Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Screenshot: Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus/Bethesda Softworks Welcome to our Game In Progress review of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. Over the next two weeks, William Hughes will be playing through this over-the-top, overtly political follow-up to 2014’s Wolfenstein: The New Order, working his way through a Nazi-dominated America full of crazy superscience, foul-mouthed revolutionaries,…
Credit Rebekka Dunlap Among video game developers, it’s called “crunch”: a sudden spike in work hours, as many as 20 a day, that can last for days or weeks on end. During this time, they sleep at work, limit bathroom breaks and cut out anything that pulls their attention away from their screens, including family…
Last weekend’s NeoGAF implosion was upsetting to anyone who enjoyed reading and posting on the influential gaming message board. Fortunately for them, a new option has already emerged. On Wednesday night a group of former GAF users launched ResetEra, a clean new message board with sections for discussing video games and other topics (“EtcetEra”). As…
After marathoning through the entirety of Middle-Earth: Shadow of War, I can confidently say two things about it. The first is that the game is built on a complex set of mechanics that gamify slavery and make it “fun.” The second is that its narrative wants us to be critical of the slavery that it…
In FIFA, as so many fans of EA’s all-conquering football series know, you can buy FIFA Coins with real world money. And with those FIFA Coins you can buy packs of cards for use in FIFA Ultimate Team, the series’ most popular mode and the one that makes EA so many millions of dollars each…
Editor’s note: This story is revised from the print editionA funny thing happened this year as investors dove into esports, chasing eight-figure franchises in the Overwatch League and the “League of Legends” League Championship Series: A new game came out of nowhere to win the hearts and minds of fans. Launched in beta mode by…
Image credit: Frontier. Last week, Elite: Dangerous’ mysterious aliens finally went on the offensive after months of poking and probing. Now, players have figured out how to fight back, but not everybody’s feeling super rah-rah-rah gung-ho about it. Over the weekend, notorious Elite player Joshua “Harry Potter” Chamberlain and his Smiling Dog Crew managed to…
.post-info Before a “Dungeons & Dragons” player joins a game, before she finds her first sword or slays her first gnoll, she must create a character who has a race and a class. Will she skulk in the shadows as a gnome rogue? Sally forth with her human paladin? Reave up and down the Sword…
SK Gaming’s Counter-Strike team celebrating their first place win at the Intel Extreme Masters 2005 (image via SK Gaming) In the early 2000s, pro gamers had much simpler uniforms. They wore cotton hoodies and T-shirts while competing for prize pools that were in the tens of thousands of dollars, rather than the hundreds of thousands….
Yesterday, Felix Kjellberg, aka PewDiePie, uttered a racial slur while streaming PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. We wrote a news piece about it. The responses to the article were a mixed bag. There were plenty of readers who were appalled and disturbed by the instance. However, in the past 24 hours, supporters have come to Kjellberg’s defense, saying…