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Unhewn Throne Is One Of The Best Fantasy Series I’ve Ever Read

I have read many fantasy books over the years, many of them mediocre, and few as captivating as George R.R. Martin’s now-ubiquitous A Song of Ice and Fire. So it was refreshing and thrilling to discover a trilogy that’s nearly as good: Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne, one of the best fantasy book series I’ve…

Overwatch Fans Love Moira And Symmetra’s New Looks

As the Overwatch Anniversary skins and emotes trickle out, fans are getting hyped over a few specific ones. Moira’s new dance emote and Symmetra’s magician skin are sending the fandom into a whirlwind of jokes and fanart. Moira’s dance emote was leaked over the weekend. Whether or not it’s real, Overwatch fans find the idea…

I Enjoyed The New Devil May Cry Even More By Waiting A Few Years To Play It

I’m a big fan of action games, and the cream of the crop is Devil May Cry. The series has always had the right mix of tricky combo creation and carefree fun. When developer Ninja Theory reimagined the series in 2013’s DmC: Devil May Cry, an anarchic mood and redesigned Dante upset some fans, including…

Pokémon Go will get Sun and Moon’s Alolan forms, Niantic announced today No release date yet, but the devs say you can expect an update holding the new variety of monsters within the next couple of weeks.

A Look Inside The Hello Kitty Bullet Train 

Previously, Kotaku reported that Japan is getting a Hello Kitty bullet train. All we saw was the outside. Now, we get concept art showing what inside the train looks like. The train will begin service between Osaka and Hakata on June 30. The train’s first car is called “Hello! Plaza!” and features a Hello Kitty…

Japanese Maid Outfits, A Serious Look 

Artist Ray Tatsumi has done an exhaustive in-depth study of Japanese maid outfits, tracing their origins from the UK and the USA. Tatsumi has been working on this chart for a while, and here is the third version: At the top right, you can see how maid outfits originate in the UK, but by the…

Want to wander around the Japanese countryside? Nostalgic Train is a self-described “mysterious walking simulator” that’s set in rural Japan that might be filled with nostalgia, but not with people. The game is out on Steam this June, but currently only has Japanese language support.

Island in the Sky. Cebu City, Philippines. By Martin Tan. JPGs is a photo peek into wherever gamers might find interesting. If you’re a photographer and have images you want to share, drop us a line!   

Resident Evil 7 Is Coming To Nintendo Switch As A Streaming Game

Capcom’s Resident Evil 7 is getting a Switch release in Japan later this week. It’s a weird thing, though; users will only have to install a 45MB game file, while gameplay will be streamed via the cloud. So while it won’t take up much storage space (or cost much, since it’ll be selling for around…

It’s been two years since Overwatch first launched, and as part of the celebration Blizzard made this cute little stop-motion video. It’s like Toy Story, only Reaper is a bigger asshole than Woody ever was.

Animated Dungeons & Dragons Boards Look Like The Future

Paper? Cardboard? Plastic models? That’s some 20th century D&D shit. The adventures of the future look like this. Dynamic Dungeons is a one-man effort to get tabletop gaming looking as good as possible through the use of animated maps. Birds fly overhead, water rolls in, that sort of thing. Here’s a woodland scene, for example,…

Crusader Kings II Is Now A Board Game, So You Can Murder Your Friends In Person

Crusader Kings II, a sprawling PC game with around 17,534 buttons and menus, is coming to tabletops, and has been condensed so much that it’ll be playable in 2-3 hours. Not that this is a bad thing! If I want to spend dozens of hours managing an empire I’ve got the video game for that.…

Broken Nintendo Handhelds Turned Into Beautiful Game Boys

The hinges on old Nintendo DS handhelds were notoriously weak and would often give way, but where most would bee a broken console, modder Joe Bleeps sees an opportunity to salvage the hardware and create something new: the Neon Advance. Because the bottom half of the unit is still intact, and because the older DS…

Paradox’s Next Big Strategy Game Is Set In Rome

Paradox, makers of epics like Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis, have a new grand strategy game coming called Imperator: Rome The debut trailer doesn’t show much (actually it doesn’t show anything), but Paradox fans should know what to expect: granular control over all aspects of your faction, as you “relive the pageantry and challenges of…

Deadfire‘s Maps Are Really Good

Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire is a big epic fantasy game about gods, pirates, boats, and ghosts, but what’s stuck with me post-game is how good the maps are. They’re really good, and the navigation is even better. Following the Baldur’s Gate franchise, the first Pillars of Eternity game has two “layers” to the world.…

Overwatch‘s New Map Is A Brawl In A Hidden City

At halftime in today’s match between the Philadelphia Fusion and Florida Mayhem, the Overwatch developers showed off their new map, called Petra, that will go live in the game on May 22 during the Overwatch Anniversary event. In the short gameplay trailer that we saw between Overwatch League matches, it appears that Petra is part…

It’s the third anniversary of the release of The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt. The game remains one of the most interesting and engaging games around, and it only got better with the release of two expansions, Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine. Here’s to more years of appreciating Geralt & Co.

Blighttown Apparently Runs At 60 FPS In Dark Souls Remastered

Digital Foundry have created a comparison video for Dark Souls Remastered that demonstrates that, at least on the PS4 and PS4 Pro, Blighttown runs at a smooth 60 fps. Blighttown is a notorious part of the original Dark Souls experience. It’s a massive swamp reached via rickety scaffolding and weird elevators. There are dozens of…

Ravnica Got Me Into Magic, And Now We’re Going Back

Magic: The Gathering is a card game, but the storytelling and worldbuilding that goes into informing those cards is basically unmatched across the world of games. They announced this week that the game is going back to the world of Ravnica, and it took me down a nostalgia hole. Each plane of Magic (think “world”)…

The Xbox Has Quietly Gotten Some Cool Features

This week, Microsoft revealed the Xbox Adaptive Controller, a new peripheral to help make gaming more accessible. It includes two large, programmable buttons and works in conjunction with a mix of joysticks and other devices like the Quadstick, a controller designed specifically for people living with different forms of paralysis. It’s just the latest in…