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10 hilariously offensive Steam games you aren’t allowed to buy any more In memoriam the best of the worst banned games in Steam's storied history.
Long gone are the days of Steam Greenlight, where users could launch games into the highly lucrative Steam marketplace through sheer vote brigading. Gone too are the wild west days that followed in those glorious glasnost days of literally anyone being able to publish literally anything – as long as Gabe got his $100. It’s current year and Steam has embraced its mainstream status by doing what reputable platforms are supposed to do: adopting a Heckler’s veto editorial line guided by the illuminated coastal principles of NPR. So here it is, our memorial page to the most hilariously offensive games in Steam’s storied history. If you want to play any…
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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 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.
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.
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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 bittersweet (and sour) search for Chinese representation in games Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan may be symbols of pride for Chinese people, but you don't quite feel that when passing idiots shout their name at you.
A history of griefing: gamers who ruin your day for kicks Sometimes it’s purely for fun, sometimes it’s to make a point, and sometimes it’s even to make a profit.
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."
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Gabe Newell reveals he was an undercover World of Warcraft gold farmer Just for research, you understand.
Gabe Newell got the idea for the Steam Workshop during his time working as a gold farmer in World of Warcraft. Speaking to Edge Magazine, Valve’s CEO said he managed to bring in a decent hourly wage – and worked out a concept that would help some people make significant amounts of money. “We were always used to thinking about games as entertainment experiences, but then we started thinking of them as productivity platforms,” says Newell. “As a sort of proof-of-concept, I decided to be a World of Warcraft gold farmer for a while. I was making $20 an hour farming gold. I was making what was a spectacular wage for…
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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."
10 times gamers IRL died on cam F in the chat.
10 Xbox things to remember on Xbox’s 15th anniversary Did you know the console was almost called 'Odyssey of the Mind'? Really.
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Bored? These are the funniest indie games on Steam We have the video evidence.
It’s a rare treat when developers dare to enter the competitive video games market with something completely absurd – and their creations are actually entertaining. I would say it’s even the stuff of legends. Who on planet Earth hasn’t seen the endlessly hilarious Goat Simulator at this point? So buckle up and let’s get to it, and drop your own favorites in the comments (we might add it to our list). The Long Drive Watch this video on YouTube At first sight, this is just another indie driving simulator with a few exploring and crafting elements. But in practice, The Long Drive is a post-ironic ode to the tidal wave…
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Why Final Fantasy 7 is (still) unstoppable 25 years since its release, the cultural phenomenon is still generating headlines.
How No Man’s Sky generates life The game generates its universe and the many possibilities therein from a relatively small set of assets.
Legendary Commodore 64 Daffy Duck game finally found, playable for first time It’s a 228KB download, which was huge for the time.
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Train Simulator now costs almost $10,000 with all DLCs You can buy a brand new car for less.
Meet Dovetail Games’ Train Simulator – currently the most expensive video game on Steam. The asking price isn’t much: a mere $30 depending on the region you’re in. It’s what comes after, if you want to get a good set of trains to play with, that makes the game run up a whopping total. (This is not counting gambling programs or being a whale in a mobile game like Clash of Clans, of course, where you can throw away millions if you’d like) As calculated on Steam itself per November 3, 2019, you’re going to need a grand total of $9,765.47 to own every single piece of downloadable content (DLC)…
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The history of Wing Commander Wing Commander’s paved the way to the modern video game industry, and its design continues to influence game development to the present day.
The secret to the success of the greatest MMO of them all Vanilla World of Warcraft fed on the blood, toil, tears and sweat of its players, testing their patience and resolve - but that was part of its magic.
Catacombs: the inside story of Square Enix’ canceled shooter It’s always a great shame when a game is cancelled, but much more so when a genuine original is lost.
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Steam’s worst rated games of all time We decided to scrape the bottom of the Steam marketplace barrel and write about what we find.
Since Steam ended their Greenlight policy and opened the floodgates to anyone with a free copy of Unity and a bit of spare time, Steam’s mountains of crappy games have been the subject of some derision. It’s probably not a plot to send more traffic to curators and reviewers – … but it could be. Instead of shilling games you should buy right now, we decided to scrape the bottom of the barrel – some of the worst rated games around – and write about what we find. Most of these are not Tommy Wiseau tier games, entertainment so bad it actually becomes good again. So ask yourself why you…
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The artists and paintings that bleed through Bloodborne The aesthetic roots of a masterpiece.
