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Why Final Fantasy 7 is (still) unstoppable 25 years since its release, the cultural phenomenon is still generating headlines.
Search “Final Fantasy 7” on YouTube and some of the titles coming back at you read “The Life Changing Impact of Final Fantasy VII,” “What Made Final Fantasy 7 A BIG DEAL?” and “Why FFVII Is So Important To So Many People” – and videos along this theme have hundreds of thousands of views. There is no denying the impact of FF7 on its fans. And, in fact, 25 years since its release, the original PlayStation and Square masterpiece is still generating headlines. There is no denying that the game has also made a cultural impact. Apart from the multiple spin-off gaming appearances, movies, remakes and merchandise, the story of…
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The heartbreaking story of how one man spent $16k on Final Fantasy and nearly lost his family Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius' combining of characters that people love with gacha-esque monetization can end up going very badly.
A history of griefing: gamers who ruin your day for kicks Sometimes it’s purely for fun, sometimes it’s to make a point, and sometimes it’s even to make a profit.
Could Watch Dogs’ smart city ever become a reality? A smart city, driven by the Internet of Things. Is Watch Dogs merely a sci-fi vision, or a real glimpse at the future?
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A history of griefing: gamers who ruin your day for kicks Sometimes it’s purely for fun, sometimes it’s to make a point, and sometimes it’s even to make a profit.
You’re in the zombie nightmare of DayZ and about to be eaten by one of the charging undead when suddenly a helicopter appears. Its pilots – and simply owning a helicopter lets you know they’re big shots – gun down your pursuer and offer you a lift. What you don’t know is that instead of flying you to safety, your destination is the tiny, featureless Schadenfreude Island some 15km off the main coast of Chernarus. The only reason they’ve saved you is for the amusement of knowing you’re condemned to stand there until you waste away, and that they were smart enough to fool you. Griefing: it comes in many…
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You’ll never be able to afford these top gaming battlestations MOM! BATHROOM!
5 plot twists that would have made great games even better When done right, a twist can be truly spectacular. Here's what they should have done...
10 Xbox things to remember on Xbox’s 15th anniversary Did you know the console was almost called 'Odyssey of the Mind'? Really.
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Seditionis: Tower Defense reinvents while making love to the classics Seditionis harkens back to classic tower defense games while adding gripping new features—and we can't stop playing.
I’ll come right out and say it. Seditionis: Tower Defense is one of the best tower defense games on the market right now, which is a surprising feat considering it’s from a first time indie game developer in the form of one man. Any good tower defense game must be addictive and rewarding and abide by a few core tropes, but Junson Chan’s game rises above its peers by gloriously reinventing everything else. Yet loading up this game will take you back to a nostalgic past where tower defense dominated the internet and made the other genres hide in piss in pants terror. You see, the game builds on those…
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Rise of the oversensitive gamer Easily offensive? Or easily offended?
Destiny 2 is practically impossible to play if you’re a parent Bungie can do hunters, titans and warlocks alright, but it really struggles with the parent class.
The game dev who cried wolf Indie developers feel it’s hard to get noticed, but trying to stir up fake scandal sets a terrible precedent.
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How to improve your online poker game 15 tips to help you get better and start winning.
The World Poker Tour reports there are 100 million poker players across the globe. Pokers’ popularity continues to grow, and here are a few reasons why you and everyone else is hooked: It requires skill: Poker takes strategic thinking and focus. Professional poker players spend years practicing and perfecting their game to win tournaments. This is exciting for players who value games that reap a reward based on their efforts. It’s sociable: Poker games in-person and online offer many opportunities to socialize. Friends, family, and strangers congregate to enjoy the game. And, of course, win. It’s accessible: Poker is now open for everyone to play online. Meaning players no longer…
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25 years later, how Super Metroid came to define a genre It drastically reimagined how people would think about action games, and still shows up on “best game of all time” lists to this day.
The magic of video game cartography Video game maps shift and redraw the borders between real and imaginary.
How great puzzle games deconstruct our world The Witness, Gorogoa and Baba Is You reflect the societies they come from.
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The ultimate history of fighting games Fighting games have always been around. The first one on this list landed in arcades in 1976!
The Street Fighter games are arguably the best-known fighting titles ever released (only Mortal Kombat comes close), and the series has sold a staggering 37 million copies. Fighting games, though, have been around since the very beginning of the medium. The first one we hit on this list landed in arcades in 1976 – a full 40 years ago! Lace up your gloves, charge up your ki, and let’s write the book on the history of fighting games. I tried to play, either on original machines or through emulation, every single game that could be considered a “fighting game” in the history of video games. I’m going to try and talk…
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The Mission: the most bizarre soccer game ever made "Once you have acquired the ball it is used as your main weapon against the Ninjas."
The 11 hardest survival simulators Casuals, stay away. These are the survival games that make staying alive difficult.
The state of health Nobody wants to die. But were games more fun when we still could?
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The weirdest fighting games of all time Most fighting games have some degree of strangeness to them, but there are those who are downright bizarre.
