It's easy to take the little things for granted when gaming like, you know, having two hands. That's what Jason, better known online as 'OneHandFPS,' discovered when a motorcycle accident left him paralyzed in his left hand. In an instant, the WASD setup that we all use, along with dozens of other things, became impossible for him. But, amazingly, that hasn't come between Jason and his love of gaming. I would know. I challenged him to a duel in CS:GO and he kicked my ass with what might as well have been one hand tied behind his back.

Though his accident was only eight months ago, Jason streams his attempts to get back into gaming on Twitch. Unable to play by traditional means, he uses a Razer Naga MMO mouse—the one with 12 buttons on the side—to do just about everything I would use a keyboard for. He's still able to use the weight of his left hand to push a button or two on his keyboard if he absolutely has to, but everything from moving to swapping weapons is done on the mouse. If it wasn't for the second webcam pointed at his hands when he streams, you might never notice that Jason is only using one of them. That's how good he is. But getting there, he tells me, has been a struggle. 

The road to recovery 

What was supposed to be another day of riding motorcycles with his brother turned into a disaster when Jason lost control and steered into a wall, flipping over and falling 35 feet to the ground below. "I broke multiple vertebrae," he says. "I have a T5 [spinal] fusion in my back. I broke my scapula. I broke my right arm, my left hand was severely dislocated. They said I broke all of my ribs. My spleen also exploded, so that had to be removed."

In all, he spent nine days recovering in the hospital. But when his left hand still hadn't regained feeling, Jason worried something was wrong. "After going through a bunch of tests, they determined that I severed some nerves in my brachial plexus which is in my neck," he says. "So they think I pulled them out of my spinal column." The diagnosis wasn't positive. While there might be some procedures to restore a little bit of movement, Jason's left hand was paralyzed.

For Jason, who tells me he's been playing on the PC for years, that was hard to take. "Gaming is a huge part of my life, it's like my favorite thing in the world," he says. "I was like, how am I going to play games? Am I ever going to be able to play Counter-Strike again? Am I ever going to be able to play games with my brothers and my friends?" 

But Jason didn't waste any time trying to figure out a way. He very quickly figured out that a game like Diablo 3 could easily be played entirely using the mouse, so he started slaughtering demons to help pass the time he spent at home in recovery. Take one look at the most played games on his Steam profile, however, and it's easy to see that Jason is a Counter-Strike guy at heart. Eventually he longed for the sandy corridors of de_dust2.

After a somewhat successful attempt to play the Overwatch beta, he decided it was time to give Counter-Strike a try. "What I did was I went into a deathmatch—I didn't change any [settings]—and I just sat there. I let people come to me and I'd just kill them." It was hardly playing, but it was just enough to motivate him to try a little harder. "I was like, if people are missing this bad while I'm standing still, it can't be too bad if I try moving around," he says. "So I decided to try to rebind [the controls] of Counter-Strike."

With some experimentation, Jason found a setup that worked. And with each match he played, a sliver of his previous ability came back. In the time that we spent dueling each other, it was obvious that Jason is the better player. His aim is deadly, but movement is where he can stumble. Using his thumb to control his character means that he can't strafe and peek as effectively as most players. He also tells me that in hectic situations he'll sometimes switch guns due to hitting the wrong button. Still, that hasn't stopped him from ranking at Gold Nova III. "I definitely get frustrated," he says. "I know where I used to play at skill-wise, so sometimes it gets frustrating especially when I'm in a [competitive match]. I always telling everyone that the only reason that I'm probably where I'm at right now is because of what [knowledge] I have of the game."

But knowledge in Counter-Strike goes a long way. The first few times Jason came out on top, his brothers would always brag in chat about him pulling it off one-handed. When players didn't always believe them, they started encouraging Jason to stream himself playing. Though he was apprehensive at first, he quickly realized how sharing his story could be a positive thing. "It's been amazing," he says. "Through the streaming and whatnot, I've met a bunch of great people. It's helped me tremendously—talking to these people, talking about my accident, and not just storing it away."  

