Slaying a rampaging rathalos with a team of friends is one of Monster Hunter: World’s greatest joys—if you can sort through the menus required to join your pals. The game’s online management is clumsy and poorly explained. Setting up online sessions and sharing codes can be confusing, but it helps you get the precise…
Trust is the goopy bonding agent in the petri dish that is an online gaming team. Toss a bunch of strangers in a Call of Duty, DOTA 2, or Overwatch queue and you’ll find that the team that’s communicative or empathetic or just plain likes each other pulls through more often than not. Trust isn’t something you can see,…
Hardship is a social glue, especially in games. Shared victories and mutual defeat, confusion, frustration— these are bonding mechanisms that transcend the IRL-URL barrier. In MMORPGs, in which community is a main draw, the difference between a challenging game and an easy game can also mean the difference between a…
A short story. Last night I was playing a game of league of legends and losing really, really badly. One opponent was boasting in /all chat about winning. Suddenly we rebounded. He immediately responded “OMFG LAGG.”
Forget everything you saw and experienced in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, forget Jack Mitchell and harken back to the days of Soap, Ghost and Price. Remember those good ol' days with them boys? Well, you can relive that whole experience again and then some in the China-only Call of Duty: Online.
Earlier this morning, China time, the fine folks at Shanda Games dropped a bombshell. They're bringing Borderlands to China. That's right, they've announced Borderlands Online, a made for China action RPG/online shooter.
During this year's World Cyber Arena, an e-sports tournament in Yinchuan, China, another multiplayer online battle arena was added to the list of games that cyber athletes competed in. Rounding out the MOBA genre, Tencent's "new" Caliber of Spirit is a cheap League of Legends knock-off.
While Chinese Internet cafes are supposedly on the decline, but with a 126 million active players at net cafes across the country it's easy to see that net cafes are still a major player in the gaming scene of China. Such as it is, it's always interesting to see what kind of games are being played in the country's net…
As the year comes to an end, year-end statistics are trickling out from every which way. Over the weekend, the China Game Industry Annual Conference's China Games Party has released info on how much revenue the Chinese game industry has brought in over the course of 2013. Chinese video game companies pulled in over…
The year is coming to an end, and lists seem to be the thing to do right now—so I'm jumping on the bandwagon.
2013 seems to be a great year for China's online video game market with the release of some pretty cool online games. Deviating more and more from the standard click and grind RPG format, Chinese game companies have been pumping out interesting and visually appealing games, foreign and domestically-developed alike.
China's online game market is breaking sales records year-on-year in the world's most populous nation. In 2013, this market alone is poised to make over $11 billion, according to Gameindustry.biz. But which are country's favorite online games? Let's take a look.
South Korean police are warning that downloadable games might contain North Korean malware. It's believed these could be part of a cyber attack.
On October 1, President Obama took the stage at a press conference and did something unusual for the leader of the free world: He explained why a website wasn't working. Specifically, Obamacare's overloaded online service healthcare.gov, which hadn't had a particularly smooth launch. For a moment, the president…
Forgetting to lock your house door while at home isn't that heinous a mistake, but to forget to lock your car, now that might be a big mistake; particularly if your wife has an agenda.
Recently, there have been more and more interesting online games coming out in China. With Monster Hunter Online and Call of Duty Online, there will be two top tier free-to-play games in the middle kingdom. While these games are only available in China, that doesn't mean enterprising players abroad can't play them.
Running a private server can be hard and it can cost a lot of money. In China, one man made a lot of money running a private server and now he's headed to jail.
Bureaucracy is a funny thing. It’s supposed to make our lives easier by compartmentalizing things and preventing redundancies, but in China (and most places in the world) it just gives bureaucrats more free time at work.
Sick of playing Chinese games that involve historical fantasy or martial arts fantasy, I set out looking for a new type of Chinese online multiplayer game to play. Unfortunately, The Legend of Shengdao wasn't the game to help me escape a sea of mediocrity, despite its crazy visuals.
Earlier this month, we reported that the Chinese State Administration for Film, Radio and Television (SARFT) came out with six guidelines that could affect the future of Chinese television. Those six guidelines included a ban on the creation of TV dramas based on online video games. Now it appears that SARFT has come…
