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The Best Minecraft Sculptures Continue To Impress

The piece above, called “The Perfect Marionette,” took first place in a recent Minecraft sculpture contest, reminding us that not only are games art, they can also be amazing platforms for creating it. Dr. Bond’s entry took about four days to complete and was based around the idea of human achievement. Rather than try to…

Blizzard’s Latest Plan To Get Hearthstone Players To Meet Up Is Flawed

This week, Blizzard announced that they’d be releasing a new playable Hearthstone hero called Nemsy Necrofizzle. The catch? It’s only available for players who participate in difficult-to-reach LAN-type events called Fireside Gathering Taverns. This has annoyed some players, but it’s also shown that Blizzard still hasn’t figured out a good scheme to encourage more in-person…

We’re playing the Switch port of Stardew Valley right now on Twitch. Time to harvest blueberries and romance the artist who lives by the lake.

A Game About Deciding What Is (And Is Not) Soup

What makes soup qualify as soup? Must it be liquid? What if it’s frozen? Need it be edible, or can it contain rocks or batteries? Those are the kinds of heady philosophical questions posed by Something Something Soup Something Something Something Soup Something is a free browser game made by Italian philosopher and game designer…

Friday The 13th‘s Big Update Makes The Game Feel New Again

For fans of all things Jason Voorhees, any Friday the 13th on the calendar is a time for celebration, and today is no exception. With a physical release on shelves today and free DLC for all players, the studio behind Friday the 13th: The Game is helping ensure that the campfires around Crystal Lake are…

Loot Boxes Are Designed To Exploit Us

The influx of randomized loot boxes into games like Shadow of War and Star Wars Battlefront II has kicked off a discussion about their inclusion in games. Discussions of multiplayer imbalance and blocked off game content ignore an important truth: loot boxes are an ethical problem. They exist largely to exploit players and create addicts.…

Age of Empires: Definitive Edition has been delayed from October 19 to “early 2018,” the developers announced today. They say that they “will instead be inviting thousands more players from the community into our closed beta” for more testing.

Road Redemption’s Motorcycle Violence Reminds Me Of A Kid From Middle School

Road Redemption is the Kickstarted love-labor of some guys who realized EA was never going to bring back Road Rash. It perfects Road Rash’s idea (“it’s hilarious to swing heavy objects at stuff while riding a motorcycle”) by adding modern hotness: random tracks, unlockables, splitscreen co-op, and all that stuff. It just so happens that…

Destiny 2’s Revamped Iron Banner Is Missing Something

Destiny 2’s Iron Banner event made its debut this week, another carryover from the first game that’s been tweaked enough to require a reappraisal. Unfortunately, it’s lost something along the way. Iron Banner is a week-long event that comes around every six weeks or so. It centers on the competitive Crucible, and in the first…

The Most Popular and Influential GTA Mods Over The Last 20 Years

Over the last 20 years, modding has been a huge part of Grand Theft Auto’s culture. Not only do mods keep older GTA games alive, they allow large communities with different interests to form around the series. Here are some of the most popular, influential, and weirdest mods in GTA history. Superheros The phenomenon of…

As reported by Gamasutra, IGN has acquired indie-game deal site Humble Bundle. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed but the site will continue operating independently, ensuring everyone has at least one cheap copy of RPG Maker that they never use.

The More We Learn About Mario As A Character, The More He Sucks

2017 has changed Mario for me, and not just because he might be mind-controlling poor Goombas. Nintendo has told me too much about Mario, and now I can’t look at him the same way again. In the latest episode of the Favecast, Gita Jackson and I discuss how factoids like ‘Mario is no longer a…

Of Course There’s Battlegrounds ASMR

“Hopefully, I can actually win one,” YouTuber Whisper Plays breathed into his microphone before he parachuted off a plane in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. His mechanical keyboard clacked loudly as he dropped down and collected his first few items: a few packs of 9 m.m. ammo and a P1911 pistol, which actually takes .45 ammo. “I’m not…

People Are So Obsessed With Switch Icons, Now Developers Are Polling Them

Nintendo Switch owners really care about the icons that show up on their home screens, making so much noise that many developers are swapping them out. But not German indie studio Bplus. It’s asking fans to choose Puzzle Box Maker’s icon ahead of the game’s November release. In a post on the studio’s blog, Bplus…

Scary Movie Recommendations For Horror Game Fans

What’s a fan of horror games to do when the final boss is vanquished and the credits roll but you’re not ready to say goodbye? What if you want the scary experience but you’re too tired to hold a controller and push buttons? The answer, my friends, lies in another form of entertainment: film. If…

Blizzard Bans A Ton Of World of Warcraft Botters

Last night Blizzard brought the banhammer down on botters and scripters in World of Warcraft, passing out six- to eighteen-month suspensions for players caught using a number of popular third-party programs. Watching the programs’ forums fill up with ban reports is a hell of a thing. According to reports posted on the World of Warcraft…

South Park: The Fractured But Whole will get two downloadable story packs—“From Dusk till Casa Bonita” and “Bring the Crunch.” In the first, you’ll fight goths in Casa Bonita; the second will presumably feature Mintberry Crunch. They’ll each cost $12 or you can get them, along with some other challenges and costumes, as part of…

Swery’s Cat Game The Good Life Moves To Kickstarter After Failed Fig Campaign

Yesterday, The Good Life, the next project by Hidetaka “SWERY” Suehiro, failed to meet its crowdfunding goal on Fig. In a letter to fans, SWERY announced the project would move to Kickstarter. The Good Life captured people’s attention for its strange premise: a reporter moving to a country village where everyone turns into cats at…

River-based survival game The Flame in the Flood is out for Nintendo Switch. The game’s day one Switch sales have been higher than for all other platforms. We had a good time with it on PC.

The Most Popular D&D Races And Classes

Decades of D&D fans repeating the old adage “Friends don’t let friends play half-orcs” may have had some tangible effects. Yesterday, FiveThirtyEight publisheddataon the most D&D popular classes and races and, well, half-orcs only make up about five percent of all D&D characters played between August 15 and September 15. For comparison, more than fifty…