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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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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 making of Firewatch The story behind one of 2016's most unusual, human and thought-provoking games.
What your MMO says about you We've got you figured out.
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It’s true: 4 scientific ways video games make you better at sex 1.2 billion people regularly play video games. The earth is also rapidly becoming overpopulated. Coincidence? Maybe not.
No matter how many pounds you can press or miles you can run, you will never be able to compete with a gamer in the sack. Video games train more of your senses, faster, and in just the right ways to please the opposite sex. Think I’m being facetious? Read on. Gamers last longer A study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine reveals that a positive relationship exists between gaming and traits that are beneficial in the bedroom. The study, headed by Dr. Andrea Sansone of the University of Rome, asked nearly 400 gamers about their sexual function. They found that gamers have unlocked some real-life perks: enhanced stamina…
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25 years later, how Super Metroid came to define a genre It drastically reimagined how people would think about action games, and still shows up on “best game of all time” lists to this day.
Satoru Iwata’s noble Nintendo legacy Even if you thought his decisions were misguided or wrongheaded, they still came from a place of love for video games.
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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How our caveman instincts explain why we play video games Video games are fun - that’s a given. But here's why we derive so much pleasure from them.
As I was playing Threes on my mobile phone the other day, it occurred to me that there’s something intrinsically satisfying about tidying up in video games. Taking a messy screen full of numbers and shuffling them neatly into one big number is not only addictive, it taps into a strong desire to put everything in order. The same feeling pops up when clearing the screen in Tetris or mopping up all of those pesky flags in Assassin’s Creed. But where does this desire to tidy up come from? And what function does it serve? “It makes total sense,” says Phil Robinson, director and curator of the Museum of Games…
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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.
WATCH: mom rages on livestreaming son having a smelly gamer moment Gamers sometimes need to poop where they sit instead of wasting time going to the bathroom, but this mom won't tolerate gamer moments.
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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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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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.
Media calls for VR safe spaces Everyone will finally be safe in places where nothing can hurt you to begin with.
How Breath of the Wild plays with our nostalgia Nintendo's masterpiece re-invents the Zelda series, and part of that is growing up alongside its players.
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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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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.
Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack sucks. Play N64 games these 5 ways instead You can pay Nintendo $50 to play N64 games on your Switch, but you shouldn't.
Why Super Mario Bros. 3 is still a masterpiece Before Mario had a World, he had the biggest stage on Earth – and played the part to perfection.
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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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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.
Returning to Runescape, over one decade on We’re going back... back to the browser!
10 reasons Alien: Isolation is the greatest survival horror game ever made I really loved about this game. But I’m writing this with all the lights in my house on.
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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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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?
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 real reason LEGO Universe shut down: it didn’t anticipate the ‘penis cost’ The challenge of keeping a family-friendly MMO penis-free was too much for Warner Brothers.
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Study shows gamers are better in bed Are you a gamer? Then you might also be a player between the sheets, according to science.
According to a new study by researchers at the Sapienza University of Rome, your ability to slay virtual dragons and save the world from the robot apocalypse may also make you last longer in bed. The study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine was a cross-sectional survey sent to 396 men. Of those 396, 287 reported playing video games for an hour or more each day. The survey then quizzed everyone on their sexual health and performance. After analyzing the responses, researchers found a relationship between gaming and sexual stamina. Gamers were less likely to suffer from premature ejaculation than non-gamers. But don’t go running off to buy an…
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Hacker receives developer-sanctioned death penalty in Guild Wars 2 Sweet justice.
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.
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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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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10 reasons Alien: Isolation is the greatest survival horror game ever made I really loved about this game. But I’m writing this with all the lights in my house on.
‘Experiment 12’: the disturbing result of 12 indie devs taking turns to make a game Our look inside the strange chaingame made by 12 different indie developers.
The artists and paintings that bleed through Bloodborne The aesthetic roots of a masterpiece.
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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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It’s true: 4 scientific ways video games make you better at sex 1.2 billion people regularly play video games. The earth is also rapidly becoming overpopulated. Coincidence? Maybe not.
Why Blizzard’s decision to crack down on porn memes for Overwatch is odd Plenty of other game franchises have similar adult content floating around.
The birth of the horror game genre Was true horror present in the 16-bit era? 8-bit? Or in the words of an ancient text adventure? We’ve decided to take a look back.
