Esports

Inside The Weird World Of Video Game Wrestling Leagues

Ghosts, weddings and hit-and-runs are all just small threads that wrestling has used throughout the WWE’s legacy to drive storylines. But for the non-wrestling fans who prefer their action in the vein of Celebrity Deathmatch, there exists a small but fervent community of wrestling modders, crafting some of the most exotic and extravagant cards in…

The Weekend In Esports: Gears Of War Goes To The Beach

Dota 2 returns this weekend with the Asia Championships, while big things are also happening across League of Legends and elsewhere. A little game called Gears of War 4 is also returns with a major tournament down at the Jersey shore. If you woke up early enough this morning you might have even caught Evil…

Dueling Dota 2 Pocket Picks Culminate In Bananas Comeback

The lower bracket seems like a strange place for a match-up like Evil Geniuses and Wings Gaming to happen, but in the first round of the Dota 2 Asia Championships bracket, both teams found themselves on their last leg in a best-of-one match. Back against the wall, both teams turned to oddball strategies, leading to…

A Southern California Tournament Curse Plagues Top Smash Bros. Players

Call it a curse. Call it a jinx. Something is currently afflicting a series of Super Smash Bros. for Wii U tournaments. The Saga events are run by a group called 2GGaming in Southern California and are typically named after a player or players who have been flown in to compete. The problem is that,…

Legendaries Do Not Ruin Competitive Pokémon

Legendary Pokémon get a bum rap in competitive play. Many casual observers and players constantly ask why legendaries are allowed in the first place. Aren’t legendaries overpowered? Don’t legendaries make battles boring? I see sentiments like these expressed all the time on social media: These beliefs don’t represent the full spectrum of competitive Pokémon players…

Dota 2 Skin Creators Say Valve Is Ripping Them Off

Designers who say they are able to make a living selling outfits and skins for Dota 2 say they may need to get new gigs now that they’ve noticed an unannounced change to the game’s economy affecting their bank accounts. In a post on the Dota 2 subreddit, a collective of anonymous artists alleged that…

Magic: The Gathering‘s Head Designer Has A Damn Hard Job

“Magic is secretly, not really … it’s not one game,” head Magic: The Gathering designer Mark Rosewater told me. “It is actually a bunch of different games that all have a shared rule system. Every time I make a card set, I’m making the game for everybody, but for each person, it’s a different game…

Street Fighter V‘s Most Heated Rivalry Intensified Last Night

There’s nothing fake about the rivalry between Street Fighter V pros Kenneth “K-Brad” Bradley and Joshua “Wolfkrone” Philpot, but last night, Eleague gave the pair a chance to play it up for the cameras. It’s not exactly a years-long feud, but it’s already a popular one. The first notable stand-off between the pair happened last…

Blizzard Revokes Two Invites To Global Hearthstone Tournament for “Unsportsmanlike” Comments

Blizzard has revoked the invites of two players, Thomas “Sintolol” Zimmer and Mats “P4wnyhof” Kathage, to the upcoming Global Games because of “recent, inappropriate, and unsportsmanlike comments,” after at least one player protested the inclusion of P4wnyhof by withdrawing from the tournament. The Hearthstone Global Games is a congregation of international Hearthstone players, a special…

Twitch is rolling out support for 1080p and 60 fps streaming. For esports heads especially, this is good news. Viewers can now choose a higher stream quality, so they’ll see every little detail of every silly Overwatch play. 

Street Fighter V Fans Are Highlighting Akuma’s Flaws By Obliterating Him In Two Combos

The latest goal for the fighting game community is simple: kill Akuma in Street Fighter V using just two combos. The challenge began last Friday when a player named Javits Arias posted a Tweet, asking his fellow competitors to deplete Akuma’s health Arias wanted players to start the first combo with a jump-in attack and…

Pro Overwatch Team Known For Wild Plays Finally Meet Their Match

Over the course of the big APEX Overwatch tournament, Meta Athena went from unassuming underdog to dark horse favorite with plays that seemed to spring forth from some mad scientist’s lab, freshly glistening with incubation tube goop. Their winning streak, however, has finally come to an end. In the most recent semifinal match of the…

TBS’s Eleague Takes the Life Out of Fighting Games

The third season of TBS’ esports tournament is the first to feature a fighting game. Judging by yesterday’s premiere online broadcast, which will lead into televised episodes, it’s got problems. So far, it’s too quiet, too subdued, and too weirdly structured to work well as a fighting game event. The first two seasons of Eleague…

For Honor’s Peacekeeper Is Apparently So Overpowered, A Tournament Is Now Banning Her

It was inevitable: For Honor players have determined which of its heroes is overpowered and must be banished. In a game so dependent on balance, For Honor’s Peacekeeper won’t jibe at an upcoming Major League Gaming tournament. Eurogamer reports that the Peacekeeper is rubbing players the wrong way. She can spam her light attack, which…

Rivals of Aether Makes The Smash Bros. Formula Feel New Again

Rivals of Aether, out today, wants to become every newbie’s first platform fighter. Rather than relegating that throne to Smash Bros., Rivals of Aether guts the iconic Nintendo game while retaining the skeleton of its famous playstyle. In a genre monopolized by an established AAA game, Rivals succeeds at nearly everything it sets out to…

Two ‘Weak’ Characters Rampaged Through A Recent Smash Bros. Tournament

At last weekend’s Civil War tournament for Super Smash Bros. on Wii U, amid the gargantuan upsets, two players were busy fighting their way to the top, against the top pros in the world, using tools many would argue were ineffective for the job. Tier lists—artificial ratings of a character’s viability at the highest level…

Tournament Trolls Competitors By Making Them Dance To Smash Mouth

Dance Dance Revolution and its many copycats (Pump It Up, In the Groove, etc) already feel like a blast from the past. So why not lean into that? Tournament organizers at Rumble in the Prairie 9 yesterday decided to re-live 1999 and troll their competitors in the process. These competitors played on In the Groove…

Smash 4’s Competitive Scene Is Hype Because Nintendo Leaves It Alone

Last weekend’s Super Smash Bros. 4 tournament, one of the most anticipated yet, was a wrestling-style rivalry match between two crews led by two Smash titans. Drawing over 50,000 viewers, Civil War was a DIY event from the ground up. It’s the kind of event that could only exist around a gaming community left to…

Three Overkills Highlight Series Sweep In Halo World Championships

In the lower bracket semi-finals of the 2017 Halo World Championships, Team Envy and Str8 Rippin were fighting to stay afloat in the bracket. On match point for Envy, both teams’ players showed up in a stellar display of Halo ability. After a long technical delay, the series resumed with Envy up 3-0. Str8 Rippin would…

Protoss Prodigy Stats Wins Global StarCraft League Finals

Last night was a fond walk down memory lane for any StarCraft fan. Between the announcement of StarCraft Remastered and the showmatches between old Brood War favorites like Lee Jae Dong and Lee “Flash” Young Ho, anticipation kept building for the night’s climactic battle for the Global StarCraft II League finals. Kim “Stats” Dae Yeob…