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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.
Game journalists, you’re not the first to notice, are increasingly out of touch with the game-playing masses, yet there is no end in sight on their wailing about game difficulty or their transparent demand for art to conform to the demands of that very particular brand of corporate endorsed Woke ™ Social Justice ™ ideology. Given how well-trafficked their ideas are on social media, you can’t be blamed if you fall under the impression that games themselves are becoming more political — or politically correct. But the market speaks louder than words, and no amount of digital paper and wasted ink promoting a left-leaning narrative can change the fact that…
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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."
Does ‘role-playing game’ mean what it did a decade ago? We interview veteran RPG designers Chris Avellone and George Ziets about where the RPG is and where it's going.
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.
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Video game journalism is killing itself Game journalists are killing themselves through political peacocking and attacking consumers.
Game journalists used to be the only source consumers could turn to for gaming advice, purchasing decisions, and informed opinions about video games. Their time is almost up, and it’s not simply because other sources of information became available through the rise of social media and video streaming platforms. It’s mainly because they made themselves irrelevant. Even as gamers themselves have risen to become trusted voices in the scene, to take up the positions once filled by professional reviewers, game journalists have adopted an elitist approach that has both alienated and angered their audience. “Gamers are over,” wrote Leigh Alexander in an article that sparked the GamerGate movement. “Gamers don’t…
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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.
Repetition as a feature: gaming’s best groundhog days When repetition is used as a narrative technique, it can be super effective.
The largest ever MMO battle—3000 players!—was an accident Someone forgot to pay rent, resulting in a space battle involving over 3000 players and $300k worth of the game's currency gone forever.
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Game journos: devs must force players to make the ‘right’ moral choices “If game designers are not willing to de-power players then their ‘moral choice’ mechanics are reduced to basically meaningless ‘play style.’”
The upcoming video game Deus Ex: Mankind Divided has seen no end to controversy lately. With release just a few weeks away, the perpetually offended raised issues over the game’s use of the term “mechanical apartheid,” and the horns of outrage have been sounded in light of the game’s supposed appropriation of Black Lives Matter within its themes. More recently, self-described “pop culture critic” and Feminist Frequency producer Jonathan McIntosh took issue with the amount of freedom the upcoming game offers its players. It should be noted that player choice has long been a staple of the RPG genre, which allows players to decide the outcome of the story through their actions and deeds…
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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.
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...
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."
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Why making Link female is utterly pointless The 30yo video game character, who has been a man for all those years, will still be a man in the next Legend of Zelda. Who’s the sexist who made that decision?
Watch this video on YouTube There’s a lot of buzz about E3 in the press. Not so much about the wide variety of amazing looking games at the massive video-game conference, or trite press conferences or even Hideo Kojima’s fantastically bizarre game reveal—but about why Link isn’t a woman. Yes, the 30-year-old video-game character, who has been a man for all 30 of those years, for some crazy reason will still be a man in the next Legend of Zelda. Who’s the sexist who made that decision? Well, apparently Nintendo just doesn’t want to change, and why should they? They’ve got a good thing going for 30 years, and the series already has a bad-ass…
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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 Destiny clan that saved a family Think of the average bunch of guys in an online clan and the word 'heart-warming' doesn't usually spring to mind. But then most clans aren't the Dads Of Destiny, a 30,000 strong group bound by two common themes: parenthood, and not being a dick.
Arming the citizens of GTA V leads to absolute chaos Modders have patched in the 'Crazy Peds' cheat from San Andreas.
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The increasing irrelevancy of video game journalists Being good at games is now political. Is this a sign of the end times?
Another video is causing a stir in the gaming world, once again showing a shocking level of incompetence in the gaming press. A month ago it was a Polygon’s abysmal performance in their Doom demo (latest in a laundry list of bungles born of sheer incompetence), now it’s Gamespot and their inability to understand how PC graphics settings work. Here you can see the dummies at Gamespot comparing Overwatch on the PC and PS4, coming to the conclusion that the PS4 looks better. Too bad the PC isn’t on the highest graphics setting, making the comparison absolutely useless. You don’t have to be some basement-dwelling computer nerd to understand that a $1,000 gaming PC is going to have better graphics than…
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The craziest things people ever did to persuade parents to buy video games Kids can be very creative when they want something.
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?
Gaming’s most persistent myths and urban legends, debunked From blowing in cartridges to Lara Croft nude cheats and the secret Windows95 devil program. I’m sure you believe in at least one of these falsehoods.
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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.
Polygon released a video last week of one of its reviewers playing the first 30 minutes of the new Doom. But it wasn’t the review that caused a storm. The reviewer’s playing was so bad that Polygon had to disable ratings and comments on the YouTube video to save themselves the wrath of online vitriol. One fan even posted a video to YouTube highlighting the reviewer’s incompetence. Watch this video on YouTube The reviewer picked to play the demo is someone who earns a living testing out video games, and yet he or she plays this shooter like a four-year-old. And it’s not the only time that reviewers from Polygon, which is part of Vox Media, have…
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Teen secretly spent $20k of mom’s savings on Twitch celebs, and the streaming giant thinks that’s just fine Twitch ignored the distraught mother and then silently deleted the evidence—or so they thought.
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 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.
