In an attempt to burnish their brand in the eyes of the nation’s population of shrieking nine-year-olds who steal their mothers’ credit cards to cosplay John Wick in a bad video game, the NFL has partnered with Fortnite and released a bunch of official skins and other crap. Predictably, players immediately used their…

The horses had all the hay they needed, the random bucket of water had been emptied into the wash trough, the cook had his sacks of grain or flour or whatever, and there were no more logs to split. The menial morning chores were done. And I thought, Shit, I guess now I gotta go have a thrilling Old West adventure. I…

The Vancouver Canucks are a young team, so like seemingly all young men, their players are obsessed with Fortnite. They love it. Can’t get enough of it. Flossing and shit when they score goals. (So: rarely.) Locking themselves in their hotel rooms and gaming until the sun comes up, instead of the time-honored…

If you have read anything about the NBA 2K series in the past couple years, then you know that its centerpiece “MyCareer” mode, in which you guide a custom-created fledgling NBA player to stardom, is a hyper-branded, microtransaction-choked nightmare all but explicitly designed to pressure human players into spending …

The new Spider-Man video game came out for PlayStation 4 last week, and I was eager to spend a chunk of my weekend playing it. Some things I immensely enjoyed during my few hours of play time: web swinging, jumping off buildings, web swinging, whispering “whoa, that looks just like the real Empire State Building,” and…

By this point we all know the deal with the Madden series, and really any sports game that has annual editions. Games of any kind should not be forced to come out every year, because that’s not long enough for programmers and developers to build a good, working game. That much is a truism. But because updated rosters…

It’s Madden glitch season! God bless it. The exact same game, every single year, yet somehow always with horrifying and wonderful new misfires.

Barstool Sports, a website enjoyed by young men who get really angry when their friends don’t want to go out drinking with them for a third night in a row, no longer has an official Twitch channel. This is because one of their employees threatened to swat another Twitch streamer.

Colin Kaepernick is already being kept out the NFL by 32 owners terrified of his protests against police brutality and racial discrimination. It looks like he might also have been completely erased from the upcoming edition of Madden NFL, too.

Alex Kennedy of HoopsHype has posted some excellent videos that track the evolution of specific player avatars in NBA video games over the last two decades. By far the most cursed sequence is Dirk Nowitzki’s. If you were expecting a steady, linear progression from “Not Dirk” to “Okay that’s Dirk” as the various games’…

In that frame up above, the guy playing as the Seahawks in Madden 18 recovered the onside kick with a lead of six and five seconds left. He still absolutely blew it.

A recent first-round NHL draft pick might be spoiling his career prospects because of a video game addiction, according to some gossip passed along by hockey analyst Jeff Marek on the Sportsnet podcast 31 Thoughts. Marek, who declined to name the player, cited a conversation with his junior general manager, who said…

Video games are serious now. It’s no longer enough for AAA video games to have sleek graphics, hours upon hours of playable content, and innovative game mechanics. They also need top-notch voice acting, cinematic cutscenes featuring real actors performing in motion-capture suits, and a compelling story with all sorts…

Reviews have knocked Sea of Thieves, the big new multiplayer pirate video game for Windows and Xbox, for its lack of content, for repetitive quest structure, and for generally feeling sort of hollow and unfinished. My colleague Heather Alexandra over at Kotaku wrote that playing it “feels a bit like working in a…

During a PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds streaming session last night, Sixers rookie Ben Simmons tried to convince Karl-Anthony Towns, who was logging off, to play a round with him.

Gordon Hayward has long been a prolific gamer, and it seems he’s spent his recovery from that horrific leg injury playing Overwatch, Destiny 2, and, most recently, Fortnite. The free-to-play battle royale game has crossed over into the mainstream in a way that no video game has since Pokemon Go, with Drake even…

Earlier today, a random series of events brought to my mind the rap song from Donkey Kong 64. A great song, and a great game. Maybe you’ve forgotten about Donkey Kong 64 :( But now you remember it. Let’s remember some other video games:

Some kids don’t have video games.