Becoming King of the Kill 

Months later and Jason streams just about every single day of the week. Though his audience is small, he delights in sharing his moments of triumph. Just over a week ago, he had what might be the most meaningful of those experiences. Out of the 150 people that stepped into a match of H1Z1: King of the Kill, Jason was one of two still standing. His opponent crouched behind a large boulder while he took cover behind a tree. Using a molotov for cover, Jason broke cover and rushed his enemy. Just as he closed in, his opponent opened fire but Jason proved to be the better shot. His reaction to winning is priceless. 

"I play with two hands and I've yet to win," writes one commenter. "You put me to shame."

"I'm super proud of myself," Jason says of that win. "That meant the world to me at that moment."

And already he says he's pushing himself towards his next challenge. Fans have been clamoring to see him tackle the will-breaking monstrosities hidden within Dark Souls, a game known for its difficulty but that's already been beaten with a guitar controller, the world flipped upside down, and using only voice commands. He sounds nervous when he tells me about it, but says he's willing to give it a shot. That kind of attitude is at the heart of Jason's message: "After my accident, the only thing I could do was be positive. When I started playing games again the only thing I could do was be positive and know that I would never play on that same level," he says. "I want to tell people that, yeah, this happened to me not too long ago, but we can still work through obstacles in our lives and we can still be positive."

Jason might never reach that same level of skill he had before his accident, but I don't think he minds all that much. And you know what? Two hands or not, he can still kick some ass. If you ever see him in a game of CS:GO, tell him I want a rematch. 

The actual, full title of sexy sex visual novel Ladykiller in a Bind is 'My Twin Brother Made Me Crossdress As Him And Now I Have To Deal With A Geeky Stalker And A Domme Beauty Who Want Me In A Bind!!', which, uh, tells you pretty much everything you need to know.

Your twin brother has kidnapped you and is forcing you to pretend to be him on a cruise full of exceedingly randy teens from his school. At the same time, a 'Game' is going on—it’s all very Danganronpa, really—in which you have to win votes for a chance at a $4 million prize. You have to balance two statistics: votes, which are done in a tally, and suspicion, which leads to a game over if you get to five points. Suspicion points are earned by doing things that your brother wouldn’t do, like being overly nice, kind, or naked. Because your brother doesn’t have boobs.

Unlike most visual novels, your dialogue choices are timed—you can choose the first one that appears, you can wait for a few more sentences to choose something that might be slightly better, or you can ignore all options and just go with whatever the protagonist decides to say (which is usually nothing, if you pick no dialogue options). This is a really interesting dynamic, because it makes conversations feel real and hides a lot of the visual novel framework.

The main conceit of the game is 'consent is sexy', though a clear slant towards 'BDSM is sexy' can’t go ignored, either. The sexual relationships in the game all have some kind of power dynamic, whether that’s you gently coaxing a shy girl into being more confident about her sexuality, or being tied up and suspended from the ceiling by a secret dominatrix. The topic of consent is handled well for the most part, with characters (including you) talking about safe words and making sure that every step along the sexy way is enthusiastic and agreed upon, but there’s this weird, uncomfortable layer of non-consensuality that undermines it.

At the heart of it all, you are pretending to be someone you’re not—you’re a woman pretending to be a man, and a stranger pretending to be their classmate. Can consent ever be fully received if you’re fundamentally lying about who you are? It’s also a bit weird that in one scene, you get given a “safe word” but seemingly not the option to ever use it, which, sure, would stall the whole scene, but that’s the whole point of safe words—even if, in this case, they would be for the player and not the character. Weirdly, the character imposes her own preferences on the player, with 'Honest' choices popping up about things you enjoy, even if the player really, really doesn’t enjoy them.

