Legendary 1990s publisher Acclaim is back from the dead, and a pro wrestler famous for clobbering people with a guitar is on its advisory board

If you’re a gamer of a certain age, the name Acclaim will ring some pretty loud bells. It was a big-time videogame publisher through the late 1980s and ’90s, with a number of major sports and entertainment partnerships to its name. Flagging sales forced the company to declare bankruptcy in 2004 but now it’s back,…

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Monster Hunter Wilds feels easy at launch—but after a decade of fighting post-release elder dragons and Master Rank monsters, I’m not worried about the light warmup

Monster Hunter Wilds was awash in difficulty discourse before it even launched. Prerelease reviews drove the Monster Hunter subreddit into a panic, as critics forced excited hunters to ask that most terrible of questions: What if the new Monster Hunter was too easy? Before jumping into Wilds’ highest strength hunts, I carted a single time…

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Three women livestreaming on Twitch harassed by man who then goes for them while making repeated death threats: ‘This happens off-camera to women all the time’

Three female Twitch streamers midway through a weeklong marathon stream were followed, harassed and then threatened by a man calling himself “Russell” live from Santa Monica’s Pacific Park. Content creators Cinna, Valkyrae and Emiru had just listened to the man sing when he asked for Emiru’s phone number. After she refused, and refused to enter…

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Will another Avengers game be assembled? ‘We would definitely be open to it’ says Joe Russo, co-director of Avengers: Doomsday

Marvel’s Avengers assembled in 2020, but unfortunately the live service action game from Crystal Dynamics was essentially snapped out of existence by Square Enix a mere two years later—you can still play it if you own it, but it’s no longer being supported and has been delisted from stores. But like every dead superhero, there’s…

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Kingdom Come 2 and Avowed have revealed to me the grand unified theory of game design: A good game is when you can steal back the money you just spent at a shop, a bad game is when you can’t

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is great. So great that I slapped a 90% score on it in our Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 review. But frankly, I wasted a lot of your time in that piece, nattering on about narrative and mechanics and whatever when I could have just presented you with my grand unified theory…

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