Square Enix is trying to get players back into Final Fantasy XI by helping them reactivate their old accounts. At PAX East in Boston, the company has a tiny station next to its giant Final Fantasy XIV showcase where someone will use your original email or other info to try and perform some internet archeology.

The Underground, Activist Gaming Scene In Communist Czechoslovakia

In the ’80s in Czechoslovakia, a Soviet-dominated state under a communist regime, a small contingent of gamers were cannibalizing ping pong balls, drawer handles and calculator keys to use as track balls, joysticks and buttons. At that time, video games were “the least censored media in the country,” according to Jaroslav Švelch, author of Gaming…

My Sims Won’t Freaking Stay In One Place To Finish A Meal

Where do you eat dinner? At the table? On the couch? In your bed? If you’re a Sim, you eat all of your meals at all three of those places consecutively during the same meal. I’m freaking sick of it. In The Sims 4, Sims refuse to sit and stay seated while they eat. I…

Man Makes A Real Version Of Sekiro‘s Umbrella Shield

In Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, there is a metal umbrella that can protect against attacks. Inventor Colin Furze decided to make a real-world version and then shoot firecrackers and fire at himself. The original in-game Loaded Umbrella is quite a stylized concept, so it’s neat to see that a real-world version does work as an…

Popular Overwatch League Player Quits After Just One Month To Resume Streaming Career

Overwatch League has plenty of astoundingly skilled players, but very few stars whose popularity transcends the game’s still relatively niche esports scene. Now it’s time to mark another burgeoning name off the list, because Atlanta Reign’s Daniel “Dafran” Francesca has quit after just one month of play during his debut season. Dafran, a controversy-prone player…

District 9 Is Getting A Board Game [Update]

Fresh off their success with last year’s GKR, Weta are now working to turn the studio’s 2009 sci-fi classic District 9 into a board game as well. At first glance, it’s pretty similar! The same punchy art style is there, there are hexes to move on and loads of very cool miniatures included in the…

Man Pleads Guilty To Hacking Both Microsoft And Nintendo

A 24 year-old man from England has pleaded guilty to charges of hacking into both Microsoft and Nintendo’s servers, causing an estimated $3-4 million damages. As The Verge report, Zammis Clark—a former security researcher at Malwarebytes—went before a court in London this week accused of accessing servers at both companies, stealing user information, accessing files…

Now Jedi Knight Has HD Textures Made By An AI

First Doom, then Final Fantasy, now Lucasarts’ Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II is getting a tasteful HD makeover courtesy of neural networks, which are able to take dirty old textures and get them looking closer to 2019 standards all by themselves. The work here is being done by ESRGAN, also known as “dark…

Fortnite Pros Still Don’t Have A Good Way To Practice

Fortnite’s World Cup begins April 13 and will be comprised of weekly online matches leading up to a final with a $30 million prize pool in July in New York City. The weekly tournaments each have a $1 million pool, which means there’s a lot of money on the table for would-be pros—if they can…

When Fashion Photography Meets Cosplay

Rizaldy Celi is a fashion photographer who is just getting into cosplay, and I love the way he’s bringing his eye for the former into his work on the latter. You can see more of Rizaldy’s stuff at his Instagramand personal site

The New Power Rangers Fighting Game Could Use A Lot More Power Rangers 

The colorful, spandex-clad martial artists of Power Rangers are the perfect subject for a basic but enjoyable three-on-three fighting game like Battle for the Grid. But with 26 seasons of television featuring more than 140 different heroes, the starting roster should at least be in the double digits, and not nine. I was super excited…

Outward Is A Merciless Fantasy Game Where You’re Just A Regular Person

When I began Outward, I found myself surrounded by a murmuring crowd of villagers. They were gathered not to cheer my impending heroic escapades or tell me that I was destined to kill god, but instead to inform me that I was in debt, and I had five days to pay it off before I…

Control Is As Weird As Alan Wake, But Much More Open

In some ways, development studio Remedy’s upcoming action game Control has slid under the radar. After an announcement at last year’s E3, Control quietly simmered in the background of upcoming game releases. I played some of the game last week at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco. It was an intriguing mixture of exciting…

Hands-On With The Gorgeous New Ninja Gaiden-Like Cyber Shadow 

Cyber Shadow is a retro-looking action platformer that that looks beautiful and controls just as tightly. There have been a lot of those recently, like The Messenger, which channeled Ninja Gaiden, as well as Bloodstained: Curse Of The Moon, a mini-ode to classic Castlevania. Cyber Shadow isn’t entirely original in that regard, but based on…