The fighting game genre is one of the biggest in the industry, but even the most die-hard fan will admit that it can often times be somewhat… odd. Serious fighting games like Street Fighter feature characters that can launch projectiles from their hands, emit electricity, or stretch their limbs to unnatural lengths. The Virtua Fighter series, which is praised for its realism, also has its fair share of goofy characters. Most fighting games have some degree of strangeness to them, but there are those who are downright bizarre. We’ve rounded up some of the most outlandish, eccentric, and unconventional fighting games to ever be released. We’ve only picked games that…
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The state of health Nobody wants to die. But were games more fun when we still could?
The making of Grand Theft Auto 1-3’s music An interview with Colin Anderson, Grant Middleton, Stuart Ross, Raymond Usher, and Pal Mackie—the original composers of GTA 1-3.
The Lost Arcade: a rose-colored look at the last arcade in NYC, the legendary Chinatown Fair From Times Square to Coney Island you could find people playing arcade games all day and all night, but it wasn’t meant to last.
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The 11 craziest video game feats ever captured on video These 11 videos show people taking ordinary video games and making them truly extraordinary.
Video games: how much do we love them? Enough to inspire us to devote a good chunk of our lives to them, at the very least. The incredible world of electronic gaming has something for everybody, from the base casual to the most hardcore multi-monitor Eve Online sock-pooper. We’re going to be talking about the upper echelon of gamers in this piece: the men and women who don’t stop at mere enjoyment and instead fight for utter mastery. These are people who squeeze every last byte out of their games, twisting them under their mental strength until they crack. These 11 videos show people taking ordinary video games and making them truly extraordinary.…
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Former jewel thief reviews GTA 5’s jewelry heists A former jewel thief has taken Grand Theft Auto 5’s heists to task, and explains how he would have done it instead.
The best JRPG you’ve never heard of The SNES was the home to a lot of classic Japanese RPGs, but this one is in danger of being lost to time.
Why do Polygon reviewers suck so much at video games? We knew their reviews suffer from political bias, but basic game-playing competence is also a big issue at Polygon.
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10 hilariously offensive Steam games you aren’t allowed to buy any more In memoriam the best of the worst banned games in Steam's storied history.
Long gone are the days of Steam Greenlight, where users could launch games into the highly lucrative Steam marketplace through sheer vote brigading. Gone too are the wild west days that followed in those glorious glasnost days of literally anyone being able to publish literally anything – as long as Gabe got his $100. It’s current year and Steam has embraced its mainstream status by doing what reputable platforms are supposed to do: adopting a Heckler’s veto editorial line guided by the illuminated coastal principles of NPR. So here it is, our memorial page to the most hilariously offensive games in Steam’s storied history. If you want to play any…
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What’s so scary about the 90s? The best horror games look to the nineties not as a rough draft to be improved upon, but something terrifying in and of itself.
The rise and fall of video gaming’s most vocal enemy Over the course of 10 years, lawyer Jack Thompson aggressively pursued video games in the courtroom. This is a history of his career.
Turn your Excel spreadsheet into an RPG with Arena.Xlsm Just because you’re stuck in Excel all day doesn’t mean you can’t do some questing.
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They really did that?! Little known games from big developers Before Naughty Dog made Uncharted, it made the wacky comedy game Keef the Thief.
Whether it had to start somewhere, ran low on cash or had a crazy one-off idea, almost every big games studio has worked on some surprising games. A football JRPG, a Shrek tie-in, various kinds of licenses, these largely forgotten titles often reflect periods of uncertainty, when talented studios needed a project to keep the lights on and would work on whatever was going. Some of these games are, of course, terrible. Others, like Irrational’s Tribes Vengeances, are cult classics that have come to be regarded as highpoints for their series. Whatever the story though, they’re all surprising. Wayne Gretzky Hockey (Bethesda) Watch this video on YouTube These days the idea…
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How ‘Untitled Goose Game’ went from meme sensation to real game House House partner Stuart Gillespie-Cook went into the company’s Slack channel in August of 2016, posted a picture of a goose and wrote “Let’s make a game about this.”
Video game journalism is killing itself Game journalists are killing themselves through political peacocking and attacking consumers.
Destiny 2 is practically impossible to play if you’re a parent Bungie can do hunters, titans and warlocks alright, but it really struggles with the parent class.
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The psychology behind your backlog of unplayed games As games become ever cheaper and ever longer, we must necessarily accrue ever bigger piles of unplayed titles. Feel bad about it? Psychology can explain.
The ‘gaming backlog’ is a concept almost every gamer will be familiar with – a huge pile (possibly digital) of games that you have amassed, but have no hope of ever playing your way through. 2015 saw a slew of releases that each required dozens if not hundreds of hours of play time, leading to the question of how on Earth we’re supposed to play all these bloody enormous games. At the same time, games are cheaper than they’ve ever been thanks to cutthroat competition among internet retailers, digital distribution, Steam sales and the enormous secondhand market. It’s no wonder that we are developing a bit of a backlog. But…
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The secret to the success of the greatest MMO of them all Vanilla World of Warcraft fed on the blood, toil, tears and sweat of its players, testing their patience and resolve - but that was part of its magic.
Ventrilo Harassment: Arnold ruins a clan meeting Mission objective: Infiltrate and harass.
The many, bizarre emotions of FIFA 15’s emotion engine Thanks to FIFA 15’s new Emotional Intelligence, all 22 players on the pitch can now employ 600 new emotional reactions. It's... not always the most natural-looking thing.