There’s also the issue of whether or not the game is actually sexy, although, to be honest, this is more of a personal thing and not the game’s fault. If you’re not really into power-play and words like 'groping' and 'molesting' being used in a sexual context, this game isn’t gonna make you tingle in your downstairs dancefloor. But, again, that’s personal preference, and, well, even if you don’t find that particular dynamic sexy, you’ll still find other parts of it pretty steamy anyway. AHEM. Let’s move on.

There are uncomfortable scenes, though there is the option to skip them, and there is a content warning (“transactional sex, degradation”). These scenes feature sexual acts that are implied to not be consensual, yet the character still seems to enjoy them (here’s one of the points where you get the option to “confess” that you enjoy being forced to do sexual acts against your will. Even if you don’t). There’s also the really creepy narrative framing, in which you’re telling your twin brother about all the sexual acts you’ve been getting up to in the past week, in graphic detail, because he really wants to hear about it. Personally, the idea that your brother gets off on hearing about your sexcapades with all the goopy, sweaty detail included felt really, really unsexy.

Despite all this personal preference and occasional discomfort (and one extended instance of extreme unpleasantness), Ladykiller in a Bind is doing important work when it comes to the portrayal of consent and interesting sexual dynamics. Most sex games are pretty vanilla and are written very much from the male gaze point-of-view, and while Ladykiller isn’t all that diverse when it comes to its cast of characters, who are mostly skinny, white and entirely hairless from the neck down, it’s still making leaps and bounds in other areas.

When sex games can actively represent the diversity of sexuality, fetishes, turn-ons and kinks while still showing that respect and care are important in any level of sexual relationship, then we’ll have got somewhere good. For now, Ladykiller is a good start. 

World War One FPS Verdun may have ceased firing over the holidays while reenacting the Christmas Truce, but it's now back to business in the bunkers. To mark the new year, M2H and Blackmill Games are adding The Highlander Squad to the battlefield—kilts and all. 

Performing an "aggressive scouting" role in Verdun, the Scots comes equipped with Pattern 1914 Enfield—a five-round 'dog-leg' bolt handle rifle, which combines elements of the infamous German Mauser and renowned Lee-Enfield, best suited to marksmen. 

"The Scots were no stranger to war, and when the call to arms came in 1914, a relatively large number of Scottish young men eagerly joined the ranks of the British in Belgium," reads an update post. "Wearing their traditional kilts, they performed many aggressive scouting maneuvers, often finding themselves in the thick of savage battles such as Loos and Arras. They suffered a staggering number of casualties as a result, but were nevertheless undeterred and soon earned the nickname the 'ladies from hell'."

I'm from Glasgow myself and while not overly fussed with kilt wearing, I know better than to take the piss out of a proud Scotsman/woman for wearing one. 

Should you wish to don the traditional tartan attire in the virtual battlegrounds of Verdun, the Highlander Squad update is out now free-of-charge via Steam. You'll of course need the base game to play, which costs £18.99/$24.99.

When Tom and James got to grips with Arachnid Games and Gambitious Digital Entertainment's Diluvion at PAX, they described its crew management system as "equal parts FTL and Dragon Age". That's quite the combination and while the deep sea submarine exploration game was initially expected to launch late last year, it now has a concrete release date: February 2, 2017. 

With nine unique upgradable vessels, filled with bespoke weapons and "specialised" crew members, Diluvion drops players into a vast undersea world after the land above is flooded and subsequently frozen over. A "ceiling of impenetrable ice" blocks access to the surface, therefore you're tasked with battling hostile ships and whichever other terrors stalk the deep as you strive to defend your submersible and its crew. 

"But fighting isn’t the only key to staying alive; players will also have to manage food and oxygen, salvage and trade loot, collect bounties and discover the depths of a dangerous world brimming with uncharted harbors, factions, stories and secrets," says Gambitious in a statement. "Captains can even build their own home bases of operation to shelter their fleets while growing in notoriety and wealth."

