Helping Hand Is A Clever Idea That Falls Flat

Helping Hand begins with your character getting into a car accident and smashing almost every bone in their body. In the game, you can only communicate with your left hand. It’s more interesting than actually being in a full-body cast, but not by much. The main conceit of Helping Hand is pretty brilliant: you’re in…

Valve Launches Steam.TV, Which Could Be A Twitch Competitor [UPDATE]

Today, Valve quietly debuted what appears to be a new video game streaming platform, which could be a direct competitor to Twitch, called Steam TV Earlier today it came to light that the company had registered the domain Steam.tv after it was first spotted by Pavel Djundik, the curator of the third-party website Steam Database.…

Overwatch World Cup Match Grinds To A Halt When Game Crashes

The primary ingredients for a great Overwatch moment are a) a hotly contested match and b) a cheeky strategy the other team doesn’t see coming. During the fourth game of last night’s Overwatch World Cup match between South Korea and Finland, both these things happened. Then the game crashed. This year’s Overwatch World Cup—in which…

The Weekend In Esports: Call Of Duty World Championship And More

Stay inside, turn on the air conditioning and watch gamers pwn one another to your heart’s content over the weekend, because there are a crap ton of high profile esports tournaments going on. Call of Duty: WWII Call of Duty’s annual championship takes places this weekend in Columbus, Ohio at the Nationwide Arena. For those tired…

Monster Hunter: World Could Be Weirder

Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate comes to the Switch on the 28th. Yesterday, Paul and I streamed the demoand faced off against a massive Valstrax. It’s a sort of laser-shooting dragon that darts around like a fighter jet. As I wait for the full release, it occurs to me that Monster Hunter: World could learn a…

Three Rules The Makers Of Assassin’s Creed Origins Used To Design Quests

Assassin’s Creed Origins is an incomprehensibly large game, so packed with quests that most players will likely never see them all. If you do see them all, however, you may notice that they follow certain rules—rules that Ubisoft detailed pretty specifically while making the game Speaking on the AIAS Game Maker’s Notebook podcast in an…

What Are You Playing This Weekend?

The weekend is for finally making that pasta dish you spent all week planning to make but then kept ordering delicious takeout instead. Also, video games. I don’t have a lot of free time this weekend, but my friends have been bugging me to play some Overwatch with them. I have, in return, been bugging…

PUBG‘s Throwback Mode Is A Reminder Of What Made It Great

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds keeps on expanding, adding new guns and maps that change the game’s pace into something faster than before. The game now has new rules for armor loot drops and tweaks to the dreaded blue zone. PUBG’s latest event mode, ‘Early Access Memories,’ brings back many of the game’s rough edges. Playing it reminded…

Court Blocks Maker Of GTA Online Cheating Programs From Selling Them

Yesterday, a federal judge for the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York issued a preliminary injunction against a man distributing cheating software for Grand Theft Auto V. In other words, he’s prohibited from making or selling any more cheat programs for the game until the court can definitively sort out whether…

There Is No Longer A ‘Best’ Time To Play A Video Game

That game you bought last month isn’t the same game today. It’s almost certainly been patched, updated, rebalanced, and tweaked. The original version is shrinking from view as it washes downriver. But is it better now? Truer? Should you have played more of it back when you bought it, or waited? This article was originally…

Graveyard Keeper Feels Like A Job

If you ever thought that Stardew Valley needed more corpses, Graveyard Keeper is the highly specific game for you. Managing a graveyard, performing autopsies, and keeping the Church happy is a humble and rewarding existence. It’s also hard work; after my first day playing Graveyard Keeper, I was legitimately exhausted. My grandfather worked for years…

The Japanese Voice Of Pokémon‘s Professor Oak Has Died

Voice actor Unsho Ishizuka, who voiced Professor Oak and narrated the Pokémon anime in Japanese, has died. Ishizuka has been voicing Professor Oak and narrating the Pokémon TV anime since the show debuted in Japan in 1997. He also voiced some Pocket Monsters, including Onix and Steelix. Besides his Pokémon anime work, Ishizuka also voiced…

A Rural Stop. At the edge of Toyohashi, Aichi Prefecture. By Majdi Alkhalaf. 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! 

Cops Show Up At Popular YouTuber’s Door Looking For His Elon Musk Flamethrower

Popular YouTuber Tom “ProSyndicate” Cassell just wants to own a flamethrower. Or well, technically it’s a “Not A Flamethrower,” a glorified propane torch mystifyingly produced by that one Elon Musk company that digs tunnels. Police in Cassell’s home of Manchester, England, however, don’t love it. Cassell claims police first started asking around about the Not…

The Dota 2 International’s First Day Marred By Technical Issues

The International 2018 officially got underway yesterday and, surprise, there were a number of problems with various streaming feeds going down in the middle of the Dota 2 matches. Valve sent out a tweet last night apologizing for the outages, but given how big and lucrative the event is, it still feels like the company…

Battle For Azeroth Blood Lust Fades Quickly

When World of Warcraft’s seventh expansion pack went live on Monday, Blizzard’s dramatic pre-launch events had whipped me into an anti-Horde frenzy. Three days later, I just want to hang with these snake critters. War’s over, everybody go home. My first few hours with the expansion were filled with the same story-based, single-player questing I’ve…