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…

No Man’s Sky Malcontent Says He Was Just Role-Playing An Evil Emperor

Three days ago, a No Man’s Sky community leader saw one of her bases erased by a notorious streamer who roleplays as a tyrannical overlord. In response, the community put their foot down. SeriusGamerX, or SGX, is a streamer who mainly plays No Man’s Sky. His whole gimmick is that he’s an evil overlord, playing…

Meet The Controller Mechanic Who Repairs Smash Pros’ Hardware On The Fly

In a poorly-lit corner of a former Polish wedding venue in Brooklyn, New York, Giovanni “ShinG” Nieves took a screwdriver to a GameCube controller as a crowd of customers waited. Nieves, in a red bomber jacket and a fade haircut, was reverse-engineering a Super Smash Bros. 4 competitor’s controller at a tournament called Smash Sounds.…

Why Mafia III’s Developers Cut Its Initial, ‘Shocking’ Opening

Mafia 3’s opening used to be much more intense, the game’s director has revealed. A “cold open” sequence that ended with the main character killing a cop was eventually cut from the game—and apparently deleted from the developer’s servers, so it never gets out. Speaking at the Brighton Develop Conference yesterday, as reported by Eurogamer,…

Twitter Bots Can’t Stop Snarking About No Man’s Sky And Persona 5

Tons of Twitter bots are still just pictures of boobs asking for your credit card information, but programmers have also used the format to make some cool shit. Every Teenager Bot and Gradients are genuinely fun little experiments that brighten up my timeline. But every botmaker struggles with getting flagged as spam, and some bots…

The Modders Bringing A Bunch Of Rockstar’s Cities Into GTA San Andreas

The Grand Theft Auto games’ massive cities are separate from one another. You can’t fly west from the Florida-based Vice City to the LA-inspired Los Santos. But one fan and his small team of modders are trying to make this possible, in GTA: San Andreas. There are a bunch of fan projects and mods focused…

Esports Player’s Use Of Homophobic Slur Sets Off Unexpectedly Long Debate

This week, esports host Frankie Ward won “Presenter of the Year” at the UK Esports Awards, and she used her acceptance speech to make a pledge: “There is no room for homophobic or racist or misogynist language in the esports industry.” Her pledge follows on the heels of a week-long debate among esports stars and…

The Star Ocean Mobile Game Is Easy To Hate And Still Play Anyway

There’s finally a new Star Ocean game after 2016’s barebones Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness. Unfortunately, Star Ocean: Anamnesis, the latest entry, free-to-play, only on smartphones, and a gacha game to boot. The first of those would be forgivable if not for the second, but as a slot machine for collecting characters from Star Oceans…

The first day of this month’s Overwatch League finals will be broadcast on ESPN, with finals highlights airing on ABC. That’s part of a multi-year deal announced by ESPN/Disney today that’ll put other finals games on Disney XD and ESPN2/3 as well. OWL’s Twitch deal remains intact, according to the report.

Zangief Cosplay Visits A Japanese Public Bath 

Bodybuilder Taichi Shimizu already does an excellent Zangief cosplay. So put him in a public bathhouse, and the cosplay looks like the downtime during Street Fighter II These photos were taken by photographer Maruo Kono for a Red Bull shoot. You can see more of Kono’s work on his official site and more of these…

This Year’s Banned Pokémon Anime Episode

Earlier this spring, the 64th episode of the Sun & Moon anime aired in Japan. Since then, the episode’s English dub has not been broadcasted in the U.S. Rather, it was skipped entirely. As Bulbapedia and Gamerant (via Yurukuyaru) explain, Ash dresses up like a Passimian in the episode. However, it’s not merely that he…

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Boss Fight

Pedro Krüger Garcia is a concept artist and illustrator from Brazil. You can see more of Pedro’s work 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 some concept, environment, promotional…