Trading Card Games are in an odd place. They’re probably more popular than ever, with more playing them than ever. Given Magic: The Gathering’s recent big focus on crossover events, which makers of Wizards of the Coast keep reporting as being phenomenally successful, they’re probably making more money than ever. At the same time TCGs…

Who would win in a fight? Comics writers know this is what fans argue about, endlessly, and feed those arguments with crossovers and stories like Batman vs. Superman. Usually it’s naff stuff where characters just biff each other for a bit and then abruptly form a getalong gang as if they weren’t battering each others’…

Nexus Mods is currently hosting a Fallout modding marathon timed to coincide with the second season of the TV show. Fresh off a rewatch of the first season I’m replaying New Vegas right now myself, and keeping an eye on new mods like the ones that add a unique upgradable outfit for the Courier and…

I love stealth games, and I love playing a sneaky guy in bigger RPGs: Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Cyberpunk. You best believe that, when given the option, I’m crouch walking for 80 hours straight. I’m not alone in that preference either: The Stealth Archer in Skyrim, which plays exactly how it sounds, is a memetic,…

Deadlock‘s not-so-secret invite-only beta has been a blast if you don’t mind your favorite MOBA getting fundamentally altered every few months. The game has switched up how many lanes it has, dropped half a dozen new heroes in one go, and now, majorly overhauled lane creep mechanics in what Valve calls a “small update.” Troopers,…

As I flitted between Peter Parker and Miles Morales boroughs-apart in Spider-Man 2’s New York City, I thought: why haven’t more games copied the character-swapping system from GTA 5? Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 first swung onto PS5 consoles towards the end of 2023, and breached the shores of Steam at the beginning of this year. Grand…

When my 11 year old son took a guard’s arrow to the dome, it occurred to me I had failed as a parent. Rufus is—was, before the arm of the state converted him into a needlebook—my Fat Idiot Son, a mod for Skyrim that promises “a new level of realism, depth and challenge” via the…

One of the coolest things about Half-Life 2 is its physics engine, but as anyone who has played a physics-based game will know, even the best-in-class tech is prone to quirks here and there. Valve’s legendary narrative shooter was no exception, as former Valve developer Tom Forsyth shared in a thread on Mastodon. In the…