Diluvion will launch on Steam February 2 and will cost £14.99/$19.99. If pre-ordering is your thing, doing so will net you a 15 percent discount ahead of time and a 'Captain's Journal'—said to "document the game’s rich lore"—as well as a Deringer sub to use in-game.

And if you want a sneak peek at Diluvion, Arachnid will be joining us live on today's PC Gamer Show to demo the game. Stop by our Twitch channel at 1pm PST to watch us play or ask them questions!

Elon Musk isn't just the wealthy super-genius behind SpaceX and Tesla Motors, he's also a man who knows something about videogames. It's not immediately evident, as he initially appears to stumble over a game recommendation request at the end of a Y Combinator interview—the only title that seems to cross his mind is Overwatch. His kids play a lot of Hearthstone, he eventually adds, which is the sort of thing a person says when he's awkwardly grasping at straws. But then someone mentions The Last of Us, which leads to talk about the importance of story in videogames, and suddenly Musk is off to the races.    

"I think [storytelling in games] is really neglected. That's the criticism I heard of the latest Deus Ex, that the storytelling is kind of lame. Whereas the prior Deus Ex, and the original Deus Ex, the storytelling was amazing," Musk says. "Some of the older games, the graphics and sound were terrible, so they had to rely on storytelling." It's important to note here that Musk didn't just cite Deus Ex and Human Revolution, but that he also utterly refused to acknowledge even the existence of Invisible War. That's the sign of a man who really knows his stuff. 

Thanks, Glixel. 

Shock Tactics is a very XCOM-like turn-based tactical combat game that puts players at the head of a team of mercenaries exploring a newly-discovered alien world on behalf of the Free Space Pioneers. Naturally, exploration is only part of the job, and you're not carrying all those guns because they look snazzy: You'll have to square off against pirates, hostile aliens, and the troopers of the Imperial Consortium as you set up outposts, establish dig sites, and seek out powerful alien tech to upgrade your base, weapons, and armor. 

Battles in Shock Tactics will take place on procedurally-generated maps built on three different environments, populated by "smart enemies that employ a large array of tactics." Character movement is based on action points, with an "interrupt system" that will halt movements when new enemies are spotted, "so you can asses the situation and spend your remaining action points accordingly." But don't dawdle too much, as some objectives are time-sensitive, and you don't want to get tangled up in enemy reinforcements.

"Shock Tactics is our own vision of modern-age strategy games. The very aggressive turn-based gameplay forces players to get rid of familiar habits and defensive tactics and deal with new, more active ways of fighting enemies,“ said Leonard Kausch, game director at developer Point Blank Games. "We can’t wait until the players finally can see the results of our development.“ 

The website at shock-tactics-game.com doesn't have a lot more to say about it, but you can get a deeper insight into what the developers have planned at the Square Enix Collective, which Shock Tactics passed through in mid-2015. The XCOM influence is obvious, but that's not necessarily a knock against it: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all. Shock Tactics is expected to come out early this year. 

Mega City One isn't quite Half-Life 3, but it is a three hour-long single-player campaign which plants you in the shoes of Gordon Freeman and sets you off on an alternate timeline in a bid to save the world. Its version 1.0 is out now. 

Inspired by an unorthodox combination of the movie Dredd, and games Tomb Raider and Resident Evil, Mega City One sees Freeman again siding with the Rebels against the Combine this time in search of a lost Xen crystal. The next phase of your adversaries' invasion of earth is hinged on acquiring the ancient artefact thus you'll visit ancient ruins, old temples, villages, mansions, and ultimately the city in your quest to get there first.     

"All difficulty levels have been completely rebalanced compared to the main game, to make the experience more challenging and fun at the same time," explains mod creator Abdulhamid Cayirli, who goes by the pseudonym Crowbar. "On the hardest difficulty it is essential to explore and conserve ammo. The difficulty levels have also been smoothed out and the levels are all designed for every difficulty level."

