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Arms Players: Motion Controls Or Standard Controls?

Over the weekend a bunch of people had their first chance to play Arms, Nintendo’s upcoming rubber-band boxing game. If you played one of the hour-long “testpunch” betas, I have one question for you: motion controls, or nah? Arms can be played by detaching the Switch Joy-Con and moving them through the air: push them…

2-D nostalgia bomb Sonic Mania will release this summer on August 15th. Pre-orders are available for Playstation 4, Xbox One, and PC. You’ll also be able to play it on the Switch instead of that hacked Game Gear you’ve been working on.

Judging MomoCon’s Indie Games Competition

Each year Atlanta-area anime and gaming convention MomoCon selects five independently developed video games to honor in its Indie Games awards, and each year I help pick the winners. Here’s how games like The Banner Saga 2 and Talent Not Included made it into the top five this year. MomoCon (“momo” is “peach” in Japanese,…

The Friday the 13th Game Isn’t Very Good

Friday the 13th has a lot in common with some of the sillier sequels in the film’s franchise: it’s great for a laugh, but not much else. Friday The 13th is an online multiplayer game based on the long-running horror franchise about Jason Vorhees and the teenagers he murders. Up to seven players are counselors…

‘Life Is Unfair’: A Q&A With Nier: Automata‘s Director

Nier: Automata is both a wild action game and an introspective look at the things that make us human. We corresponded with director Yoko Taro via e-mail to talk about the game’s themes, what goes into writing memorable characters, and what he’d like video game players to stop doing. Here, in full, is our Q&A:…

Streamer Jailbreaks Super Mario World Cartridge To Run Mods

Streamer and speedrunner Sethbling has taken Super Mario World hacking to the next level. Using a save glitch discovered by Cooper Harasyn, he’s managed to create a “jailbroken” Super Mario World cartridge with a mod-enabling hex editor built right in. Fooling around with Super Mario World code is usually a pretty complicated thing, as Sethbling…

Just Because is an upcoming anime about a group of high schoolers and their old friend who transfers to their class right before graduation. Artists behind Sword Art Online: Progressive and The Pet Girl of Sakurasou are working on it.

Square Enix Announces New JRPG Lost Sphear For PS4, Switch, And Steam

The followup to I Am Setsuna is Lost Sphear, the latest release from Square Enix’s Tokyo RPG Factory. Here’s how Square Enix describes the game: The adventure of LOST SPHEAR begins in a remote town where a young boy, Kanata, awakens from a devastating dream to find his hometown disappearing. To stop the world from…

Street Masters Turns Beat-Em-Ups Into A Board Game

Street Masters: Rise of the Kingdom is an attempt to take the underlying design of games like Double Dragon and Final Fight and turn them into a board game (with a lot of miniatures). Designed by Adam and Brady Sadler, it’s for 1-4 players, and features both an “arcade mode” (for quick and random action)…

Neill Blomkamp Is Making Short Movies For Steam

Director Neill Blomkamp, the guy behind movies like District 9 and Elysium (not to mention a very good attempt at Halo), is now heading up a studio that is going to be releasing “experimental short films” on Steam. Here’s the first trailer for the films, coming out of a company called Oats Studios: Steam has…

Some Blue Shells Have Minds Of Their Own

You’re in first place and the finish line is in sight. Everything is going just fine until you hear that weird electronic whirring coming from behind. Someone’s dropped a blue shell and you think you’re doomed when all of the sudden it hits the person just behind you instead. Sacré bleu! If you’ve been playing…

Some Thoughts On Arms After Playing This Weekend’s Open Beta

Arms is hard to pin down, both literally and figuratively. While this weekend’s global testfires offered a good introduction to the house of whimsical party combat Nintendo is trying to build, a quick stroll around inside left me wondering, Peggy Lee-style, if that’s all there is. Across the roughly three to four hours I spent…

Rime Dev Says It Will Drop Denuvo DRM Once The Game Is Cracked

Rime, the indie game caught halfway between Ico and Journey was released last week. With Denuvo DRM. Like a lot of games. But that made some players angry, and prompted the developer, Tequila Works, to state that once the Denuvo DRM is broken, which it eventually always is, the company will release a DRM-free version…

The Plot Twist In Star Ocean: Till The End Of Time Is A Lot More Believable Today 

Most video games are content just to string the player along through dungeons, towns, or corridors full of machine gun cover while dishing out character arcs and weapon upgrades. Only a few try to reflect on the nature of reality and human existence. Star Ocean: Till the End of Time tried to do both. The…

Fire Emblem Heroes Adds Wedding Costumes

These are the latest heroes to be added to the game starting May 30. The spring event came with bunny costumes, so naturally a series of special characters sporting bridal gowns was the next logical step. The latest trailer for Nintendo’s mobile slot machine shows off old characters all dolled up for the big “I…

Square Enix Moves Final Fantasy VII Remake Development In-House

Previously, Square Enix was working with external studio CyberConnect2 to develop Final Fantasy VII Remake. But now, Square Enix will be making the game in-house. Third party studio CyberConnect2 is perhaps best known for its Naruto and .hack games. Back in 2015, it was revealed that Square Enix was working with the studio on the…

Australian Pokémon Are A National Treasure

Pixel God Paul Robertson has drawn up an exhaustive catalogue of Australian Pokémon based on national foods, sayings, places, plants and animals, some of which could kill you, some of them which (probably) wouldn’t For those outside the antipodes who don’t understand many/all of these, niboswald has started annotating them so that you can read…

Creepy Mod Transforms Fallout 4 Into A Horror Movie

Pilgrim is a mod for Fallout 4 that takes Bethesda’s Commonwealth and turns it into something you’d see in a game like Silent Hill It doesn’t add new much new content, so there won’t suddenly be quests to chase down chainsaw-wielding hick families or bog witches. But what it does do is overhaul the game’s…

This Sure Is A $600 Mega Man X Statue

Good statues don’t come cheap and Mega Man X is no exception. But for the price of six months’ car insurance or a round-trip flight to the North American coast of your choice, it could be yours. The little blue robot man measures 21″ and is 1/4th scale, so naturally it’s already sold out. Produced…

There’s More To Phantom Trigger Than Just Another Beautiful Pixel Brawler

Phantom Trigger is, in the words of its development team, a “neon slasher,” and it’s slated to arrive on the Nintendo Switch later this year. But don’t let pink and teal pixel art fool you, it’s more than just Hyper Light Drifter-lite. Revealed two months ago, the PC action adventure game with roguelike elements looked…