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When a Minecraft feud turns into an IRL bomb scare The hoax emails claim a link to VeltPvP, a company which runs Minecraft servers - but the company says it is being framed.
As first reported by Sky News, a rivalry between Minecraft players lies behind 24,000 threatening emails sent to schools and colleges across the UK. The emails claimed that a student with a bomb had been sent into the recipient’s school and that, if a payment is not made, the device will be blown up. The email repeats the English text in Arabic afterwards. The message led to many schools being on alert and some evacuating, with parents having to collect their children and local police assisting. In Hertfordshire, seven schools received threats with one evacuating. The Hull Daily Mail says over 20 schools acrioss Hull and North Lincolnshire were affected. The…
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The games players love more than critics We use statistical analysis to shine some light on the divide between video game players and critics.
Hacker receives developer-sanctioned death penalty in Guild Wars 2 Sweet justice.
10 anti-gravity racing games like WipEout and F-Zero While futuristic anti-gravity racing games aren't extremely popular these days, there are still a few good titles that you might have overlooked.
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It’s alive! How the last decade of horror cinema is influencing indie games The cinematic genre's margins are violently expanding and contracting, and videogames are learning from the best examples.
The horror film, like all cinematic genres, has a dual identity. There are the things it wants to do, and then there are the things it must do. The genre history gives it focus and a set of rules: an aim to scare you (whether that’s a sudden gasp at the time or a moment of hesitation before turning off the lights later), and a set of established methods to do so (pace, shot framing, sound). The hopes and troubles of whatever era it comes from provides a less obvious framework, one that consciously or otherwise seeps into the gaps of whatever story is being told. The last decade has seen an especially rich crop of horror cinema,…
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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.
Eleven years on, Resident Evil 4 is still a masterpiece What makes a game that’s as campy as Rocky Horror shine.
The craziest Pokémon Go stories so far Spontaneous friendships, Diglett dick pics, illuminati conspiracies, dead bodies, and all the other crazy Pokémon Go stories so far.
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The lost Call of Duty mode worth saving from extinction 50,000 people used to play here. Now it's a ghost town.
For the follow-up to its genre-defining Modern Warfare trilogy, Infinity Ward needed a ‘wow’ factor. Though the developer was largely responsible for establishing Call of Duty as a blockbuster in the first place, by this point its studio heads and a big chunk of talent had left to form Respawn – so not only was there a certain degree of ‘difficult second album’ syndrome, but it felt like the studio had to prove itself all over again. The next Infinity Ward COD would not only set the tone for the new generation of consoles, PS4 and Xbox One, but it would show whether the developer still had what it takes. Call of Duty: Ghosts was…
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How a group of Polish devs turned war into a deeply personal and groundbreaking game A look at what went into the making of This War Of Mine.
Five standalone ‘sidequels’ that are far better than their main series The bitesize masterpieces that edge out their main series counterparts.
Repetition as a feature: gaming’s best groundhog days When repetition is used as a narrative technique, it can be super effective.
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Returning to Runescape, over one decade on We’re going back... back to the browser!
Back in the distant past of 2004, when Avril Lavigne was still in her heyday and Green Day made me feel like an American Idiot in spite of living on the English south coast, I started playing my first MMORPG. I was around thirteen years old, and I remember being introduced to the wonders of Runescape during a lunchtime spent quietly hidden away on a school library computer. It was a MMORPG that ran entirely in-browser, and as such could be made to work on our ancient and technologically-limited school computers. Someone in my class had been passing around a proxy server access file on a flash stick, meaning that…
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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.
How No Man’s Sky generates life The game generates its universe and the many possibilities therein from a relatively small set of assets.
Don’t share Watch Dogs 2’s (very real) vaginas or Sony will ban you (NSFW!) Turns out there are vaginas in Watch Dogs 2, but if you share a picture of them then Sony will ban you.
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The games players love more than critics We use statistical analysis to shine some light on the divide between video game players and critics.
Believe it or not, I haven’t always been a games critic. Once upon a time I enjoyed games with nary a thought of cataloguing performance and assessing if they furthered the state of the art. There’s a difference in how you look at games once it’s your job, a shift in focus. A critic might value different things in a game than the wider audience does, and vice-versa. With the help of complex statistical analysis, we decided to shine some light on that divide. Here we’re going to look at the games that users rate more highly than critics, and see if we can tease out any interesting trends. The…
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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.
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.”
