The First Five PC Games I Use To Test A New Graphics Card

First, you spend too much on a new graphics card. Then, you fire up your chewiest, toughest PC games and make them beg for mercy. For one brief moment, your exorbitant purchase feels completely reasonable. Last week I bought a new top-of-the-line GTX 1080, a purchase I rationalized by telling myself I should get it…

Go Home, Krampus, It’s July

Nick De Spain is a concept artist at Turtle Rock, the developers of games like Evolve and the original Left 4 Dead You can see more of Nick’s work at his ArtStation page To see the larger pics in all their glory (or, if they’re big enough, so you can save them as wallpaper), click…

Finding A Magikarp In Pokémon Go Is Hilarious

Yes, the GOAT is in the newly released Pokémon Go, and boy, is he turning up in some pretty unexpected places. As you may already know, Pokémon Go is an augmented reality game that lets you catch Pokémon located in the real world. (We wrote our impressions here, if you’re curious.) Right now, Pokémon Go…

Doom‘s New Photo Mode Is A Beautiful Nightmare Factory

As part of Doom’s first major post-release update last week, id Software added a photo mode, and people are already doing amazing things with it. Here’s what it looks like when the photo mode kicks into gear: You spend much of Doom running ‘n gunning, not really paying attention to the details unfolding around you.…

Hearthstone‘s Most Ridiculous Card Reignites Debate Over Randomization

Is Yogg-Saron broken? Hearthstone’s most ridiculous new card is reigniting debates over one of the game’s core principles and a tenet that Blizzard has stood by for years now: RNG. RNG, a colloquial video game acronym that stands for “random number generation” and is used to refer to any outcome that’s determined by randomized decisions…

VR Has Its Roots In Ancient Rome

Probably my favorite virtual reality experience was unearthed around 1863 in the Roman suburb of Prima Porta. Well, it’s not a virtual reality experience as much as it’s an illusionistic fresco on four walls, but bear with me. In the villa of Livia Drusilla (58 BCE-29 CE), the wife of the first emperor of Rome,…

Watch This Excellent Speedrunner Power Through Zelda: Link’s Awakening

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is one of the best—maybe even the best Zelda game, so it’s a treat to watch speedrunner ZorlaxSeven blaze through it all in just under an hour and a half. Performed earlier this week at SGDQ, this Link’s Awakening run is really fun to watch thanks to some great…

Pokémon GO Players Are Saying the Game Kills Battery Life 

In what should surprise no one, Pokémon GO seems to drain phones. Pokémon GO has been rolled out in Australia and New Zealand (check out these microtransactions). The game sounds fun, but one common comment seems to be that the game uses a whole bunch of battery life. Website CyberShack notes that the game’s heavy…

Japanese Politician Campaigns With A Cat

It’s not that cats are important in Japanese politics. Cats are important. Full stop. This is Satoshi Shima. He previously worked at mobile carrier Softbank, and before that, he was a member of Japanese Parliament. He’s now running to represent the Mikawa region in Aichi Prefecture in the upcoming election. During Japanese elections, candidates plaster…

Cannon Busters, the Kickstarter-backed anime project worked on by folks from Black Dynamite, Darksiders, Legend of Korra and Macross, has actually been made! Here’s the trailer for the first episode, which premieres for backers on July 8.

Overwatch’s Bring Your Daughter To Work Day

Overwatch cosplay is quicklymoving past literal recreation into the world of…more fanciful things. Here, for example, are Soldier: 76 and D.Va. Who are probably pausing for a photo on their way to McDonalds D.Va is Vanessa Wedge, Soldier: 76 is Auzzie L Epilogue: She got McDonalds.

Ikenfell is an RPG that takes place at a school for witches and wizards. Interestingly, the main character, Maritte, does not have magical powers. The game is inspired by everything from Paper Mario to Harry Potter, and it’s got a soundtrack by folks who’ve worked on Steven Universe. It’s on Kickstarter

How Not To Scam Publishers For Free Games

So: there are loads of kids out there who try and ask publishers for free games. Most of them are at least up-front about their pan-handling, maybe pointing to a YouTube or Twitch channel that nobody watches. But then there’s this guy, who was busted trying to straight-up scam indie publisher Devolver. I hope he…

The Technomancer Is A Bad Game That’s Still Worth A Look

The Technomancer feels like a 90s RPG based on an 80s comic book. It’s not, of course. The game was released this month, and is not based on anything, instead being an entirely new property cobbled together by Spiders (which is the developer’s name…this game was not made by spiders). But compared to the kind…

Just Cause 3 Is Getting A Multiplayer Mod

Just Cause 3 has been out for a while now, but it’s still… missing something. Just Cause 2, you might remember, only reached its true potential when fans created a multiplayer mod that let hundreds of people blow shit up and fly whales together. The Just Cause 3 version, which is being made by the…

YouTuber Meets Pope, Gives Him A Copy Of Undertale

Um. So this is a thing that actually happened. YouTuber MatPat—who you might know as the king of fan theories—got a chance to meet the Pope earlier this year, as a part of a summit that explored how the internet brings people together. When meeting the Pope, it is apparently customary to gift him something.…

The First Ten Minutes Of Riders Of Icarus, The Mount Collecting MMO

You will not ride a majestic unicorn within the first ten minutes of Riders of Icarus, Nexon’s free-to-play massively multiplayer online role-playing game, which launches into free open beta tomorrow. That’s for 20 minutes in. First comes the pegasus. One of my favorite things to do in MMORPG games now that I am pretty much…