Mega City One came to be when Crowbar entered RunThinkShootLive's mapping tournament 'The Hammer Cup' last year, designing various maps for the competition's five challenges. Following the event, Crowbar decided to rework his designs, remake areas, and implement the feedback he received from the tournament's players. He's since added entirely new maps in order to fill the gaps.

"The great thing about this is that all maps have been extensively play tested, so you can expect a very polished experience in terms of gameplay," says Crowbar. 

Mega City One's version 1.0 is out now—head over to ModDB for download links and installation instructions.

If you've grown a little bored with Fallout 4's holotape minigames, here's something a bit more entertaining. It's a mod called Revolted, and it gives you a custom retro 1990s-style corridor shooter that you can play inside Fallout 4. The mod, created by Cohagen, has a pulse-pounding chiptune soundtrack, wonderfully stilted and over-serious voice acting, and some 2D digitized sprites sprinkled into the 3D levels for some added nostalgia.

With the mod installed, head to Concord, where inside the Speakeasy you'll find a computer terminal on the second floor. Activate it, and you can play Revolted. In the mingame, you inhabit an ass-kicking, cigar-chomping Overseer with a gravelly voice and no patience for mutants, perhaps inspired by Duke Nukem.  The door to your vault has been opened, allowing monsters inside, and your job is to close it again, while blasting your way through zombies and other enemies. 

You're not just shooting, mind you: There are a few interactions with NPCs (also deliberately poorly voiced), some of that shitty '90s platforming that was always shoehorned into shooters of that era, and of course, you'll have to hunt for colored keycards to open various progress-blocking doors.

It's an impressive mod, both fun and funny, as well as a bit profane (there are a number of references to male genitalia). The awkward dialogue and voice acting, plus the music and sound effects, perfectly reflect shooters of the '90s.

It's also got a few surprises I won't spoil, other than to say that there's an amusing boss battle near the end. And when you decide you're finished with the minigame, take care: it might not be finished with you. 

You'll find Revolted over at Nexus Mods.

Gamers hold a very particular vision of the future of entertainment. We were born too early to untangle dark matter and eclipse Alpha Centauri in our own intergalactic freighters, and while those fantasies can be teased and inflated by Star Wars or Star Trek, videogames are the only thing that can simulate them. A pure representation of life between the stars—docking on space stations, exploring planets, carving out a subsistence on the bleeding edge of reality—requires a profound amount of processing power, so for decades we settled for half-steps. Star Wars Galaxies, FreeSpace, Eve Online—all capable games, all leaving us with a desire for something more. 

No Man’s Sky was supposed to be that game. A limitless, psychedelic vision of space, promising a dynamic universe with hours of mystery and curiosity spread across the void. It generated a massive amount of grassroots buzz centered on a few killer trailers, but when the faithful got their hands on the product, they found a nice, low-key procedurally generated survival game. Not bad, but it wasn’t going to carry anyone through the looking glass. 10 years ago, or even five years ago, No Man’s Sky probably would’ve been lauded, but in a moment where videogames seem so mouthwateringly close to delivering a singular, second reality (and the way the development team leaned into those hopes), disappointment was inevitable.

Like most people, a gamer and Reddit poster named Chris got interested in No Man’s Sky following its stellar showing at E3, and followed the development for a year before its 2016 release. "With each video and interview it appeared that the game was going to live up to the original trailer," says Chris. "That E3 trailer, and the hints of multiplayer dropped by Sean Murray in various interviews, was really the only bar I had personally set for the game. I figured I would get about 100 hours out of No Mans Sky."

Chris was equipped with a middling PC and an Xbox One, and decided to make the investment into a $600 Alienware Alpha to be ready for release day. After 20 hours with the game, he started having some serious doubts.

