After Nearly 40 Years, Video Games Still Don’t Do Lord Of The Rings Justice

For decades, The Lord of the Rings has been one of the world’s most influential and revered stories. While J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy series has been successfully adapted into a beloved film trilogy, the track record of video games set in Middle-Earth has been a bit more dubious. From text-based adventures to movie-licensed tie-ins, from MMORPGs…

All The Video Games You Can’t Play When You’re Pregnant

There are plenty of fun things you can’t really do when pregnant: waterslides, alcohol, trampolines, staying up past 10pm. You’d think that video games would be a totally unaffected pursuit, but as I’ve discovered, even cherished sofa-time is not safe. The first time I found out I was expecting a baby, for instance, I was…

Riot Games To Make Mobile Version of League Of Legends With Tencent

Riot Games is developing a mobile version of League of Legends alongside Chinese tech company Tencent, Reuters said today in a report confirmed by Kotaku A source with knowledge of the upcoming mobile game told Kotaku that it “plays differently” from League of Legends, although it retains the hit MOBA’s general appearance. “The game is…

Lapis X Labyrinth Lights Up My Life

In Lapis X Labyrinth, NIS America’s new dungeon crawler coming to PlayStation 4 and Switch on May 28, a totem-like stack of four adorable adventurers dive into dungeons, seeking their fortune. It’s cute and chaotic, until the fever meter fills, at which point it gets even more cute and chaotic The music changes, the scenery…

Mario Kart Tour Is Pretty Good When It’s Not Nickel And Diming You

The Mario Kart Tour beta is now live for Android users in the United States. I’ve had some time to check out how Nintendo’s upcoming free-to-play mobile game adapts the beloved kart racing series for smartphones. The answer is a mostly faithful but stripped-down recreation of Mario Kart decked out with all the microtransactions and…

How The China-USA Trade War Could Impact Game Hardware

During the 1980s and 90s, Nintendo made its game consoles in Japan. Now, they are made in China and could get more expensive for American consumers. Since late January of last year, the US and China have been in a trade war. As The New York Times reports, the Trump administration has plans to tax…

The Problem With Names In Japanese And In English

Yesterday, Japan’s foreign minister asked the English-language media to write Japanese family names first, as done in Japanese. This would change how Japanese names are typically written in English. For example, famed animator Hayao Miyazaki is Miyazaki Hayao in Japanese, Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto is Miyamoto Shigeru and Prime Minister Shizo Abe is Abe Shinzo.…

Delicious Meal. Kyoto, Japan. By ShuYung Wu. 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! 

Time Buddies

Raul Aguiar is an illustrator and graphic designer from Brazil who has worked in video games, children’s books and magazines. You can see more of Raul’s stuff at his Behance page

Fancy Logos For Games That Don’t Actually Exist

For the past few days, I’ve had the pleasure of reading a copy of Raid, a magazine featuring a bunch of super talented artists and graphic designers coming up with logos and briefs for games that don’t actually exist. A bit like Famicase, then, but just the logos, and not the entire cover/cartridge art. And…

Star Wars: Rogue Squadron Looks Great In HD

A team of fans have been working for over a year on an Unreal Engine 4 version of the original Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, and it is looking absolutely delicious. First released in 1998 on PC and N64, later games in the series—developed for the GameCube—looked a lot nicer, but the original suffered from low-res…

Valve Is Making Its Own Version Of Dota Auto Chess

Late last year, Valve launched the collectible card game Artifact, a spinoff of Dota 2. It flopped so hard that Valve is now revamping it from the ground up. Earlier this year, Dota’s community beat Valve at its own game, creating Dota Auto Chess, a similarly strategic spin-off that, unlike Artifact, has become one of…

Modiphius is releasing a tabletop wargame based on The Elder Scrolls universe Weird choice, seeing as this is an RPG series in which combat is usually a small-scale solo affair, but whatever, licensing! 

Meet The Modder Painstakingly Rebuilding Fallout 76 In Fallout 4

Fallout 76 had a rocky launch, but it’s since established a community that’s making do with what they’ve been given. Still, some of those fans don’t see Fallout 76 as a proper Fallout game, which, for one fan, gave rise to an idea: What if Fallout 76‘s setting of Appalachia was in a proper Fallout…