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Lost NES Version Of SimCity Emerges After 27 Years

In January of 1991, a prototype for an NES version of SimCity appeared at an electronics show. It was never seen again—and the iconic city-building game would come out solely on the Super Nintendo several months later—but video game historians have tracked down a previously undiscovered version, and uploaded it on the internet for all…

New Destiny 2 Plot Twist Leaves Players Wondering What’s Next

When Destiny first launched, its story was a punchline, a string of proper nouns that was barely coherent, let alone engaging. Over the past four years, the developers at Bungie have worked very hard to change that, and the game’s latest plot twist makes for strong evidence that they’ve succeeded. To go see this new…

Eight Of Your Weirdest Smash Ultimate Rule Sets

It’s fun enough to play regular old timed or stock matches in Smash, but players have also been making their own weird, super-hard, or just plain wacky rule sets for years. Smash Ultimate allows players to codify their rule sets as saved settings. I asked readers to tell me their Ultimate rule sets, and here…

What’s The Next Great Vaporware Game?

Next month, Kingdom Hearts III will finally come out, which is great news for video game fans, but bad news for people who need to write punchlines about video games that never come out. It raises an interesting question: What’s the next great vaporware game? Vaporware, a name coined for software that’s announced but never…

Looking Back On My Former Life In Star Wars: The Old Republic

I started playing Star Wars: the Old Republic at launch on December 20th, 2011. In the six years to follow, BioWare’s narrative-focused online RPG became a constant in my life, bringing me new friends, dear personal partners, and amazing adventures. I canceled my subscription on March 13th, 2017. It’s been a little less than two…

After A Year Of Free Updates, The Switch’s Kirby Game Is Finally Very Good

Kirby Star Allies launched on Switch in March, and it was decent, but a significant drop in quality from 2016’s Kirby: Planet Robobot. Since then, Nintendo has given the game several significant updates. Combined, they have made Star Allies a vastly better game. Unlike most Kirby games, Star Allies revolves not just around Kirby but…

There are new, “very hard” levels coming to Celeste in 2019. PC Gamer reports that Celeste developer Matt Thorson also tweeted that we will also learn “what’s next” from the Celeste team next year.

A Classic Christmas Song Interpreted Through  Rollercoaster Tycoon

It’s the holiday season, and that means it is the time to listen to holiday songs. They’re universally terrible, so making “new” versions with pop culture objects is just fine by my book. And now we have “The Twelve Days Of Christmas” with Rollercoaster Tycoon Classic parks. A YouTuber with the simple name of “Stu”…

Kingdom Hearts Is Weirdly Similar To Twin Peaks

What I love about both Twin Peaks and Kingdom Hearts is that they simply trust me with a massive amount of knowledge

Assassin’s Creed Origins Composer Posts Unreleased Tracks

Composer Sarah Schachner, whose credits include Assassin’s Creed Origins, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, and the upcoming Anthem, has released a number of previously-unreleased tracks from Origins on her Soundcloud page The tracks seem to mostly be songs that are in the game in some form but were not released on the official soundtrack for…

Bethesda has announced on Twitter that anyone who logged into Fallout 76 during 2018 will receive a copy of the Fallout Classic Collection on PC. The collection contains Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout Tactics. It is currently unclear how the collection will be distributed.

Modder Transforms Super Mario 64 Into Super Mario Bros.

The brain behind a number of Super Mario 64 mods has done it again by recreating lots of Super Mario Bros. levels inside of Super Mario 64. Modder Kaze Emanuar has taken the 2D level design of that older game and crammed it into the engine of Super Mario 64. Judging from the video that…

Dragon Quest XI is releasing for the Switch in Japan during 2019. It’ll be called Dragon Quest XI S, and while details are thin currently, it will have a significant amount of voice acting. There’s no word yet on a release date or whether it will release outside Japan.

With Activision’s Influence Growing, Blizzard Is Cutting Costs

Blizzard has spent the year taking big measures to cut costs as it prepares for a lean 2019. Those measures, as conveyed by people who work or have worked for the iconic studio, include employee buyouts in which workers are offered money to leave, a broadening of the finance department, and the limitation of budgets…

Happy holidays! Chris and I are getting festive and celebrating with the dark, Quake-inspired first person shooter Dusk right now on Twitch! Come join chat for cookies and gibs.

Blizzard Creates Official Catalog Of Overwatch Pros Who Break The Rules

We know who’s been naughty now, thanks to Blizzard’s new website outing Overwatch pros for violating the Overwatch League’s rules and code of conduct. The Overwatch League’s “discipline tracker” is a public list of players who broke league rules, such as by boosting other people’s accounts or being toxic. Next to their infractions, Blizzard lists…

Valve Walks Back Its Stance On Balancing Artifact Cards

Digital card game Artifact received some crowd-pleasing changes yesterday, and thank God, because players have been bleeding out of the game since its late November launch. The new update gives Artifact a leveling system, which comes with rewards like card packs, and independent skill ratings, which starts at one and caps at 75. “Over the…

2018’s Biggest Video Games, In Under Two Minutes

As he does every year, Malcolm Klock has put together a video running us through 2018’s best (and some of the worst!) video games in under two minutes. Blink and you might miss your favourite. Of course, some games get more screentime than others—it’s not every year we get a new Red Dead—but Yakuza is…

Ubisoft’s recently-released toy spaceship game is lovely, butit needed more enemies and activities. Today’s free holiday update for Starlink: Battle for Atlas adds more enemies and activities, as well as a photo mode to capture all that sweet alien flora and fauna action. I love it when an update gives me everything I want. 

It’s hard to put into words why Fortnite—as repetitive as it can be as a game—has so immersed a huge number of gamers. “Fortnite Isn’t A Game, It’s A Place,” a new article by writer Owen Williams, described Fortnite’s appeal as a hang-out spot rather than as your bread-and-butter shooter.