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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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15 underrated N64 games the world forgot about Celebrating the weirder side of the N64.
The 10 most hilarious Destiny exploits From fantastically cheesy ways to kill bosses to painless ways to level up, these are some of the most hilarious exploits Destiny players have discovered.
What do you do after you’ve made one of the world’s most successful games? King was bought for $5.9 billion by Activision last year. It has two of the most successful games in the world right now. Where can it go from here?
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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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Catacombs: the inside story of Square Enix’ canceled shooter It’s always a great shame when a game is cancelled, but much more so when a genuine original is lost.
The game journo echo chamber: suppressing dissent and vilifying gamers Apart from a few comments sections, gamers are often defenseless to the torrent of accusations against them by ivory tower weirdos.
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.
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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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The history of Wing Commander Wing Commander’s paved the way to the modern video game industry, and its design continues to influence game development to the present day.
Under the thumb: the evolution of buttons How the buttons we press daily were formed over many decades.
15 underrated N64 games the world forgot about Celebrating the weirder side of the N64.
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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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‘Cobra Club’: an amazingly weird celebration of dick pics (NSFW) In Cobra Club you play a man stood in his bathroom taking pictures of his penis. It's deeper than you think.
The Legend of Zelda was an explicitly Christian game—until Nintendo of America desecrated it Link, a devout Christian warrior? Believe it.
The 10 most hilarious Destiny exploits From fantastically cheesy ways to kill bosses to painless ways to level up, these are some of the most hilarious exploits Destiny players have discovered.
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The Legend of Zelda was an explicitly Christian game—until Nintendo of America desecrated it Link, a devout Christian warrior? Believe it.
Before The Legend of Zelda became known for its somewhat complicated lore and disconnected story lines, the popular Nintendo series had real-world religious influences with Link originally written as a devout Christian warrior. I wouldn’t blame you if you missed the references to Christianity in the first three Zelda games because the hints were always subtle (especially for children) and it was never explicitly stated by characters in-game. One of the biggest in-game hints of religious imagery was found in the Japanese version of The Legend of Zelda. If you played the English version of the game, you’re probably familiar with the Book of Magic, which had a cross on…
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The video games about nothing Seinfeld is famously a show about nothing, but indie developers continue to find plenty of something to work with.
Mortal Kombat has kept a secret for 24 years That's... a long time to keep a secret. Huh.
The world of video game vinyl Down the video game record collection hole.
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Under the thumb: the evolution of buttons How the buttons we press daily were formed over many decades.
I’ve been delighted with Nintendo Switch, not just because Breath of the Wild is probably now my favorite game ever, but because the Joy-Cons really make the hardware feel special. Even more so if you were fortunate to get hold of the neon red and blue version. It may be because no other controller has ever had so much versatility, either for a single player or for the instant sideways turn into two stand-alone controllers. It shakes up a lot of other controller preconceptions, too, and in doing so made me think about all the controllers I have used. How over time that knowledge of where to move your thumb is accumulated,…
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You’ll never be able to afford these top gaming battlestations MOM! BATHROOM!
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.
Why Zelda dungeons are so great Let's dig into how the dungeons work so well with Mark Brown's great crash-course.
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80 years before X-COM, H.G. Wells designed ‘Little Wars’ H.G. Wells' contributions to modern pop culture can hardly be overestimated, and even video games haven't escaped it.
Having popularized concepts such as time travel and invaders from Mars, the contributions of English author H.G. Wells to modern pop culture can hardly be overestimated. Often described as ‘the father of science fiction’ thanks to seminal, genre-defining works such as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and When the Sleeper Wakes (all three published between 1895 and 1899, a testament to his unerring productivity) Wells’ influence is everywhere, even if you’ve never picked up one of his books. Video games are no exception. In fact, when designing one of gaming’s earliest and most recognizable icons, Space Invaders creator Tomohiro Nishikado plumbed Wells’ imagination to stoke his own. “The…
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Video game journalists are a joke Gamers don’t have a problem with challenge. Game journalists do, because they're lazy hacks — and because challenge itself engenders fundamental problems for their ideology.
Man builds functional glowing IRL life bar A vertical tube filled with water that lights up different colors and changes its water level based on your in-game health and mana.
The games that dare to sail the dark seas The humbling grandeur of the ocean: a place eternally unknowable, and indifferent to the fortunes of the seafarers it both sustains and destroys.
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‘Adventure Mario’: the making of The Legend of Zelda We’re going back to the mid-80s to look at the creation of one of gaming's longest-running and most-loved series.
The Legend of Zelda is one of those games, of course, that is so garlanded it’s sometimes hard to see clearly – pioneering in many respects, an instant classic, and the instigator of one of gaming’s longest-running and most-loved series. So to get some idea of what the game actually was, we’re going to go right back to the mid-80s and look at the original development. It was the morning of February 1, 1985, and Nintendo needed a hit. Shigeru Miyamoto, Takashi Tezuka, and Toshihiko Nakago were working on the first Mario game for the Famicom, and Super Mario Bros. would be finished and released by September of that year.…
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These are the most controversial games of all time, according to science We’re sitting here with a beautiful big dataset from Metacritic. It's time.
A conspiracy of silence: How NDAs are harming the games industry Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) have long been a fact of doing business in video games - but their enforcement can have wide-ranging, negative effects.
From EA QA to Pokémon Go and beyond: the incredible career of E. Daniel Arey He's helped design some of gaming's greatest successes, and is just getting started.
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Swearing at the screen: a history of rudeness in text adventures Much effort went into providing responses to inputs quite removed from an adventurer's staple activities of bashing heads and examining stuff.
“Don’t be ridiculous” the invisible narrator snapped, dismissing some long-forgotten typed request, and several decades later I still remember it. It was the first computer game I’d ever played, an early 80s text adventure titled Madness and the Minotaur on my swanky new Dragon 32, and my uncle had joined dad and I to marvel at the shiny new toy and help us with the intricacies of English prose. He had to explain what it meant to be ridiculous. I’m being ridiculous? Even at a tender age I could sense some grand unfairness at work, even more so after the line started dumbly repeating itself, our textual flailings going unrecognized…
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The doomed heroes of Dark Souls Beneath the chivalric castles and lofty cathedrals of Lordran beats the bitter, pagan heart of Beowulf.
When nightmare mode isn’t enough: 5 ways to add difficulty to your game If you haven't sent a controller hurtling through the air straight into the middle of your flat screen TV, you aren't being challenged enough.
Why you pay what you pay for video games We can often feel short-changed when it comes to buying video games, especially in the UK. So what exactly determines what you pay?
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The world of video game vinyl Down the video game record collection hole.
I don’t understand vinyl. Lots of music nerds swear by vinyl albums for reasons I can’t actually understand. Then I went down the video game record collection hole. Watch this video on YouTube And I still don’t understand. But that hasn’t stopped me from picking up a handful of albums when I don’t even have a turntable. Because, while I can’t imagine casually listening to any of them (and most I’ve gotten include digital download codes, so you don’t have to worry about playing the actual album), they look really cool. The Journey It started at a Protomen show, the premiere of their music video for “Light Up The Night”…
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You can now play 10,000 Amiga games in your browser for free, on archive.org Take a nostalgia trip with some real retro classics.
Are your kids experimenting with Minecraft sex? YouTube is brimming with videos of Minecraft sex targeted to kids.
The final days of Grainger Games—as told by those who worked there The closure of Grainger Games was a shock for customers — but absolutely devastating for employees.
