Author: David Carter

Ian Proulx had realistic hopes for Splitgate, the multiplayer shooter dubbed “Halo with Portals,” when he and his colleagues 1047 finally published the game in 2021. He hoped for gradual expansion and assumed it would do enough over time. Ten47 had less than twenty members at the time, including four engineers. Proulx recalls, “But it was like, nope, this is your moment now, everything’s on fire.” Splitgate’s success exceeded both Proulx’s expectations and the capabilities of its tiny independent staff. According to him, it peaked at almost two million daily active users. The team had to spend the following few…

In another reality, the adored Kirby series from Nintendo and HAL never left Japan. The games starring the pink puffball gradually became known as the kid-friendly, more lenient counterparts to Mario as he and his cute friends took over one platform after another. Mario was lost if he failed to make a jump. Kirby? You can retry your redemption by just pumping the button to float. Younger gamers found it easy to get started with Kirby games and finish the primary missions, but those seeking a bit more difficulty encountered some very tricky obstacles along the way to reaching 100%…

This morning, Nintendo got up and decided to cause chaos by releasing a brief but extremely disturbing teaser for what appears to be a new horror game. Although the name is yet unknown, it might be called Emio or even Smiling Man. What on earth was that? Fans of Nintendo are perplexed. The description of this “Emio” thing is essentially nonexistent. The only other information we have, aside from the teaser, comes from Nintendo tweeting about it this morning using the hashtag #WhoIsEmio? on its accounts in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Additionally, the official Nintendo website merely has…

All PlayStation Plus subscribers can now access the Concord early access beta, according to Sony. The communications manager at developer Firewalk, Alice Labrecque, provided information on the pre-download, the server launch date, and the PC system requirements for the cooperative multiplayer shooter in a post on the PlayStation Blog. The open beta for Concord is scheduled to run from July 18 to July 21, while the early access test will run from tomorrow, July 12, to July 14. All PlayStation Plus subscribers have to do is turn on their PS5 and search for the early access beta download option. The…

As Endwalker began with you and the company cruising to the far-off city of Old Sharlayan, so too does Final Fantasy XIV’s Dawntrail expansion start with an extended voyage to a land we have never been before. But instead of making contact with a long-established society, you enter a whole area with which very few people in Eorzea are familiar. Entering Tural, a region influenced by Mesoamerica and Latin America, may initially give you the impression that a group of heroes who have spared vast realms from destruction are on a summer vacation. But I can guarantee you that Dawntrail…

The First Descendant feels like a focus-group-tested, shamelessly derivative shooter that strives to please everyone and is doomed to mediocrity as a result, especially with so many live-service games competing for your attention. It takes stale concepts from better games, coats them in a thick layer of free-to-play irritations, and then packs the entire experience with monotonous, mind-numbing missions—just in case you were still finding enjoyment in it. That is bad because there is a pretty solid base with fun gunplay and interesting characters I would like to know more about beneath all that cheap wood and decaying drywall. Although…

Players of Helldivers 2 have found an amazing bug that stops them from incurring fall damage, and Arrowhead’s new CEO wants it to remain that way. According to Redditor Chunke-Funke-Monke, emoting in Helldivers 2 lessens fall damage. You can indeed lessen the damage you would normally take and survive by performing an emote when you are falling from a height from which you would ordinarily die. The explanation for this phenomenon is that Helldivers 2 uses the same physics model for fall damage as it does for other types of damage; that is, it calculates the part of your body…

On August 1, 2024, Apple Arcade will add Vampire Survivors to its library at no additional cost. The game is also free of advertisements. Apple revealed that Vampire Survivors+ would now come with both of the paid expansions for free. The full lack of advertisements is arguably what makes this version most enticing, however, giving it a leg up on the version of the gothic rogue-lite game already accessible on smartphones. “Mow thousands of night creatures and survive till dawn in Vampire Survivors, a gothic horror game with rogue-lite features, where your choices can allow you to fast snowball against…

Despite some technical difficulties at the introduction on July 2, 2024, Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail became the most popular massively multiplayer online game in over ten years. Director Naoki Yoshida of Final Fantasy 14 commended fans in a blog post for their support of Dawntrail, noting that player counts were at their greatest since the game-changing A Realm Reborn update was published in 2013. Yoshida added, “I want to thank everyone for their cooperation and tolerance in dealing with server congestion during Dawntrail’s early access.” “Thanks to your help, we hit a record number of concurrent users—something we have not…

For the past week, I have spent every evening getting back together with a very dear old buddy. I used to be obsessed with Super Monkey Ball, especially during the GameCube era. However, our relationship deteriorated when the series abandoned its flawless combination of challenging gameplay and precise physics in favor of uninspired level designs and clumsy motion controls targeted at a younger demographic. As a result, you can understand my lack of interest when the first trailer for Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble emphasized the chaotic, 16-player online battles. However, I have never been happier to be mistaken because…