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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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How No Man’s Sky generates life The game generates its universe and the many possibilities therein from a relatively small set of assets.
The making of WipEout Forget Lara. There was only one true herald of the Playstation generation. Real 3D, real music, real gaming. The future, after years of waiting, was finally now.
We are producing way too many (good) video games There more good games out there than ever before, and they're getting longer. Let's look at the numbers.
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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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10 great adventure games everyone must try From the games we grew up with to the best modern examples of this wonderful genre.
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.
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.
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The people obsessed with uncovering gaming’s deepest, darkest secrets For some, playing a video game to completion isn’t enough. They want to reveal the secrets behind its creation.
This article was originally published March 2016. For some, playing a video game to completion isn’t enough. They want to reveal the secrets behind its creation. Turning their fevered gaze towards cut content and cancelled games, these individuals assemble in online communities, their goal being to uncover fresh information about our favourite games and the abandoned titles we never got to play. Unseen64 is one such community. Started by a group of Italian friends in 2001, the website has grown into an international venture, staffed by volunteers from all around the globe. These volunteers are responsible for scouring the web for news about unfinished and rejected games, to archive for…
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69 things you need to do in GTA before you die So you think you’re done with Liberty City? Think again.
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.
J. B. Harold: the 20-million-selling game series you’ve never heard of With their labyrinthine plots and adult themes, the J.B. Harold games drummed up huge sales in Japan. But despite their success, they never made it to Europe.
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Warcraft III: Reforged is yet more proof Blizzard’s not the company it once was User score: 0.5. Beyond the visual downgrades, visual glitches, stutters, crashes, missing features, and connectivity issues, Blizzard now has a total disconnect with its audience.
Blizzard used to be synonymous with addicting and highly polished games, and had Midas’ golden touch for anything to do with entertainment. Now it seems as if the company is almost intentionally trying to show us just how much they just don’t give a shit. The recent launch of Warcraft III: Reforged is just the latest demonstration of the fact. The only reason this controversy has blown up at all is because it’s a remaster of a cherished classic game that was made back when Blizzard still had people with a passion for video games. Media outlets like Newsweek – while acknowledging the sorry state of the game at launch…
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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.
The making of Firewatch The story behind one of 2016's most unusual, human and thought-provoking games.
The 11 hardest survival simulators Casuals, stay away. These are the survival games that make staying alive difficult.
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Pokemon GO disables tracking and fans are furious Instead of fixing a bug, they decided to amputate the feature entirely. Thanks…
The latest update of Pokemon GO completely removed its feature tracking relative locations of Pokemon, while neutering third party apps that aided users with exact locations. This was called a “fix” to a bug that would mistakenly show three footsteps for every Pokemon regardless of their location. But by fixing the feature they actually meant amputation, which left Pokemon GO players stumbling in the dark. The update along with Niantic’s poor communication has enraged fans of the game. Third party apps like Pokevision mapped out exact locations of Pokemon, allowing players to find the good ones without having to tediously walk in circles. The new update effectively made it impossible for these apps…
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The state of health Nobody wants to die. But were games more fun when we still could?
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 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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Elite’s AI created super weapons and started hunting players. Skynet is here. Frontier has had to strip out a bugged feature to stop players from being wiped out from the galaxy.
A bug in Elite Dangerous caused the game’s AI to create super weapons and start to hunt down the game’s players. Developer Frontier has had to strip out the feature at the heart of the problem, engineers’ weaponry, until the issue is fixed. It all started after Frontier released the 2.1 Engineers update. The release improved the game’s AI, making the higher ranked NPCs that would fly around Elite’s galaxy more formidable foes. As well as improving their competence in dog fights, the update allowed the AI to use interdiction hardware to pull players travelling at jump speed into normal space. The AI also had access to one of 2.1’s…
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I played No Man’s Sky with an astronomer to separate its science fiction from facts An infinite gaming world, but is any of it based on scientific fact? We sat down with one of the world's leading astronomers to put No Man's Sky under the intergalactic microscope.