"The art assets were getting old: repetitive building design, lifeless NPC’s, repetitive flora, bizarre fauna—random mixes of reptile and mammal parts—the same terrain and single biomes," he says. "I never really felt like an explorer because over every horizon there was a landing pad, observatory, or trading post with several NPC’s casually glued to their chairs. Exploring the game was no longer fun for me. I can honestly say that it's not a horrible game, it was just marketed wrong, I think most people would agree with that. As I posted on Reddit, NMS actually felt like a Wii version of a space exploration game."

$600 to power a Wii survival game would probably leave me pretty annoyed. But Chris did now have a powerful PC lying around, and he decided to throw his weight behind Star Citizen—the other super ambitious, controversial space sim on the horizon. In a Reddit post he made three months ago titled "If I hadn’t met NMS, I probably wouldn’t have fallen in love with SC," he lays out his reasoning.

"After a few underwhelming weeks of NMS' ‘chill’ gameplay, I immediately started looking for something more to satisfy this craving for an awesome space sim that's been growing within me these past few years... and that's when I came across the [Star Citizen] 3.0 Demo. It was everything I thought I wanted from a space sim," he wrote. "Even in Alpha I am having a lot of fun and I'm excited to hop inside my Avenger each night and blast off into the 'Verse! So this is it, I think I've finally found the game; it took me a little longer than most, and I lost $60 along the way, but at least I made it!"

To be clear, Chris is only invested into Star Citizen for $80. He might not be nearly as optimistic if he had to plunk down the cash for a new machine like he did for No Man’s Sky. But it’s still interesting that he’s willing to risk disappointment on such a similar project. The dreams of Chris Roberts are cached in more experience, a larger team, and a different business model, but they aren’t that different from the hopes of Sean Murray. The logical reasons are all sound—Chris states he’s attracted to the lore, multiplayer, and the open-ended gameplay that No Man’s Sky lacks—but he still admits that this breed of hype is a little bit destructive. 

"At the end of the day, gaming is one of my hobbies. I don’t mind spending money on my hobby, and I recognize that not every game is going to be great—that goes with anything in life," he says. "Hell, I took my family to a movie the other night which cost $40 in tickets and $30 in food, and the movie sucked. That was $70 for two hours of dissatisfaction. Needless to say, I don’t get worked up over ‘wasting’ money on videogames. I’m fortunate enough to say that losing $60 on a bad game won’t ruin my day."

However, there are other people who’ve migrated from No Man’s Sky to Star Citizen who won’t be quite as satisfied if Cloud Imperium Games fails to deliver. Another gamer named Jules has been playing PC games since the first Ultima and has dealt with more heartbreaks than the average dejected No Man’s Sky fan. Like Chris, he was drawn to Star Citizen late last year after Hello Games left him cold, but he’s not going to pull any punches if it fails to deliver.

"If Star Citizen does fail, I think it might finally make me hesitate to back games of that magnitude early on in the development cycle," he says. "Buying your way in is a new concept and I'm not sure it's all that positive in helping developers achieve their goals. If you can easily get funded but then still fall flat because you just didn't have a good game concept then there's something wrong with the new trend of funding games via buy-ins, crowd-funding and early access systems. I do think Star Citizen has a winner though and I hope they succeed!"

Jules and Chris have been chasing this fantasy for a long time. All they want to do is explore without any evidence of the machine behind the curtain. No invisible walls, no repetitive landscapes, no cut-corners or processor shortcomings to disturb the dream.

"I want to explore, that's my main motivation for a good space game," says Jules. "I'm actually not that enthusiastic about dozens of ship types and dog-fight PvP and all that. But I am very interested in a community of players interacting within a given universe with an economy and story unfolding. I was an old-school Star Wars Galaxies player and in its beginning it was an amazing game until they changed the fundamental way it worked. I hope for another game with that sort of expansive dynamics and gameplay where traders, explorers, and fighter pilots all have a place to share in the game's universe." 

