I have my own separate issues with the Steam marketplace and points shop, but I can't lie: I love collecting themes that make my Steam profile look like a relic of the early 2000s. It's not quite as satisfying as the complex Dragon Ball Z profiles I styled back in the day on Neopets or LiveJournal, but it may be the closest thing I have to simulating the feeling.(Image credit:...

I realize it's poor form of me, but I can't mind my own business, and I'm about to yuck some of y'all's yum. Why does every game need a series of mods turning their respective worlds into smooth-faced dystopias? It's like there's an unwritten rule somewhere that the first batch of fanmade downloads in every game's modding scene must include 'fixes' for no pores, no freckles, no scars, and no...

A common early World of Warcraft experience was to stumble into a series of corpses lying on the ground that, when looked at from the right angle, spelled out a URL for a site where you can pay real money for in-game gold.Gold was scarce back then, which spawned an entire market for buying it instead of grinding for it. Even if you never touched one of those sites, it...

The ArmA family tree(Image credit: Future)This TikTok from Biffmatic (recently reshared by Bohemia Interactive) reminded me just how different PC gaming would look today if not for Arma, the long-running milsim series that's still going strong.Pretty much everyone knows that DayZ, one of the important PC games of the previous decade, began as an Arma 2 mod. The idea of PvPvE survival—the kind where you never know if you can...

When the gates opened on the World of Warcraft: Forever beta, it was a free-for-all. Everyone fought to be the first to "tag" enemies with their attacks so they would count for their quests—a problem that is essentially obsolete in modern WoW.My memories of doing this in the real classic WoW came flooding back as I frantically tried to claim enemies before someone else did. But that old frustration also...

I swore I'd never become this evil"I think there are some genuine wrinkles in MoP: Remix, for sure. I'd like to see the shared XP buff thing return, for example—but the frog farming is only a problem if you view the event as a competitive experience, which it isn't designed to be."- me, May 21, 2024. (Image credit: Blizzard)Anyway, this beta is not designed to be a competitive experience. For...

I'm calling it here—this is as bad as it's gonna get. Insomniac's Wolverine has been getting slapped around a fair bit because it's perhaps the summit, the zenith—of 'how much handholding can you put in a game before we all get sick of it'. And listen, I've actually defended yellow paint on this site before. I am in agreement with most developers that a little guidance is good. Players do...

This appeared on my X feed this morning and it's been bouncing around in my brain since I saw it. Titled as the "first $100,000 RAM kit" it caught my eye. The first thing to note is that this is, inevitably, server grade memory, and 2 TB of the stuff as well.It's DDR5-5600 of ECC RDIMM in a 16-pack kit for precisely $101,451.99 at Amazon, for all you server engineers...

You do not, as a rule, see studios respond to rumours, reports, and speculation, but a recent Bloomberg report that Sony dropped Physint, Kojima Productions' upcoming stealth game, because it was overbudget and kept missing deadlines must have rankled the studio a little, because it released the statement above yesterday to quell fears.To quell fears of what? Well, mostly that the relationship between Hideo Kojima and Sony has gotten as...

As reported by Kotaku, the organizers of the Tokyo Game Show have announced that its final day has been canceled and tickets for Monday, September 21 will be refunded. This was supposed to be the first five-day event in TGS' 30-year run⁠—while I am not a superstitious man, God or karma or something may be trying to tell us that it's just supposed to be a four-day deal."Due to the...