The worst (best) ads in early video game history We remember some horrific advertising campaigns in gaming.
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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.
We’ve all been there, casually browsing a forum with nary a care in the world. The sun may be shining but you’re safe in a darkened room absorbing top-tier video game chat when boom – some little scrote called ‘XXb0ngsm0kA98XX’ throws a hand grenade into the room. “Bloodborne is overrated emo trash, like all of Miyazaki’s games.” And so your day, which had began so well, is now consumed by thoughts of vengeance. Yep, one of the things we fleshbags just can’t get our head around is the fact that opinions are like bumholes – everyone’s got one. Rarely are they so pronounced or hotly contested as in the video…
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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.
The secret history of G.I. Joe and Transformers We’re going to look at the many times in the past the two franchises have collided.
Video game journalism is killing itself Game journalists are killing themselves through political peacocking and attacking consumers.
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Sony makes the worst exclusives, according to science We downloaded over 350,000 reviews from 18,000 different games so we can rank Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony.
Unlike eBook readers, CD players, MP3 players and BluRay drives, video games consoles are in the unique position of not featuring standardized hardware. Where any cassette player would play any cassette, video games need to be tailored to the unique rendering hardware of their machines, which incentivizes hardware manufacturers to create their own first party exclusives. You buy an Xbox One over a PlayStation 4 if you want to play Gears of War more than God of War, which makes first party exclusives a vital deciding factor between similar gaming hardware. So… we’ve got a lot of data about this. But because video game fans can be silly, we’re going…
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Video game romance: a lost cause? You can't force love, especially not when it comes to western games.
The secret history of G.I. Joe and Transformers We’re going to look at the many times in the past the two franchises have collided.
How great puzzle games deconstruct our world The Witness, Gorogoa and Baba Is You reflect the societies they come from.
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Subnautica developer fired for retweeting conservatives The hate mob strikes again.
Subnautica developer and sound designer Simon Chylinski became the target of a social justice-driven hate mob on Twitter after he shared tweets by conservative journalist Paul Joseph Watson. Chylinski was subsequently fired by his employers at Unknown Worlds following a sustained campaign over the weekend by social justice activists on both Twitter and the ResetERA gaming forums, who called on the developer and publisher to act against him. Subnautica is an underwater survival game filled with eerie noises and a haunting soundtrack, for which Chylinski is responsible. Over the weekend, the outrage crowd discovered an old set of tweets by game director Charlie Cleveland, who set up a poll in…
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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.
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.
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.
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Atari founder Nolan Bushnell loses game industry award following feminist outcry Atari founder and the father of video games, Nolan Bushnell, was set to receive an award at this year’s Game Developers Conference until a group of feminists cried foul.
GDC selected three individuals for their “Pioneer Award,” including indie game developer Rami Ismail, Psychonauts creator and Double Fine Studios boss Tim Schaefer, and Atari founder Nolan Bushnell. The inclusion of Bushnell, who is widely credited for his contributions to the video game boom, was first met with applause, until feminists raised their ire against him over an excerpt from a 2012 Playboy article that described Atari’s frat-like working environment. “It was a wild environment,” he recalls wistfully. “It was post–flower revolution, women’s liberation, no AIDS yet and lots of company romances.” The engineers began code-naming their projects after women — including Darlene, a beloved employee who, according to Bushnell,…
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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.
Mario and Sonic: a tale of two mascots Super Mario Odyssey and Sonic Mania reflect the histories of their star characters almost too well.
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.
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Twitch forces black streamer to submit DNA analysis over african cooking show Another race flap is the last thing Twitch needs right now.
Streaming giant Twitch has caused outrage after banning an African-American girl for her Africa-themed cooking show and seeming to accuse her of being a white cultural appropriator. The girl – youtuber Brittany Venti – was then forced into the humiliating position of having to submit an actual DNA analysis to prove her descent, shocking Twitch Support screenshots reveal. “This is insanity,” Brittany shared on Twitter. “I can’t even talk about my own race on Twitch, I get told I’m not my own race and I can’t have a cooking stream based on REAL African and Haitian food that is WELL known and DOCUMENTED.” “I got banned for having an African…
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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.
You can now play XCOM in an Excel spreadsheet It’s called EXLCOM, and all you need to run it is a copy of Excel. What a time to be alive.
The wonderful wobbly world of experimental gaming hardware "Your first communication you have with the game is the hardware, so we think that it’s important to have the right touch."