At the end of an intense weekend of Dota 2 Digital Chaos took the grand prize at ESL One Genting in the mountains of Malaysia, the first-ever LAN win for the squad. The team took home $125,000 for the victory, while runner-up team Newbee, hailing from China, ended their own impressive run with $50,000. 

Each player beamed with excitement as they stood together with the trophy. MoonMeander barely had words as the stage host asked how he felt. It was their first LAN tournament victory, a massive milestone given how close the TI6 challengers came to holding title before losing to Wings in the grand final.

Reso1ution even grabbed the mic to brag. “Our first tournament! Woo!”“We won Saksa a LAN, guys!” joked MiSeRy, the captain and one of the support players. “First LAN win ever, guys! Congratulations!” 

As a last word to the venue, Reso1ution made his feelings clear for the enthused crowd: “I love you!” And because a winner can’t be excited enough, he added again— “Woo!”

 The victory came after an intense series versus Chinese team Newbee that spanned the full best of five, including a 51-minute match two taken by DC. Both teams were seen as strong contenders going into the matchup, with Newbee’s relatively fresh blood seemingly tapped out and DC’s full potential being similarly exposed after each suffered rough runs at the Boston Major. Aside from the strength of the finalists, competition was tight for every team going into the tournament.

CIS favorite Virtus Pro was predicted as a reliably strong pick at the beginning of the event. They were looked upon as a mid-game powerhouse, spawning an aggressive meta after winning The Summit in November that other teams picked up into later tournaments. Unfortunately, the team dropped to the lower bracket, tried to fight through, and were eventually defeated by the versatile, soon-to-be champions DC in an action-packed semifinals matchup.

The semis between Chinese rivals Newbee and Wings were nothing to shake a finger at as each team kept their eyes on big late-game plays. Newbee stomped their national rivals in a short first game, but Wings had to be dragged out kicking after winning the second game. The teams went back and forth in tense and exciting second and third maps that brought the ticker over 45 minutes. Ultimately, in a final game, Newbee held control of the map despite a Wings draft, including Broodmother, that attempted to do otherwise.

Malaysia had its eyes on Fnatic, a local team recently featured in Valve’s documentary True Sight during their failed fight through the Boston Major qualifiers. Led by veteran Mushi after an anxious post-Major shuffle, the team sadly fell through both the group stages and losers bracket after losing to, respectively, VP and Canadian fan favorite NP.

Also representing the locality were Execration from the Philippines and WP.Unity from Malaysia, both of which won their respective local qualifiers. Execration likely had a bone to pick with WP.Unity, as the Filipino squad took second to WP in the SEA Kappa invitational cup in December. After a strong three matches, Execration eliminated their local rivals, though they fell to Wings in the next round.

NP remained a crowd favorite despite losing to VP in the quarterfinals. After losing to the eventual 2nd place winners in the group stage, they showed potential after wiping out Fnatic 2-0 in the first Bo3. Unfortunately, VP gave the same treatment. The team still got a lot of love from its fans due to the team's openness about its everyday life (including its affinity for anime, as the team lists its MyAnimeList links on its homepage). For instance, MSS shared his experience with food culture after buying “Sky Juice”—meaning water (“juice” taken from the sky, meaning rain). The incident became an inside joke throughout the event and its segments.

Beyond the rivalries and memes, there was no shortage of interesting drafts during the event. Meepo was drafted not once, but three times: once at a loss for none other than DC’s w33ha, famous for his “w33po” gameplay; another time victoriously for the Filipino Execration player Gabbi, against local rival WG.Unity; and finally for Newbee’s uuu9, in a winning game against Wings.

Every pub's favorite hook-thrower Pudge was picked five times by four different teams with varying results. In alignment with Wings’ reputation for unusual picks, they attempted to win with Broodmother in their third semifinal match against Newbee, unfortunately to no avail. Overall, 63 heroes were picked throughout the tournament, which is a great sign: every match was gripping for spectators.