Post-apocaltypic roguelike Nuclear Throne was a blast. Knife-edge dodge rolls, chunky shotguns, playable telekinetic eyeball monsters. It had it all - except clearly a team of modders disagreed. Their homebrewed "Territorial Expansion" came out last week, with enough doo dahs and polish to pass as an official update. There are new areas, enemies, bosses, weapons and characters. Also, pet parrots. Nothing like a pet parrot…
Matt Cox
Today
1 day ago
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Sundays are for recovering from a Halloween party. Perhaps by reading the best writing about videogames from the past week. Most writers for (ostensibly) sports website Deadspin quit on Wednesday, after its recently acquired buyers G/O Media insisted they "stick to sports" rather than write the kind of personal and political articles people liked them for. I've never been a reader, but the suppression of…
3 days ago
Feature: War is hell, if you haven't heard
Of course Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare has nothing interesting to say about war. Of course its guns feel good, and its explosions are many and impressive. Of course the multiplayer is essentially the same game we've been playing for over a decade, only prettier and in more flavours. Of course a part of me likes it, and of course part of me is jaded…
Battlefield 5 adds two new maps, plus you can play for free ’til Sunday
It's almost as if they planned it. Here I am, lamenting Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare's lacklustre attempt to mirror Battlefield's large scale conflict with its new "Ground War" mode. There go Dice, whacking in two new maps plus a handful of weapons and vehicles to Battlefield 5 as part of yesterday's update. They've opened up the Pacific front, and my pals are murmuring about…
4 days ago
Feature: Impressive, but worth scrutinising
I spoke to Google about their AI that can play at StarCraft 2 Grandmaster level
I wonder what the last "AI does a thing" headline will ever be. The one Google DeepMind are imagining, on their quest to create a genuine general intelligence, is something like "AI can do everything far better than you, nuh nuh". By their measure, their AI AlphaStar has climbed one more rung towards that goal by reaching Grandmaster level on StarCraft 2's European servers. That…
5 days ago
Feature: Man hands on misery to man
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Hellblade developers announce a research program using games to tackle mental health
I’m sceptical of big, commercially-endorsed mental health initiatives with names like “The Insight Project”, which Hellblade developers Ninja Theory announced yesterday. This research program will see them collaborate with Paul Fletcher, a psychiatrist and professor of health neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, to study (and hopefully implement) ways videogames can help people with their mental health issues. Sure enough, their announcement video is largely…
1 week ago
Rumour: Overwatch 2 will have more PvE and be playable at BlizzCon this week
ESPN, "the leading multinational, multimedia sports entertainment entity"*, have apparently got their hands on Blizzard's Overwatch 2 notes. They've got a source and a training document that say the game will be revealed at BlizzCon later this week, and will include "PvE features" involving "in-game items" and "hero talents". This gels with a report from 5 months back, plus it's a pretty logical move. Still,…
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Sundays are for (indoor) seaside board games. Brighton, you are good. Here's the best writing about videogames from the past week. For Gamasutra, Wilmot's Warehouse co-creator Richard Hogg wrote up an insightful and introspective analysis of his game. It's a deep and wide-ranging look at both how it came to be and why people like it so much, and him quoting Nate's review is just…
Bethesda acknowledge parts of Fallout 76’s subscription service are broken
Earlier this week Fallout 76 introduced a subscription service charging £12 a month or £100 a year for various things Bethesda shouldn't have, along with the more reasonable inclusion of private servers. It isn't reasonable to charge for the convenience of a box with infinite storage and a deployable fast travel tent. Even less so when some of these things do not seem to work.…
Feature: Existence precedes disco
How Disco Elysium’s opening sets the stage for existential revolt
Existentialism. A word with baggage, and about it. Philosophers have deployed it to cover many different things, but they're all concerned with the baggage of being alive. The urgent dilemma of existence, as beings without apparent purpose. The concept fascinates me. It's what I get up for in the morning. Based on the opening minutes of detective RPG Disco Elysium, so does ZA/UM. It's clear…
2 weeks ago
There's a bit in The Borderlands Show where creative director Paul Sage says he "wants to talk about terror", and for a second it sounds like he's going to launch into a philosophical exploration of fear. The Aristotelian notion of catharsis, perhaps, in which the experience of 'negative' emotion within fiction can cleanse or purify inner emotional trauma. Turns out he actually wants to talk…
Feature: Yeah, Pirsig, but what about dongles
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance can’t help me with my wi-fi
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WWE 2K20 is broken, which is great for anyone not playing it
Many people are disappointed that wrestle 'em down WWE 2K20 is a mess. Many more people are only aware the game came out yesterday because it is a mess, and those people have spent the morning chuckling at videos on Twitter. Wrestlers. If you can't beat 'em, join the people laughing at them.
Feature: The clunkman cometh
Chernobylite, right, is what's known as a technogenic compound. We found bits of the "lava-like glassy material" in the ruins of the Chernobyl powerplant after it exploded, slopped into a continually melting, still hot structure called the Elephant's Foot. Wikipedia informs me it is a "crystalline zirconium silicate with a high (up to 10%) content of uranium as a solid solution". What horrors man hath…
In the year of our lord 2019, as games embrace embrace the power of community-driven Workshop content, they are all destined to become Tetris. I pin this on the spirit of Tetris itself, reaching out from the 1980s in an ongoing life or death struggle for cultural relevance. If Tetris was a character in American Gods they'd be smashing it. Someone has used the Overwatch…
I presumed Dota Underlords was already set in some sort of dungeon, so it pleases me that Valve will soon add an additional prison. This is just one part of the upcoming Big Update, which will add a buncha new heroes while substantially changing how the game works. Valve will be jailing 8-12 random heroes each day in an attempt to keep things fresh, but…
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Sundays are for making a house into a home, while wishing B&Q; hadn't turned a nice sentiment into corpslop. Here's the best writing about videogames from the past week. On Kotaku, Cecilia D'Anastasio and Dhruv Mehrotra's investigated the information tracking capabilities of Pokemon Go and Wizards Unite developers Niantic. It's an impressively thorough piece that avoids condemning Niantic, but nevertheless highlights many of the obvious…
3 weeks ago
Feature: But yes I am still enamoured with Cal's backpack
I want to explore the worlds of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, but maybe not its story
I want to explore. Like, everywhere. I didn’t expect that to be the main takeaway of my Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order hands-on preview, but here we are: amongst the windswept vistas of Zeffo, or careening down its ice caves, or clambering around the crumbling red stone of a temple on Dathomir. The team behind Titanfall 2 have built some more beautiful worlds for me…
Feature: Space accounting school was full
The drones. The drones never stop. An endless parade of mindless lasers, twirling through the sky in patterns imprinted on my eyelids. Every day I face the same barrage, every day one step closer to my dreams. Those dreams used to be of endless sky, of tearing across the void with wild abandon, dual pistols at my side. Now I just want to leave the…
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