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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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The many, bizarre emotions of FIFA 15’s emotion engine Thanks to FIFA 15’s new Emotional Intelligence, all 22 players on the pitch can now employ 600 new emotional reactions. It's... not always the most natural-looking thing.
Five standalone ‘sidequels’ that are far better than their main series The bitesize masterpieces that edge out their main series counterparts.
Discord has a furry pedophile problem 'Furry' pedophile groups survived the Discord purges despite hundreds of reports. Then activists uncovered a nest of furry admins within Discord, Inc itself.
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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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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.
Turn your Excel spreadsheet into an RPG with Arena.Xlsm Just because you’re stuck in Excel all day doesn’t mean you can’t do some questing.
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.
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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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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.
The rise and fall of video gaming’s most vocal enemy Over the course of 10 years, lawyer Jack Thompson aggressively pursued video games in the courtroom. This is a history of his career.
The game journo echo chamber: suppressing dissent and vilifying gamers Apart from a few comments sections, gamers are often defenseless to the torrent of accusations against them by ivory tower weirdos.
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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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17 years ago today, a wild Pikachu virus appeared! W32.Pokey.Worm was not very effective...
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.
25 most heartbreaking moments in Nintendo history Sadness and spoilers within...
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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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“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?
Development hell: 12 funny tales from game dev history There was a time when lax employment legislation meant development teams could be locked in the office overnight.
The incredible career of writer and game designer Flint Dille He’s worked on everything from Transformers to Diablo to Pokemon GO, and can tell you all about Vin Diesel’s D&D character.
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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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The craziest Pokémon Go stories so far Spontaneous friendships, Diglett dick pics, illuminati conspiracies, dead bodies, and all the other crazy Pokémon Go stories so far.
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.
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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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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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.
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.
Eleven years on, Resident Evil 4 is still a masterpiece What makes a game that’s as campy as Rocky Horror shine.
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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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10 great adventure games everyone must try From the games we grew up with to the best modern examples of this wonderful genre.
From EA QA to Pokémon Go and beyond: the incredible career of E. Daniel Arey He's helped design some of gaming's greatest successes, and is just getting started.
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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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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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.
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.
Media calls for VR safe spaces Everyone will finally be safe in places where nothing can hurt you to begin with.
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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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No, game journos, Grand Theft Auto doesn’t make you sexist False interpretations of already worthless and pseudoscientific studies. But hey — narrative.
Video game romance: a lost cause? You can't force love, especially not when it comes to western games.
The wonderful wobbly world of experimental gaming hardware "Your first communication you have with the game is the hardware, so we think that it’s important to have the right touch."