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."
Metroid Prime like you’ve never seen it before An extract from the new issue of Heterotopias.
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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.
Gamers have a magical gift to discover things that designers never intended them to. In a game that’s always evolving and changing like Destiny, there are lots of opportunities for exploitation. Some, like the now canonical Loot Cave, make life easier by allowing us to skip the grind, but others are just for laughs. These are some of the most hilarious exploits dedicated Destiny players have found to make the game more fun. From fantastically cheesy ways to kill bosses to painless ways to level up, these are the funniest Destiny exploits the game’s seen so far. Auto-leveling controller Watch this video on YouTube This goes beyond the level of mere…
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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.
10 Xbox things to remember on Xbox’s 15th anniversary Did you know the console was almost called 'Odyssey of the Mind'? Really.
Nintendo needs to wake up and realize it’s a video game company The biggest problem Nintendo has is understanding that the internet exists, and there are many useful things on it that could help it out.
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Hacker receives developer-sanctioned death penalty in Guild Wars 2 Sweet justice.
Aside from feeding that loot treadmill addiction so you can stave off delirium tremens for just one more night, arguably the best part about playing an MMO is that it’s a growing, ever-changing, living world. In MMOs, players will often affect the game in an way that’s so big — through creating trends that sweep through the community, or by exploiting certain game systems on a grand scale — that the developers take notice, like with Destiny’s now-canonical loot cave. Recently, a hacker was terrorizing ArenaNet’s Guild Wars 2 until the game’s player community gathered their own evidence on this player’s misdeeds, reported it to ArenaNet, and had the hacker’s character put to death…
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Love in a time of Warcraft Sarah found herself cast as the Yoko Ono of WoW, being blamed for the dissolution of what has been a successful raiding guild.
The World of Warcraft legacy server that is no more In closing Nostalrius, Blizzard finds itself the bad guy despite having the law on its side.
Four reasons you’re wrong about Pokémon Red and Blue The original Pokémon games aren’t particularly interesting or special, they were just the first.
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The Good, the Bad, and The Dovahkiin This beautiful compilation highlights some of the more memorable glitches and oddities one may come across during their Skyrim adventures.
As humankind continues to delve deeper and deeper into the valleys and plains of my beloved Skyrim, those of us who are occasionally forced from this beautiful world must sate our battle lust with YouTubes. Thankfully, Criken knows exactly what every Dovahkiin needs when there are no dragons around to be slain. Watch as he scales mountains and trolls wagons in the name of Talos. This beautiful compilation highlights some of the more memorable glitches and oddities one may come across during their adventures. Pay close attention– or else you too may experience death by cookery. It’s real. I swear. Be warned that spoilers and salty language abound in this…
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The World of Warcraft legacy server that is no more In closing Nostalrius, Blizzard finds itself the bad guy despite having the law on its side.
Metroid Prime like you’ve never seen it before An extract from the new issue of Heterotopias.
Making a living in Minecraft We speak to James Delaney, who's trying to turn Blockworks' work into a sustainable business.
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10 most messed up Mass Effect 2 mods Things are about to get dumb.
Prep the Derp Drive, Joker, and set a course for epic lulz. Things are about to get dumb. Days of YouTube lurking led me to this fantastic collection of unintelligible, side-splitting nonsense. I’m starting to believe that the creators of these videos were on some seriously hard drugs and I am concerned for their well-being. Because they need to keep making these. Their ranks were originally determined by the amount of time I spent slamming my face into my keyboard while I laughed, yet I discovered sometime later that they really can be viewed in no particular order. Number one just happens to be the video that about pushed me…
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What Frostpunk could learn from real-life survival stories If you’ve idly wondered about the everyday lives of your little survivors, Ernest Shackleton’s failed Trans-Antarctic Expedition may prove a treasure chest of enrichment.
5 most garbage Ghostbusters tie-in products (of garbage) And yes, you’re a misogynist if you don’t like the tie ins.
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.
