Tracking The Fighting Game Community’s ‘Minor Leagues’

As with most competitive endeavors, major events with big names are given a lion’s share of the public’s attention. This tendency is reflected in Capcom’s official rankings for their Street Fighter V circuit, which only tracks results for the tournaments they deem notable. The fighting game community, however, emphasizes open pools at every level of…

Skateboarder Nyjah Huston Is Amazing (But His Video Game Isn’t)

California skater Nyjah Huston now has his own skateboarding game. For a mobile game, it’s pretty fun, but I wish it were as entertaining as watching him skate. I grew up playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and it gave me an appreciation of skateboarding. I was never coordinated enough to skate for real, so I…

I’m Hooked On A Game About Cleaning Up Murder Scenes

Playing a preview build of Body of Evidence, I found myself working against the clock to clean up crime scenes and hide dead bodies. As I meticulously scrubbed blood out of hardwood floors and tabletops, I felt exhilarated to play a role in a situation I hope I never take part in. In Body of…

A new patch for Hollow Knight on Switch fixes a variety of bugs, including one in which players—especially charming, wonderful players—who killed Brooding Mawlek at the same time he killed them wouldn’t get the mask shard the mini-boss drops. Thanks to the patch, the shard can now be claimed retroactively.

Octopath Traveler: The Kotaku Review

Eight people gather in a tavern, swapping stories and preparing for adventure. It’s not clear why they’re traveling together—there’s a pious cleric and a murderous dancer in this odd crew—but they’ve united nonetheless. As they wander across the world, each of these people gets their turn to take the reins. In one city the hunter…

Fortnite Gets Golf Carts, Portals And A Desert With Season 5

Released this morning, Fortnite’s Season 5 is like a whole new game. With two new locations, toys, an All Terrain Kart and some spooky, weird space-time rifts, today’s Fortnite is in an entirely different universe. Leading up to the patch, publisher Epic Games made some mysterious and intriguing changes to the game to tease the…

Arcade Mania. Osaka, Japan. By Luis Montemayor | Flickr 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!   

Fallout: New Vegas Player Beats Game On Hardest Difficulty Without Killing Anyone Or Dying

There are self-imposed challenges, and then there’s gleeful masochism. This Fallout: New Vegas run looks like the latter. Rhetam, the gleeful masochist in question, played the game without allowing himself to do any direct lasting damage to anybody but himself. It took him more than a year to complete. In March 2017, Rhetam began his…

A Two-Faced Opponent

Elias Ravanetti is an artist and illustrator from Italy. You can see more of Elias’ work—he’s got a particular affinity for creature design—at his ArtStation page Fine Art is a celebration of the work of video game artists, showcasing the best of both their professional and personal portfolios. If you’re in the business and have…

Giant Mech Fighting Game Will Crush Cities Underfoot

Override: Mech City Brawl is a game with two hooks: one, you’re controlling a huge mech in a fight against other huge mechs, and two, in true Tokusatsu fashion, the buildings underneath those mechs are gonna get trashed There’s both online and local play, as well as a singleplayer campaign. However, the most interesting mode…

In 2018, A PC Game Is Being Made In DOS

MS-DOS, the text-based operating system people used to use before Windows took over the planet, was how PC games were played in ancient times. It’s been dead for decades, but one developer figures 2018 is as good a time as any to make a brand new game for it. Having raised $100,000 in a Kickstarter,…

Fans Are Expanding Portal’s Universe Even If Valve Won’t

Valve released Portal 2 in 2011, and that’s the last time players returned to the Aperture Science Enrichment Center, except as a backdrop for demoing new VR tech. The dream of exploring beyond the end of the second game has been kept alive, though, thanks to mods. The latest of them, Destroyed Aperture, has been…

Mapmaker, A Board Game About Gerrymandering And How Terrible It Is

Gerrymandering—“a practice intended to establish a political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating district boundaries”—is a problem in a lot of places, but few are as badly affected as the USA. So a group of young Texans decided to make a board game about it to highlight the issue. The Houston Chronicle…

Overwatch‘s Highest-Level Player Games 12 Hours Per Day On Top Of His Job

Earlier this month, TreeboyDave became the first person to ever hit level 6,000 in Overwatch, a climb to the top of the 40-million-player heap that he estimates has taken him 9,000 hours. Despite that, he says he’s not even close to ready to hang up his keyboard. TreeboyDave is currently level 6,087, having gained more…