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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 completely awesome old school video game commercials Blast to the past.
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.
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.
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Meet the whale who spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on the MMO Black Desert Online "I love how we just casually talk about spending almost the entire cost of a full ride at Yale university on a video game."
Heedun yesterday posted a YouTube interview with Estimate, the whale who has spent $160k in microtransactions on the MMORPG Black Desert Online. Estimate is very open about the fact that he’s paying to win and gives the us lowdown on the whole thing. Watch this video on YouTube Useful timestamps: 04:30 How much he spent in the game 07:30 Why he P2Ws 14:00 Regrets 17:58 P2W in Other Games 24:00 RMT in BDO 30:30 How to P2W “he’s not a whale, he is a f**king leviathan” – YouTube comment.
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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.
10 biggest influences on video game history Marquee moments that have helped gaming get to where it is today, and laid the groundwork for what we'll hear about in the future.
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...
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Gabe Newell reveals he was an undercover World of Warcraft gold farmer Just for research, you understand.
Gabe Newell got the idea for the Steam Workshop during his time working as a gold farmer in World of Warcraft. Speaking to Edge Magazine, Valve’s CEO said he managed to bring in a decent hourly wage – and worked out a concept that would help some people make significant amounts of money. “We were always used to thinking about games as entertainment experiences, but then we started thinking of them as productivity platforms,” says Newell. “As a sort of proof-of-concept, I decided to be a World of Warcraft gold farmer for a while. I was making $20 an hour farming gold. I was making what was a spectacular wage for…
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Kotaku is killing video game journalism When Kotaku introduced ‘social justice’ to gaming coverage, it all went to hell. Why can't we just play?
Under the thumb: the evolution of buttons How the buttons we press daily were formed over many decades.
Actual news outlet reports girl was virtually raped in GTA V News outlet claims modders are hackers, and they're "staging violent attacks" in Grand Theft Auto. Evidence: a crazy female games journo.
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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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Five standalone ‘sidequels’ that are far better than their main series The bitesize masterpieces that edge out their main series counterparts.
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.
Back on the flight deck: an interview with Wing Commander’s Chris Roberts Why he got into game development, why he left, why he's ready to come back, and much more.
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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.
I had a baby nine months ago. As you might expect, this has significantly changed my relationship with video games, at least temporarily. It has made the Nintendo Switch my favorite console of all time, because I can play it both on the big screen on the occasional evening and in my hands during naptime/train journeys/stolen moments hiding in the bathroom whilst my partner deals with the baby. It has also drastically reduced the time available to me to play games — which, given that it is literally my job to know about games, is a smidge inconvenient. Most of all it has erased my ability to join in with…
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25 most heartbreaking moments in Nintendo history Sadness and spoilers within...
Who are the Star Citizen superbackers? Ever spent hundreds on a game? How about thousands? Tens of thousands? These people have. How do they feel about it?
The world of video game vinyl Down the video game record collection hole.
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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.
Heidi met John playing Final Fantasy XIV. They were part of the same Free Company, and would often help each other out with quests. Getting to know each other, the pair soon realized they had plenty in common, and began to spend more time together. “Seeing his name light up when he logged on brought a huge smile to my face,” says Heidi. John later tells me that he spent weeks carrying his laptop around at work or college on the off-chance she signed in. Eventually, John drove from Tennessee to North Carolina to meet Heidi in person. They spent a week together in which time they realized they weren’t…
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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?
The 11 craziest video game feats ever captured on video These 11 videos show people taking ordinary video games and making them truly extraordinary.
Metroid Prime like you’ve never seen it before An extract from the new issue of Heterotopias.
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The story of Second Life’s long-abandoned Duran Duran universe No ordinary world.
The stories of Second Life and Duran Duran mirror each other in a strange kind of way. At their height, both enjoyed immense popularity, and both have slowly slipped out of the spotlight in recent times. Linden Lab’s life simulator was released back in 2003 and boasted a million regular users in its prime. Duran Duran, meanwhile, emerged when the New Romantics ruled the airwaves, and their albums went triple platinum. These days, neither commands the headlines they once did. In a way, it seems prudent that these two former titans of pop culture would sooner or later cross paths, and the Duran Duran Universe, an official Second Life world dedicated to the band, was the result.…
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Why Zelda dungeons are so great Let's dig into how the dungeons work so well with Mark Brown's great crash-course.
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.
69 things you need to do in GTA before you die So you think you’re done with Liberty City? Think again.
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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.
World Of Warcraft is a living place. With each expansion it sails onwards, leaving old players behind as new ideas, faces and philosophies keep the 11-year-old MMO current. However, some players would prefer to step back in time and wander the world they knew, like revisiting the street you grew up on. Until April 10, Nostalrius existed to do just that. It was the largest private server running WOW patch 1.12 – the final build of the base game, free from expansions and adulteration. Nostalgia was so strong that 800,000 people registered Nostalrius accounts, and 150,000 were active players. This took place without the approval of Activision Blizzard. The Battle.net…
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Hacker receives developer-sanctioned death penalty in Guild Wars 2 Sweet justice.
Why Zelda dungeons are so great Let's dig into how the dungeons work so well with Mark Brown's great crash-course.
No, game journos, Grand Theft Auto doesn’t make you sexist False interpretations of already worthless and pseudoscientific studies. But hey — narrative.
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World of Warcraft’s Goldshire inn has been built brick for brick in the Warcraft film It's deeply weird to see Lion's Pride Inn brought to life with real wood and metal.
As part of the new Warcraft film, some very familiar locations of the game have been recreated in reality – or well, film sets. One of the areas of the film where we’ll see members of the Alliance meet is the Goldshire Inn. Watch this video on YouTube Watch this video on YouTube It’s an uncanny recreation: Well, there are fewer people dancing on the tables in their undies in the film version. Hopefully that will change in post. There’s an Easter egg right by the door that says ‘Kobold’s Wanted’, a nod to the early game quests that see you hunting down the blighters. If there’s this much attention to detail in…
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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.
The spooky, gory, and gorgeous worlds of DOOM Sometimes, it pays to shoot pictures instead of demons.
A Call of Duty youtuber is livestreaming his legs literally rotting away 2020 UPDATE: THEY'RE MELTING!—Diabetic drunkard ONLYUSEmeBLADE refuses to seek treatment for the rapidly expanding sores, which are being cheered on by "leg hole" fans as they gradually consume his discolored limbs in daily livestreamed updates.
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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.
Patch 1.12, Drums Of War, is the build of choice for the majority of private servers running the original World Of Warcraft. It was just an interim patch between the introduction of Naxxramas, the notoriously vicious 40-man final raid, and WOW’s first expansion, The Burning Crusade. The logic goes that it’s vanilla WOW’s final and best incarnation, for in the two years between World Of Warcraft’s release and version 1.12, myriad fixes and quality-of-life improvements had turned a rickety, spit-and-glue MMO into a real cultural phenomenon that was fast approaching ten million subscribers. By this time, you could have more than one action bar on the screen. The Looking For Group…
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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.
How 007: Everything or Nothing left other third-person games shaken and stirred "Everybody knows who he is and — like him or not — everyone has an idea of what he should be. Your Bond and my Bond — not the same Bond."
The spooky, gory, and gorgeous worlds of DOOM Sometimes, it pays to shoot pictures instead of demons.
