of “record results” for Q2 2020 in an earnings report released earlier today, with an eye on long-term growth thanks to the boost received in the previous quarter from the ongoing covid-19 pandemic. This financial victory lap, however, comes just days after workers collaborated on a spreadsheet designed to highlight pay inequity…

The Co-Creator Of The Computer Mouse Has Died

Bill English, one of the two men responsible for the invention of the computer mouse you may be resting your hand on right now, has died at the age of 91. Along with Douglas Engelbart, who passed away in 2013, English helped usher in the era of modern computing by creating a device that could…

World Of Warcraft Classic: Maybe You Can’t Go Home Again

My brother and I started taking World of Warcraft Classic seriously again two weeks ago. We both played during the mid-2000s Vanilla period—the era Classic attempts to replicate—and jumped into Classic last year, grinding to the mid-20s. Back then, it really seemed like Blizzard’s experiment was going to work. Stormwind and Ironforge, the two most…

Just How Lethal Is Ghost Of Tsushima’s ‘Lethal’ Difficulty?

The devs bill it as more difficult than Hard, but in practice it’s more a gameplay tweak.

I Thought I Missed Out On A Free Rare Warframe Suit, And It Sent Me To A Dark Place

Sometimes, you don’t know how much you want something until you realize it may have already slipped through your fingers. That’s what I told myself on Saturday, as sunk-cost fallacy convinced me to feverishly calculate how much it would cost to buy a Warframe suit that had been completely free less than an hour prior.…

Fall Guys Servers Can’t Keep Up With Launch Day Popularity

Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout released today on PC and PlayStation 4 to much fanfare—perhaps too much. The hotly anticipated physics-based party platformer has been plagued by server issues all day. Connection issues started shortly after 8:00 a.m. ET. According to the game’s official Twitter account, more than 120,000 players connected to the game at once,…

Yakuza: Like A Dragon Battle Menus Now Spell ‘SEGA’ Thanks To Joking Tweet

Game development is a collaborative effort between designers, programmers, and writers, which on big productions can number in the hundreds. It can take years to get a specific mechanic or cutscene right, and even then, it might still fall flat with players. But in the case of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, some of the best…

Even Lapsed Overwatch Players Love Pharah’s New Lifeguard Skin

It’s summer. Per tradition, this means that the Overwatch team must give somebody abs, or face dire consequences. So Pharah is a lifeguard now. Cue the entire internet dramatically leaping into the ocean and pretending to drown in hopes that somebody—nobody specific, of course—might come save them. It would be an understatement to say that…

How’s It Going?: Lost Edition

It’s a very rainy Tuesday! Welcome back to our daily open thread. I stayed up far too late last night looking for a document from my past that I don’t think I have anymore but I know I wouldn’t have purposefully thrown away. I could clearly picture it folded up and shoved into some book,…

Snowman’s incredibly chill snow/sandboarding games, Alto’s Adventure and Alto’s Oddysey, are coming to consoles and PC. The two games are combined into one as The Alto Collection, launching August 13 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC via the Epic Game Store, with a Switch version coming at a later date.

Xbox Game Pass Ultimate Adds Cloud Gaming September 15

As announced in July, Microsoft’s Project xCloud game streaming service is becoming part of the $15-a-month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription service on September 15, allowing users to stream more than 100 Xbox games to their Android phones and tablets. In a pair of posts on Xbox Wire, Microsoft details the games subscribers can play…

Sushi Used To Be Much Larger In The Past

During the Edo Period (1603-1868) of Japan, sushi was between two and four times larger than it is today. But why? One of the biggest reasons is that Edo (present-day Tokyo), where sushi was invented, was a metropolis from which large numbers of people were passing in and out. They needed food they could take…

Track: Labyrinth | Artist: Mondo Grosso | Album: Labyrinth – EP

‘Tis But A Flesh Wound

Viko Menezes is an artist from Brazil who has done work for companies like Valve, Wizards of the Coast and Fantasy Flight. You can see more of Viko’s stuff at his personal site and ArtStation page

This 1990 TV News Report Is For The Monkey Island Fans In The House

Amateur games historian Eon Fafnir posted a clip of this 1990 local news story about LucasArts (then still known as LucasFilm Games) yesterday, and while it’s fascinating getting a look behind the scenes of the studio during some its golden years, Monkey Island fans can squint and see some stuff that never made the finished…

Super Mario 64 Took 622 Days To Develop, Suggests ‘Gigaleak’ Document

Super Mario 64 is arguably one of the best games of all time, not only due to how fun it is but also because of the technological leap it represented for the platforming genre. According to a document included in the recent “Gigaleak,” however, this monumental project took less than two years of actual development.…

Overwatch Cosplay Lights Up The Darkness

Cosplayer Zibartas—who we’ve seen here before with some top-tier Overwatch work—has truly outdone himself here, building a complete set of Mercy’s wings made out of steel and aluminium, that move and really light up. Here’s the finished product: God damn If you’d like to see how something like this was put together, Zibartas has made…

Let’s Talk Fields Of Glory, A Forgotten RTS Pioneer

When people hail the pioneering classics of the RTS genre, they go through a list of usual suspects. Games like Cytron Masters, Dune II, Command & Conquer, Sega’s Herzog Zwei…but there’s one I don’t think ever gets its due, and that’s Spectrum Holobyte’s Fields of Glory Released on the PC in 1993, and designed by…

Call Of Duty Is Finally Blowing The Top Off The Warzone Stadium

Warzone’s stadium explosion was officially revealed with today’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare trailer. The teased eventwill finally come to fruition with Season 5, which kicks off on August 5 across PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. Call of Duty’s Warzone makes a great companion to Modern Warfare’s standard multiplayer, but the battle royale map…

Jumpstart‘s The Only Way I Wanna Play Magic: The Gathering Arena

Magic: The Gathering’s new format Jumpstart is the only way I want to play Magic for the rest of my life. I love playing Magic, both paper and online with Arena. I love opening new cards. I love the art. I love beating dudes who are much better than me, like I did this weekend…