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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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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.
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.
When nightmare mode isn’t enough: 5 ways to add difficulty to your game If you haven't sent a controller hurtling through the air straight into the middle of your flat screen TV, you aren't being challenged enough.
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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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Ventrilo Harassment: Arnold ruins a clan meeting Mission objective: Infiltrate and harass.
The best (worst) Watch Dogs multiplayer trolls Watch Dogs online has been designed to drive you nuts and here's a compilation of some amazing moments.
The lost Call of Duty mode worth saving from extinction 50,000 people used to play here. Now it's a ghost town.
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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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When nightmare mode isn’t enough: 5 ways to add difficulty to your game If you haven't sent a controller hurtling through the air straight into the middle of your flat screen TV, you aren't being challenged enough.
They really did that?! Little known games from big developers Before Naughty Dog made Uncharted, it made the wacky comedy game Keef the Thief.
Mario and Sonic: a tale of two mascots Super Mario Odyssey and Sonic Mania reflect the histories of their star characters almost too well.
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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 craziest things people ever did to persuade parents to buy video games Kids can be very creative when they want something.
The 11 hardest survival simulators Casuals, stay away. These are the survival games that make staying alive difficult.
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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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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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.
The making of Until Dawn The story behind one of the best horror games of recent times.
The ultimate history of fighting games Fighting games have always been around. The first one on this list landed in arcades in 1976!
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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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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.
Does the C64 Mini’s games library do the Commodore 64 justice? The real reason it trumped the Speccy and Amstrad was breadth and quality of software.
The Legend of Zelda was an explicitly Christian game—until Nintendo of America desecrated it Link, a devout Christian warrior? Believe it.
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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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Does the C64 Mini’s games library do the Commodore 64 justice? The real reason it trumped the Speccy and Amstrad was breadth and quality of software.
Hacker receives developer-sanctioned death penalty in Guild Wars 2 Sweet justice.
The best JRPG you’ve never heard of The SNES was the home to a lot of classic Japanese RPGs, but this one is in danger of being lost to time.
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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 game dev who cried wolf Indie developers feel it’s hard to get noticed, but trying to stir up fake scandal sets a terrible precedent.
The lost Call of Duty mode worth saving from extinction 50,000 people used to play here. Now it's a ghost town.
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.
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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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Ventrilo Harassment: Arnold ruins a clan meeting Mission objective: Infiltrate and harass.
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.
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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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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11 franchises that need to rip off Pokemon Go Already popular video games, movies, and other stuff that could—should—jump into the alternate reality world and make bucketloads of money.
The making of Until Dawn The story behind one of the best horror games of recent times.
RIP Konami console games, 1983-2015 With Konami moving away from mainstream gaming and onto pachinko and mobile, it's time for a nostalgic look back over its best games.
