Esports

Overwatch Pro Says He Wishes His Dramatic Reprimanding Hadn’t Been Filmed

After a hot-and-cold season with Overwatch League team the LA Valiant, DPS player Brady “Agilities” Girardi found himself in a rainy In-N-Out burger parking lot with team CEO Noah Whinston. And a camera person. The resulting official “Inside LA Valiant” video segment, in which Whinston informed Agilities that he had one last shot at making…

Geguri’s Overwatch League Debut Was A Beautiful Moment

When CrackerJess, the wife of my Overwatch buddy CrackerJack*, heard there were no women in the Overwatch League, she was livid. She’d never played a first-person shooter before, preferring Lindy Hop dancing to long computer sessions yelling over a microphone. She had no attachment to the scene, no serious gaming ambitions. What set her off,…

All The Items For Sale At The Overwatch League Gift Shop, Ranked [UPDATE]

Blizzard’s arena in Los Angeles, California is the real deal. And by that, I mean it has a gift shop, the surest marker of any worth-its-salt sporting enterprise. I have investigated the gift shop; here is a definitive ranking of the items for sale in it, from worst to best. [This post originally ran on…

The Shanghai Dragons’ Signings Were Good, But Not Nearly Enough

Kim “Geguri” Se-yeon finally made her debut for the Shanghai Dragons last night, a huge deal—the first game ever for the first woman in America’s most prominent esports league yet. And like every other match they’ve played in the Overwatch League, the Dragons got trounced, this time by the Dallas Fuel. But there were some…

Overwatch League Player Gets Three-Game Suspension And “Streaming Privileges Revoked” For Racist Gesture

The Overwatch League’s leaked code of conduct gives Blizzard and the OWL an incredible amount of control over players, including anything that happens on their own streams, so part of the latest punishment for a heated gaming moment comes as no surprise. After the Philadelphia Fusion’s Josh “Eqo” Corona made a slant-eye gesture and said…

Overwatch Star Has Advice For Mercy Players: “Be Selfish”

Overwatch’s Mercy is a “support” hero, which in layman’s terms means she’s mopping up trails of blood left behind after Overwatch battles. Mercy’s job is to heal her weak teammates, assisting them as they lay waste to enemies. It’s an apparently subservient job often painted as easy, and therefore, undervalued—that is, unless you’re Hong “Ark”…

Please Spoil The Whole Draft

Persona 4 Arena Player Wins Tournament In The Flashiest Way Possible

Over the weekend, Anime Ascension hosted several anime-styled fighting game tournaments. Although Persona 4 Arena Ultimax was was relegated to side tournament status in favor of newer games, its ending was one of the most exciting moments of the entire event. Based on the role-playing game of the same name, Persona 4 Arena Ultimax takes…

New York’s Overwatch League Team Finally Came Home To Meet Its Fans

At Overwatch League team New York Excelsior’s first-ever New York fan meet-and-greet, a preteen girl in braces broke out sobbing after coming face-to-face with player Joong-hwa “Janus” Song, a sub. Janus doesn’t play much. When he’s called in, he almost exclusively operates the ape hero Winston, and only on specific maps. In front of Janus,…

Injustice 2‘s New Tutorial Mode Is Unusually Clear For A Fighting Game

Picking up a fighting game is never easy, and few releases do anything to help new players acclimate to the genre. The developers behind Injustice 2 are hoping to buck that trend in its latest revision with something they call the Learn Hub. When Injustice 2 launched in May 2017, it included a bare-bones tutorial…

Dragon Ball FighterZ‘s Best Player Does It With Defense

Goichi “Go1″ Kishida has been dominating the Dragon Ball FighterZ scene since the game came out with a devastating lineup of Adult Gohan, Cell, and Vegeta. His success isn’t really in dealing punches and kicks, though: it’s that it’s almost impossible to land blows on him. The rhythm of a Versus style game like Dragon…

The Overwatch League Stage Playoffs Are Letting The Top Seed Pick Their Opponent

The Overwatch League’s stage playoffs are expanding again, this time adding another team to the mix and removing the first-round bye for the top-seeded team in the league. After the marathon that was stage 1 playoffs, the league moved playoffs to Sundays, allowing an extra day for matches. Starting with stage 3—which kicks off this…

Twitch Isn’t For Esports, It’s For Streamers

On Friday afternoon, news leaked that Twitch had cut more than 25 jobs, mostly from Twitch Studios, an in-house production group, and the company’s community and marketing teams. The laid-off employees—some of whom had been with Twitch since its inception—were reportedly told that the company had overhired and needed to resize as part of what…

Overwatch League’s Eqo Faces Punishment After Making Slant-Eye Gesture On Stream

Josh “Eqo” Corona of the Philadelphia Fusion is in hot water with his team and maybe the Overwatch League after making a slant-eye gesture about Korean players during an Overwatch stream last weekend. After someone compared his skill to a Korean player’s, Corona (who was born in Colombia and raised in Israel) said “I am…

League Of Legends Star’s Brother Charged With Stabbing Their Parents, Murdering Their Mother [UPDATE]

Yihong Peng, older brother of League of Legends superstar Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng, was arrested and charged with the murder of his mother and assault of his father on Saturday in San Juan Capistrano, California. According to a statement by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, Peng’s 59-year-old mother Wei Ping Shen was stabbed to death. His…

Rocket League Match Ends In Game Of Keepie Uppie

Cloud9 has secured a neat 3-0 at the end of its match yesterday against Out of Style in the Rocket League championship series. Mariano “Squishy” Arruda was not content to let the game end at the zero, however, and caught the ball at just the last second for a game of keepie uppie A game…

A Japanese Virtua Fighter Tournament Returned From Hiatus, And It Was Rad

Amid all the pro circuits and premiers for games like Street Fighter and Tekken, you might have forgotten about another classic: Virtua Fighter. Last night in Japan, 510 entrants gathered in Tokyo to play some Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown and y’all, it was pretty rad. To boil it down, Virtua Fighter is a very…

Amazon’s Breakaway is officially no longer in active development, as we reported last October. A spokesperson posted a statement on the Breakaway subreddit, saying that “after a lot of soul searching, the team decided to focus on new ideas.”

League of Legends Stream Follows One Pro’s Perspective For Entire Match

Fnatic and Team Vitality clashed in the European League Championship Series spring semifinals today, a match that would end in victory for the former. While the game itself was interesting, it was the manner of broadcast that grabbed my attention. In addition to the regular main stream, Riot Games broadcast a second stream that was…

StarCraft Anniversary Stream Is Part LAN Party, Part Reunion

This weekend marks the 20th anniversary of the StarCraft franchise. A lot of folks have a lot of love for this series, and few more than the crew that have gathered in what appears to be a Blizzard backlot studio to host a celebration stream A couch of StarCraft personalities Sean “Day9″ Plott, Nick “Tasteless”…