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Gearbox Threatens To Kill Partnership With Shady Key Dealer Unless They Change Their Ways [Update]

Yesterday, Gearbox got hit by a tidal wave of backlash for partnering with controversial key resale site G2A. It got so bad that popular YouTuber John “TotalBiscuit” Bain publicly threatened to stop covering Gearbox’s games unless something changed. To their credit, Gearbox listened, and they now have a list of demands for G2A. The demands,…

Hidden Persona 5 Tip Will Help You Nail Every Demon Negotiation

The new RPG Persona 5 brought back the Shin Megami Tensei series staple of demon negotiation. In order to acquire new Personas, you have to chat with them. But the guide for getting this right is hidden away (h/t Twitter user Aeana!). When you knock down an enemy group in Persona 5, you can convince…

Drawn To Death Is One Big Missed Opportunity

Drawn to Death hurts to play. It is too floaty and stiff to work as multiplayer shooter and while the art style initially captures attention, your eyes will beg to be gouged out after five minutes. And it never, ever shuts up. Taking (or dare I say drawing) inspiration from the messy and enthusiastic scribblings…

Aethera is a new sci-fi campaign setting for the tabletop role-playing game Pathfinder that lets you dungeon-crawl on asteroids. It was released last week and looks amazing. Its 500-page book spreads “cult mysticism, space opera and diesel punk” across six worlds. Io9 interviewed its developer over at Encounter Table in 2015. Here are some of…

The Brilliant Film Your Name Stands Toe-To-Toe With The Anime Greats

Your Name, already the world’s highest-grossing anime movie ever at the box office, is rolling out in U.S. theaters on April 7. It’s an instant classic that deserves a place next to Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke in the roster of anime masterpieces with mainstream appeal. Not many anime films have challenged Studio Ghibli’s western…

Mass Effect: Andromeda’s Tired Face Lady Now Looks Slightly Less Tired

After early footage of Mass Effect Andromeda went out into the wild, everyone latched onto Foster Addison, a character who snapped at the player because she felt tired. Addison became a running joke thanks to her blank stare and lack of emoting, which, paired with her dialogue, was pretty ironic. Thanks tothe newest Mass Effect…

Microsoft Officially Bans Emulators From Windows Store

Microsoft has revised Windows Store policy to remove emulators. The new rules bar any applications that emulate preexisting game systems, resulting in the removal of a popular program that supported games from Nintendo and Sega consoles. The new policies explicitly disallow emulators on “any device family.” It’s a wide reaching change that stymies emulation efforts…

Yesterday, Ubisoft released a big patch for For Honor, which players last week threatened to boycott unless Ubisoft acknowledged their complaints. And Ubisoft did: For Honor’s over-powered Peacekeeper was nerfed and Ubisoft added back in a popular map that they had removed. Ubisoft confirmed that some of these changes were planned from before the boycotting talks…

Here Is Some Edgy Fashion Inspired By 4Chan Culture

The culture of 4chan is unavoidable across the internet—and now you can hang it in your closet. Kara Quinteros is a freshman at Parsons School of Design in New York. Her boyfriend frequently visits 4chan, and she initially thought of creating a line of clothing inspired by it as a joke. The idea of exploring…

How EVE Players Trashed $17,000 Worth of Ships In Just Three Easy Steps

One of EVE Online’s most powerful alliances dealt a heavy blow to an opposing group yesterday, luring their opponents into a very costly trap that destroyed nearly $17,000 worth of virtual ships. Five Titan Class ships, the largest and most expensive ships in the game, were destroyed in just a few minutes, with the attacking…

Microsoft Reveals Xbox Scorpio’s Impressive Specs

Microsoft has promised that their next console, Scorpio, will be “the most powerful console ever,” and today the company delivered on that promise, revealing a set of beefy specs that, in terms of raw power, surpass any video game console on the market today. In a PR reveal with Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry, Microsoft unveiled that…

Hearthstone‘s Volcanosaur Launches Early, Causes 24 Hours of Mayhem

In the lead-up to this week’s launch of Hearthstone’s new Journey to Un’Goro expansion, Blizzard Entertainment ran a limited-time promotion that rewarded players with unique prizes for each day they logged in. April 5’s prize was a free Un’Goro card called the Volcanosaur. Giving the card away for free was certainly a generous move on…

Gearbox Hit With Backlash For Partnering With Controversial Game Key Seller G2A

Recently, Gearbox announced that they’re partnering with game key re-seller G2A for a collector’s edition of Bulletstorm. Problem: over the years, G2A has been subject to widespread criticism for lax security, enabling fraud, and making money at developers’ expense. Predictably, Gearbox has taken serious flack for the partnership. G2A’s reputation has fallen so far down…

Computer Creates Fake Video Games That Sound Better Than Real Video Games

Remember how someone taught a nueral network to name Pokemon? Someone else has taught one to name video games, and I would buy almost all of them. Starting with a port of Sega’s hit 2008 arcade game Christ disexplications took this ambitious attempt to name every video game ever made and fed it to a…

Nintendo Fixed a 30-Year-Old Zelda Typo For the NES Classic

An extraneous “N” inserted into the English translation of The Legend of Zelda in 1987 has finally been removed, and it only took 29 and a half years. This actually happened a few months back, because it’s in the version of Zelda included on the NES Classic Edition. But I didn’t even notice until Clyde…

Here Is A Thing That Definitely Happens In Nier: Automata

I’m finally playing Nier: Automata, and can confirm that it is a very odd, very interesting video game. Take, for example, this thing I came across when I was playing last night. As you make your way through the game’s compact but layered open world, you’ll undertake a bunch of sidequests for various characters you…

Blizzard just released a new Overwatch comic. In it, the Overwatch team grapples with how to handle a robot uprising in London, despite the fact that they’re technically not allowed to intervene. The comic likely exists as setup for next week’s event, but it’s also just a slick comic. Check it out

In 1982, People Were Streaming Games On Satellite

In 1982, a technology straight out of contemporary science fiction was on track to be the world’s first Twitter. Living and dying in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the cable service teletext brought 24/7, on-demand news directly to a television. Much like Twitter, teletext offered a stream of live, bite-sized information, but in a blocky, neon…

Today BioWare apologized for writing Hainly Abrams, a transgender character, in an unthoughtful way.As we reported yesterday, the character tells you her pre-transition name immediately upon meeting her, but BioWare says it is consulting the transgender community so it can update the game with better dialogue.

At Nintendo, Working All Night Is ‘Mario Time’

Over the years, game development companies have found all sorts of euphemisms for unpaid overtime, but Nintendo’s might be the best. If legendary designer Shigeru Miyamoto ever comes up and tells you it’s “Mario time,” you’re in for a long night. In a fantastic new interview over at Gamasutra by some dude named Chris Kohler,…