Metacritic Matters: How Review Scores Hurt Video Games

Bugs in Fallout: New Vegas might have eaten your save file. Maybe they took away a few hours of progress, or forced you to reset a couple of quests. Maybe game-crashing bugs pissed you off to the point where you wished you could get your $60 back. But they probably didn’t cost you a million…

The Best JRPG City

Here is a fact: There are a lot of incredible cities in Japanese role-playing games. From the simplicity of Pallet Town to the squalor of Midgar, JRPG cities are usually interesting, memorable, and full of dressers to crack open. But when we’re determining the BEST JRPG city—and determining THE BEST THINGS is what we do…

Valve Offers Unconditional Refunds On Sketchy Steam Game

Journey of the Light was billed as “one of the hardest games on Steam.” Turns out, its first level was unbeatable and the rest were nowhere to be found. The purposefully obtuse puzzler has been available for purchase on Steam since May. Players—lured in by the promise of a challenge that’d leave their brains looking…

Star Citizen Shows New Demos, Some Cool, Some Not

Today Chris Roberts showed off three portions of his space game to be/end all space games, Star Citizen. Portions of the demo were definitely impressive, but the game’s still got a ways to go. You can view the entire obscenely lengthy presentation—complete with a cosplay showcase and a raffle to win Chris Roberts’ jacket for…

Don’t Mind The NPC Humping That Pole Over There

Today on Highlight Reel we have creepy Witcher 3 NPCs, magic medics, incongruous replays, dumb metal hats and much more! Watch the video above, then link any of your favorite highlights in the comments, and be sure to check out, like and subscribe the original videos via the links below. Destiny – Nice bubbles, bro…

New Witcher 3 Patch Fixes Accidentally Armorless Geralt

Along with the many small improvements offered by The Witcher 3’s most recent big patch, at least one problem slipped in: It was possible for Geralt to wind up stranded in the wilderness without a shred of armor to wear. See, the 1.07 patch raised the level requirements for some of the game’s gear. That…

10 Former Internet Trolls Explain Why They Quit Being Jerks

For some people, the internet is like the wild west: a lawless play-pen where they can get away with being an asshole to anyone they’d like. You know—trolling. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve collected stories from people who have, at some point during their lives, been trolls. They’ve made it their mission to…

The Story Behind Mighty No. 9‘s Shady Delay

Mighty No. 9, an upcoming video game about a blue robot who fights against evil robot masters and collects their powers, was recently delayed until next year. This would not be an issue—video games get delayed!—if everything around it wasn’t so damn shady. Take, for example, the timeline. On Thursday, July 23, retail listings for…

One Man’s Defense of The Order: 1886

Tom Bissell is the author of my favorite book on video games, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, which I called “the finest account yet of what it feels like to be a video game player” when I reviewed it in The New York Times. These days, he is a writer for video games like…

StarCraft’s Medic Is Joining Heroes Of The Storm

It’s seemed like as natural a fit as there possibly could be, but Heroes of the Storm fans haven’t known for sure if Blizzard was going to transform the Terran Medic unit from StarCraft into a full-fledged MOBA character. Now, they do. Blizzard revealed the Medic as the latest confirmed character addition for HOTS today…

How Endless Respawns Can Make Death In Games Feel Meaningless 

As the week nears its conclusion, it’s time for another installment in Worth Reading, our regular roundup of the best video game writing from the last week or so. Hey, You Should Read These “On the much hated and woefully overlooked codec radio” by Stephen Beirne I have such mixed emotions about Metal Gear Solid—I’m…

Fans were pissed this week when Blizzard announced a Protoss Warrior for Heroes of the Storm that WASN’T the StarCraft hero Praetor Fenix. A HOTS developer has now weighed in on Reddit to say they are working on him, they’re just holding him back because he has a similar resurrection mechanic to King Leoric. Phew!

Mod Makes Skyrim Look Like A Pixar Film

I would very much like to play this version of Skyrim Modder UniqueUses has been playing around with Bethesda’s last Elder Scrolls game, and while I’ve seen plenty of visual mods for Skyrim, this is something else. They recently uploaded a series of work-in-progress screen shots to Imgur for what they’re calling “Toon Skyrim.” It…