Shannon I., 23, didn’t want to leave her Baltimore hotel room. For months, she had been looking forward to Otakon, Baltimore’s annual anime convention, and especially to cosplaying Takumi from Fire Emblem Fates. Trimmed in fur, embellished with red string and topped with a white wig, Shannon’s cosplay was impeccable.…

The animated Overwatch short nobody but Bastion players wanted, “The Last Bastion,” just premiered at Gamescom.

Game Masters can be nit-picky sticklers with wands up their butts. It’s a respectable mode for navigating the endless charts and dice rolls and idiosyncratic mechanics of tabletop RPGs. Seriously, I respect you, stickler GMs. Without you, I wouldn’t know the difficulty class for reaching across the table and grabbing…

Probably my favorite hobby next to playing video games is reading about people who love and design them. And I’m not talking licensed-by-Nintendo glory stories about CEOs overcoming their mistrust of Crash Bandicoot to make millions—I’m talking books about the rest of us, lovers on MMORPGs, struggling indie devs,…

“Dunno if I’m out of the loop, but what the hell is this?” Crypt of the NecroDancer player RireMakar asked on Reddit last May. In the main folder of the game’s SteamApp root directory, the data-miner unearthed a cryptic sigil, an iris embedded in the palm of a hand, which he posted online. A few hours later, Josh R.…

Last weekend, I hopped a train to Baltimore to report at Otakon, an anime convention with upwards of 20,000 attendees, many of whom were decked out in mind-meltingly good cosplay. One thing I noticed was that, on the whole, Otakon’s women were absolutely killing it cosplaying Overwatch heroes.

Overwatch’s Roadhog, the wheezing, porcine tank from Hell, is my favorite video game character of 2016. The rush of visceral win I feel when I hook an enemy and blast scrap metal in their face is unparalleled. I love it all: the way his Scrap Gun bounces up and down when he lumbers to the objective; his full-throated,…

The hunt for details about Overwatch’s alleged next hero, Sombra, has finally reaped something—and it’s literally a reaper (not to be confused with the hero Reaper). The 5,000 Overwatch fans struggling to unravel Blizzard’s increasingly obtuse information puzzles have been investigating the latest Sombra clue for…

Weird tropes find their way into anime, and I’m not just talking about tentacle porn. Judgment aside, cat girls, superpowered transfer students and Vespa-riding aliens are objectively a little eyebrow-raising as television plot hooks. To be an anime fan, you get used to things you wouldn’t normally poke with a…

Riot Games last Friday filed a lawsuit against LeagueSharp, a cheating software for League of Legends that automates gameplay, locates enemies and boosts accuracy, allowing players to gain experience at an inhuman rate. In the lawsuit, filed in California, Riot alleges that its 67 million LoL players per month are…

Hardship is a social glue, especially in games. Shared victories and mutual defeat, confusion, frustration— these are bonding mechanisms that transcend the IRL-URL barrier. In MMORPGs, in which community is a main draw, the difference between a challenging game and an easy game can also mean the difference between a…

Jamel Wilkins says he Smashes with honor and dignity. And yet, for over a month, he was marooned in what players are calling “Smash Hell,” apparently an alternate server on which soft-banned Super Smash Bros. 4 players are forced to play with each other, regardless of their innocence.

Kickstarter may be the closest thing we have to democracy in game development. Although gamers, in a sense, always vote with their wallets, Kickstarter lets them feel integral to the game development process by directly funding games. The results have been excellent: From Kickstarter funding, we’ve gotten knockout…

Akira will never not be the shit. Released in 1988, the cyberpunk-ish anime still boasts a cult following that appreciates biker gangs, science fiction and big, sad explosions. Yesterday, filmmakers Brad Kremer and Dean Fowler released an incredible CG Akira tribute “trailer” that was six years in the making. The…