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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 ‘gaming backlog’ is a concept almost every gamer will be familiar with – a huge pile (possibly digital) of games that you have amassed, but have no hope of ever playing your way through. 2015 saw a slew of releases that each required dozens if not hundreds of hours of play time, leading to the question of how on Earth we’re supposed to play all these bloody enormous games. At the same time, games are cheaper than they’ve ever been thanks to cutthroat competition among internet retailers, digital distribution, Steam sales and the enormous secondhand market. It’s no wonder that we are developing a bit of a backlog. But…
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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.
Mortal Kombat has kept a secret for 24 years That's... a long time to keep a secret. Huh.
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?
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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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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.
The weirdest fighting games of all time Most fighting games have some degree of strangeness to them, but there are those who are downright bizarre.
The making of Grand Theft Auto 1-3’s music An interview with Colin Anderson, Grant Middleton, Stuart Ross, Raymond Usher, and Pal Mackie—the original composers of GTA 1-3.
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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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5 pixel art games you need to play right now Who doesn't love breezing through a colorful, simplified world that resembles something from their childhood?
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.
Five standalone ‘sidequels’ that are far better than their main series The bitesize masterpieces that edge out their main series counterparts.
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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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The story of Second Life’s long-abandoned Duran Duran universe No ordinary world.
The making of Grand Theft Auto 1-3’s music An interview with Colin Anderson, Grant Middleton, Stuart Ross, Raymond Usher, and Pal Mackie—the original composers of GTA 1-3.
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.
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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.
Rumors and videogames have gone hand in hand for years now. From school yard bragging about your uncle who works for Nintendo, to the almost constant leaks that seem to plague new releases. We’re all suckers for a lie or myth, and even with a healthy dose of skepticism, I’m sure you believe in one at least of these falsehoods. The Myth: Blowing in Game Cartridges Makes Them Work The Truth: We all know this one. Blowing into game cartridges was meant to clear the dust off the pins, and allow you to continue playing. In reality it was the removal of the cartridge from the console that helped. Blowing…
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Video game journalism is killing itself Game journalists are killing themselves through political peacocking and attacking consumers.
Woo-Hoo! The making of Stranglehold "There were definitely moments that made you feel like you're in a John Woo movie."
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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Study claiming video games ‘train’ gamers to headshot people IRL retracted College professors with ideological axes to grind are just so delightful, aren’t they?
Nothing screams truth and light quite like research undertaken to confirm a bias based on whatever wingnut bullshit the Ivory Tower Egghead had for breakfast that morning. This latest cock-up on video game research that Breitbart is reporting on has me a bit confused though. Brad Bushman and his grad student Jodi Whitaker have been forced to retract an article claiming ‘that “first-person shooter” video games could have a lasting effect on players; for instance, that playing these games might be able to “‘train’ a person to shoot a gun,” and “influence players to aim for the head.”’ It seems that Bushman and Whitaker had some wonky data they massaged…
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No Man’s Sky versus the actual universe: a scientific inquiry Time for some mind-blowing space facts.
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."
Playing with the human side of history Games traditionally present history as monolithic spectacle, but this new breed focuses on the individual experience of simply existing alongside great events.
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Eight things that just don’t make sense in the Pokemon universe Twenty years of backtracking and flip flopping until there are more contradictions than a M. Night Shyamalan movie about time travel.
Twenty years is a long time to build up a world and all its lore. A long, long time. Over the years new features have been added to the Pokémon games, along with an ever growing list of monsters. Catching them all is now a distant dream for the likes of Ash Ketchum (mainly because he’s a terrible trainer). You’d think that twenty years is enough time to get your lore in order and answer a few questions. Yet Pokémon has taken that twenty years and left us with even more questions. Twenty years of backtracking and flip flopping until there are more contradictions than a M. Night Shyamalan movie…
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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.
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.
‘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.
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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.
I recently read a list of upcoming video game titles with a mixture of joy and despair. Joy because there really seems to be an inordinate amount of good games out there at the moment, and seemingly unprecedented variety, too: everything from top-notch driving games to sailor simulators. Despair because there’s no way in hell I’m going to have time to play them all. I’m sure many people reading this will feel the same way It made me wonder whether there really are more good games out there nowadays, or whether the number of games is the same but I perceive there to be more simply because, as a new…
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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.
The increasing irrelevancy of video game journalists Being good at games is now political. Is this a sign of the end times?
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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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.
Space, that oh-so-often-quoted final frontier. For many of us, the closest we’ll get to the great beyond up above our atmosphere rests firmly within the world of science fiction. The super-hyped, recently released No Man’s Sky went one step further than most space-based games have gone before, offering up a near-infinite, procedurally generated universe of planets, each with their own unique flora, fauna and underlying periodic table to explore and exploit. The game’s algorithmic generation has a clearly defined set of rules. But does it follow any real-world scientific rules or knowledge to populate its vast digital universe? I turned to the Royal Observatory Greenwich’s astronomer Brendan Owens for answers.…
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Could Watch Dogs’ smart city ever become a reality? A smart city, driven by the Internet of Things. Is Watch Dogs merely a sci-fi vision, or a real glimpse at the future?
The making of Firewatch The story behind one of 2016's most unusual, human and thought-provoking games.
The 11 craziest video game feats ever captured on video These 11 videos show people taking ordinary video games and making them truly extraordinary.
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No Man’s Sky versus the actual universe: a scientific inquiry Time for some mind-blowing space facts.
Thanks to the steady drip-feed of information and videos from Hello Games HQ, we now know exactly how big No Man’s Sky will be, and we have a fair idea of how it’s possible to create such a huge universe through procedural generation. (We’ve also seen how impressively big Sean Murray’s beard has got over the past year – we presume he’s growing it as some kind of metaphor to indicate the increasing extravagance of the project.) Related: I played No Man’s Sky with an astronomer to separate its science fiction from facts We know that you can explore billions upon billions of planets and find some kind of life…
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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.
The 30 moments that defined the video game industry From consoles to genres, from lawsuits to graphics, these are the 30 big moments that define the video game industry—from 1977 to the early 00s.
“You are not a real gamer” The phrase has become a joke and a cliche - but when someone says "you're not a real gamer," what is it they're really saying?
