EA say they plan to disclose odds of loot box items in FIFA 19 and other sport ’em ups, though it’s unclear quite how specific they’ll get. Loot boxes in FIFA? Yup, those are the ‘packs’ of random players and power-ups for FIFA’s long-running Ultimate Team mode (FUT), sold for a virtuacash or a premium microtransaction currency, which players use to build and boost a team. The packs give a vague indication of what might be inside (a bit like Mass Effect multiplayer, if that’s a more illuminating reference point to you) but doesn’t actually tell players odds on getting the specific shinies they long for – a common but still shoddy loot box practice. (more…)

I have reached a conclusion. Everything that’s bad is the fault of Steam sales. Two weeks ago these charts had reached a place of being a fertile ground of interesting new games and discounted classics. Today, they’re back to being mostly a miserably predictable list of games that even the undiscovered tribes of Papua New Guinea have on their Steam accounts. (more…)

Think fast. No, faster than that. Sorry, you re still not thinking with the required rapidity. Dragon Ball FighterZ is a good fighting game that requires quick wits and quick mitts, which is why you ll never be the best. But this fight between two players at a weekend tournament has some folks in the fighting game community squealing. From an outsider s perspective, it sure looks like a lot of kicks and punches and firey blasts of focused energy. But to Dragon Ballers, it s a tour de fisticuffs, a relentless slugfest featuring a tense and impressive comeback from one of the game s best pugilists. (more…)

Every six months, the Games Done Quick Nerd Olympics allows us to witness the best and brightest and funniest and most highly-specific gamer heroes absolutely devastate titles ranging from the modern AAA to the retro to the entirely forgotten. These speedruns decimate the rules of the game while a live audience cheers our heroes on to victory. The fact this event benefits excellent foundations is always the best part, with sudden prompts that allow you to vote on game changing events by using your dollars. This year, the Bloomington, Minnesota event for Summer Games Done Quick raised a record $2.1 million for charity.

Doctors Without Borders are surely thankful that so many people want to see Celeste get broken in front of a live audience.

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Americans don’t know Jeff Minter in the way he’s known elsewhere. At least, that’s what I’ve been told, and it tracks because I didn’t know who Minter was either. The game creator has repeatedly butted heads with The Creature That Wears The Skin Of Atari, so it is delightful to see that some kind of common ground was reached to allow Minter to make this re-imagining of the classic arcade game Tempest. Minter was behind Tempest 2000, the widely-admired Tempest remake first released on Atari Jaguar, and has only grown more Minterly across the years through games including Space Giraffe and Polybius. Tempest 4000 is a challenging wave shooter wrapped in neon retro vibe that carries his trademark style into the future. And you can play T4000 in a couple weeks.

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He came in like a… well, what would you call it? A spherical distruption? No… but that’s close… Anyhowdy, there’s a new little furball in action amidst the unending battle nightmare of Overwatch. Hammond the Hamster pilots a gigantic murder-mech of his own design, built from the escape pod he used to flee an evil science lab. Wrecking Ball is the most innovative and wacky character to be added to the Overwatch line-up, and while he comes packed with a number of gizmos and attacks, one such device has called out to players and made them huge weirdo jokes: the grappling hook.

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If you read our site, you’re probably familiar with Robert Yang at this point. One of my first introductions to Yang’s work was through this RPS article on The Tearoom, which is a “historic bathroom simulator” that dealt with gay issues but could not include gay sex, so the in-game penises were replaced with guns, because no one in the industry will ban a game with guns. Yang’s public shower-based game Rinse & Repeat was one of the very first games banned on Twitch. You might be detecting some themes in Yang’s work. (And that theme is that Steam won’t allow many of Yang’s games.) Now, Yang is part of a group of queer artists and game designers who just launched a video game bundle to benefit LGBTQ / pro-immigrant grassroot non-profits (such as the Sylvia Rivera Law Project and Make The Road New York) and their game bundle is now live.

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Back in 2014, we covered Contagion, a multiplayer co-op zombie game that was dark as all hell and equally hard, but with delightful twists and incredibly well done maps. As Craig said of the game at the time, the levels aren’t huge but they’re incredible densely designed, and built to be slowly explored. Well, Contagion is coming to VR now as Contagion VR: Outbreak, and I can’t imagine a better pairing. There’s no need to rush through this world, and thank god, because rushing and the current state of VR don’t work that well anyway.

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Sundays are for playing board games with old uni friends, at your old uni. Or for reading about video games. Thems your choices.

Blogger “problemmachine” wrote a short piece that questions whether every story needs conflict. I’m fascinated by it, because I think they’re wrong but can’t help but wonder if that’s based on an assumption I’m unaware of because it’s baked into me so deeply. Every story has to be about an attempt to overcome an obstacle, doesn’t it? What’s more interesting about not seeing that struggle through the lens of conflict? What would it mean to actually look at events through a different lens? It’s one thing to say they can exist, but another to give me an example of a conflict-less story I’d value being told. (more…)

Fortnite: Battle Royale is no stranger to royal displays of extravagance. Heck, that good spacedaddy Thanos ran amok in there for a while. But today, we’ve witnessed a Once In A Game experience: they shot a rocket into the sky and it made the sky not work anymore. We’re not sure what it means, but there’s plenty of video of what went down, and certainly this is all leading into the fifth season with some kind of world changing… thing. Look, I don’t know either, man.

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