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.
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.
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Steam game offers 41% discount and now people want the devs dead And the harassment campaign is backfiring big time, with Heartbeat shooting up the bestseller charts after support from prominent anti-bully activist.
The transvestite community’s campaign against indie RPG Heartbeat has reached a fever pitch after learning that Chumbosoft is discounting their game by 41% on Steam, with some now even calling for the developers to be executed. The number 41 is interpreted as a reference to the attempted suicide rate among men who suffer from a mental illness that causes delusions about turning into women. One sicko with pronouns in they’s bio tweeted, “the devs of this game should not have beating hearts.” (archive) Not really one to support violence but damn if someone doxxes the guy who made #HEARTBEATRPG and their body ends up in a ditch somewhere i wouldn’t…
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J. B. Harold: the 20-million-selling game series you’ve never heard of With their labyrinthine plots and adult themes, the J.B. Harold games drummed up huge sales in Japan. But despite their success, they never made it to Europe.
What Frostpunk could learn from real-life survival stories If you’ve idly wondered about the everyday lives of your little survivors, Ernest Shackleton’s failed Trans-Antarctic Expedition may prove a treasure chest of enrichment.
The story of Second Life’s long-abandoned Duran Duran universe No ordinary world.
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Steam Link Anywhere offers new innovations to gaming Valve is introducing a new “game streaming everywhere” service with Steam.
Valve has long since dominated the PC gaming landscape with its online retail service, Steam, but its dominance has allowed the company to collect a bunch of money and get real lazy about innovating its own service. With Steam now facing steep competition against the likes of Discord, Epic Games, and Twitch, Valve is introducing a new “game streaming everywhere” service with Steam. Reported earlier this week on PC Gamer, Valve has revealed plans ahead of GDC to launch two potentially major new features for Steam that are now in “early beta.” Steam Link Anywhere enables streamed gaming to any compatible device, and Steam Networking Sockets APIs, which grant developers…
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The state of health Nobody wants to die. But were games more fun when we still could?
Making a living in Minecraft We speak to James Delaney, who's trying to turn Blockworks' work into a sustainable business.
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.
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‘Rape Day’ video game tests Steam content policy “A game where you can rape and murder during a zombie apocalypse.”
A new video game promises to allow players to fulfill their darkest rapist fantasies in a zombie apocalypse scenario. The game is called Rape Day, and it is set to launch on Valve’s Steam gaming platform. The description is plain and straightforward: “Rape Day is a game where you can rape and murder during a zombie apocalypse.” According to the listing’s “about” section, Rape Day puts players in the role of a “serial rapist during the zombie apocalypse,” and encourages the player to “verbally harass, kill, and rape women as you choose to progress the story.” “It’s a dangerous world with no laws. The zombies enjoy eating the flesh off…
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The spooky, gory, and gorgeous worlds of DOOM Sometimes, it pays to shoot pictures instead of demons.
15 underrated N64 games the world forgot about Celebrating the weirder side of the N64.
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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The dank, sometimes hilarious, world of Steam shovelware Stolen asset valor!
In the olden days, if you wanted to buy a new computer game you had to haul your ass down to an Electronics Boutique or a Babbage’s or whatever and take a box home. That obviously was less than ideal, so we’re thankful that Gaben and the boys at Valve came up with Steam. Steam’s great! But it also has a few pretty big problems. Because the company doesn’t make any pretensions towards quality control, certainly less than salubrious publishers use Steam as a place to dump cheaply-made games to make a quick buck. The dark and grimy world of these games is our latest culvert in our explorations of…
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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.
The Legend of Zelda was an explicitly Christian game—until Nintendo of America desecrated it Link, a devout Christian warrior? Believe it.
Don’t share Watch Dogs 2’s (very real) vaginas or Sony will ban you (NSFW!) Turns out there are vaginas in Watch Dogs 2, but if you share a picture of them then Sony will ban you.
