Recently, Blizzard announced the implementation of a new policy for World of Warcraft,: players who are frequently reported for spamming and/or abusive chat will receive a 24-hour warning silence, preventing them from using a number of in-game functions. Players who are continually reported after that warning may be permanently silenced. […]
PC
Forecast: Not good but getting better. Maybe. I’ve written before about being nonbinary and considering what that looked like in games and why continued strides in representation matters. This week Laytonya Pennington at BGD looked at Kingdom Hearts Unchained X and offered evidence of why better representation is necessary for […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about The Flame in the Flood lately; I’m playing it, my husband’s playing it, even my son played a time or two. We’re all big fans of survival games, and roguelikes; we all love scrabbling to survive another adventure, another day, and the chipper, folksy music, […]
I’ve played about an hour and a half of The Magic Circle, and, to be completely honest, I haven’t yet figured out whether or not I like it. I think I do. But I’m not sure. I’m mainly confused, but not really in a way that makes me annoyed or irritated […]
I’ve often wondered about the potential reach of games. If marketing was a little different. If (some) games were. So when Her Story came along, with its straightforward interface, search-based mechanic, and nonlinear mystery narrative, I saw the potential immediately for the game to spread, though the problem with something […]
I’m not sure how much time I’ve actually spent playing Her Story. The game was open for a long time while I was trying to stream (unsuccessfully), and more time passed as I searched for paper and took notes. And then there was the time spent considering and studying and adding […]
Because of the woefully bad performance of the PC version of the final installment of the Batman trilogy, Batman Arkham Knight, WB has suspended sales of the game for PC until such time that they can patch the game to a playable point. WB representatives on the game’s official forum […]
Yesterday, it was reported on Twitter and Reddit that Guild Wars 2, ArenaNet’s MMORPG, had added a transgender NPC — or rather, featured the transition of an NPC, Sya, who had formerly been known as Symon. Sya appeared with yesterday’s game patch that featured the re-opening of Lion’s Arch, a […]
The recent NYMG piece on Sam’s reaction to the new Cuphead trailer has inspired a lot of reaction of its own about the game, the animation style that influenced it, and what it means to critique a trailer, and so for the purpose of further discussion and analysis, we have […]
We joked several times on the last episode of the podcast that this was going to be the year of the 4 at E3. We were all anticipating 2nds, 3rds, or 4ths of some series or another and that held up for the most part. One of the things that […]
I am a sucker for a good spy story. And when those spies are also cyberpunk hackers, then all the better. So when I discovered that Invisible, Inc. is a game that features such hacker-spies, suffice it to say I was pretty excited to play it. Invisible, Inc., developed by […]
I’m not sure why I call myself such an unapologetic fan of Bethesda Softworks and all their related arms; I played Skyrim a while, but found it mostly boring, I won’t touch Elder Scrolls Online, and if you mention The Evil Within, I will set off on an hour-long rant […]
One more week to go. Can you feel it? Is your body ready, Reggie Fils-Aime? Nintendo On June 14, Nintendo will stream some sort of Super Smash Bros. announcement on Twitch. What could it be? (Please let it involve an Amiibo restock.) Sony Could The Last Guardian actually show up? […]
The Music Machine delivers an experience that’s uncharacteristic of most horror games. There are no monsters chasing after you, despite the fact that they’d be right at home on the abandoned island where the game is set. There are no jump scares waiting for you around the corner (at least […]
Bloom, by Caelyn Sandel, presents the interactive story of a someone discovering a new identity and wholeness later in life than most. As Sandel puts it, “I started writing Bloom because there are some wonderful stories out there for trans women coming out in their teens and twenties, but few good […]
The line between adventure games and interactive fiction is at best a little blurry, and sometimes doesn’t exist at all, and finding that line in author Matthew Burnside’s forays into interactive media and games is a particular challenge. Often, in adventure games that skew toward interactive fiction, the plot’s the […]