Cute Dota Characters Make for a So-So Game

China seems to have a big thing for Warcraft. World of Warcraft is still going strong, and now one of China’s best mobile games, Dota Legend, is based off the original Defense of the Ancients mod. Released in February 2014, Dota Legend has climbed and at times dominated China’s mobile app charts. According to certain…

The Creator Of Hotline Miami 2 To Australians: “Just Pirate It”

In an email screencapped by a reddit user, Jonatan Söderströmm, co-creator of Hotline Miami, has told Australians that if they want to play the recently banned Hotline Miami 2 they should “just pirate it”. “If it ends up not being released in Australia,” he wrote, “just pirate it after release.” “No need to send us…

Five Years Later, Fallout: New Vegas Is Still Getting Great Mods

Modding communities are odd. Some dogpile on a game, try to build Rome in a day, get discouraged/bored, and leave. Others stick with the same game for years, feeding it a steady diet of tweaks and changes, eventually transforming it into something entirely different. Fallout: New Vegas is the latter. Here’s SkyttsTV running through ten…

Two New Steam Features You Might Not Have Noticed

Steam is changing all the time—even if it feels like it’s improving in Valve Time, not regular people time. That means key features can, occasionally, slip through the cracks. Here are a couple recent additions with big potential. First up, the feature with the biggest long-term implications. There is now a “follow” button in every…

Destiny‘s Crota’s End Raid Gets Hard Mode Next Wednesday

Destiny‘s Crota’s End raid will get its much-anticipated hard mode next Wednesday, January 21st, Bungie has announced. Brace your level 32 characters for impact. In a new Destiny weekly update, Bungie’s David “DeeJ” Dague shared more details: Hard Mode for Crota’s End is ready. We know you are, too. The first Fireteam to sink their…

Animated Zombie Short Really Makes Me Wish Left 4 Dead 3 Existed

Look, as one Evan to another: when you wake up with blood on your body, always take the gun… There’s no co-operative team dynamics here and it’s not even related to a video game (as far I can tell) but Isolated manages to tickle many of the same places in my head that enjoyed the…

How The Hobbit’s Incredible CG Visuals Were Made

Wired and effects studio WETA have put together this video showing how many of the big battle (and dragon) sequences for the third Hobbit movie were put together. It’s pretty good! A little infomercial-y in parts, sure, but there are plenty of effects breakdowns, as well some interesting info: the fact that Smaug’s wings were…

You Need A Friggin’ Screwdriver To Change Memory Cards In The New 3DS

The most annoying thing about the new 3DS? You can’t just put in a new SD card, like you could in the old system. Instead of popping off the SD card cover, like you could on the older systems, the new 3DS requires the use of tools. Full disclosure: yesterday, Nintendo provided me with a…

Hope You Didn’t Just Pay $400 For An Xbox One

Did you buy an Xbox One at some point in the past two weeks? Well, Microsoft’s got some fun news for you: they’re dropping the price yet again That’s right, after selling the Xbox One at $350 late last year and then hiking it back up to $400 on January 3, Microsoft is now offering…

The ZX Spectrum is coming back in a radically different form, according to a report from BBC News. The Sinclair Spectrum Vega version of the old-school console is set to arrive in April, with plans afoot to have 1,000 games from the Spectrum back catalog preloaded on the new hardware.

A StarCraft Tournament That’s Only For Robots

We are training robots to excel at outer space future war. In a video game. This is sure to end well for humanity. The Student StarCraft AI Tournament pits 42 bots—all programmed to excel at stars and the crafting thereof (also war)—in a total of 861 games against each other. Each match is 1v1, and…

Dark Souls II Patch Doesn’t Really Fix Multiplayer Problems

Bandai Namco’s has released details on a major patch forDark Souls 2, which both tweaks a bunch of game elements and tries to address a major flaw with the game’s multiplayer. This patch also lays the groundwork for The Scholar of the First Sin, an expansion arriving in April. Some mysterious story elements are being…

Rifick, an avid Super Smash Bros. stage builder who’s made some of the coolest custom levels I’ve seen for the game, just posted a handy tutorial for some of the mode’s trickier parts. Give it a look if you’ve been having any problems with your own custom stages. And let me know if you have…

Twitch Is Trying To Solve Its Music Problem

Twitch kicked up a huge storm last August when it started muting users’ archived footage that used copyrighted music—a sudden and unpleasant change that lead many to accuse the service of taking the worst possible cues from YouTube. Today, the company offered a concrete idea for a new way forward: a music library. The newly-minted…