Eons ago, in the dark ages of video stores, adventurers navigated labyrinthine aisles and palavered with part-time archmaesters to find treasured artifacts of the fantasy film genre. Now, thanks to Netflix, one can simply walk into Mordor and sweep over hundreds of options with the click of a button. Most of us don’t possess an Eye of Sauron to sift through Netflix’s fantasy movie programming, making it nearly impossible to find the quality picks buried beneath the Swamp of Direct-to-Video Sadne

Bungie, the studio behind the Halo and Destiny franchises, announced that it’s received investment from NetEase, a massive Chinese online gaming company. The partnership opens up China to Bungie’s games, including Destiny 2, for the first time. Additionally, the investment will “accelerate Bungie’s vision of becoming a global, multi-franchise entertainment company,” according to an announcement from NetEase. Parsons told the Wall Street Journal that Bungie plans to focus on self-publishing games

Faction Rallies was removed from Destiny 2’s rotating events list in March. In the latest edition of This Week at Bungie, community manager dmg04 detailed the upcoming Faction Rallies changes. Renown accrues in stacks, and greatly increases your Faction Rallies token gains from looting a Lost Sector chest. As far as the new rewards, players can get new armor ornaments for their Faction Rallies armor and new weapons. Each faction will have their own exotic armor ornament and exotic weapon catalys

Epic Games is hosting the first official Fortnite Battle Royale tournament at this year’s E3, and the event is going to have quite the guest list. The tournament, which is being called the 2018 Fortnite Pro-Am, will pair 50 pro players, streamers or YouTube personalities with 50 celebrities. The Pro-Am will stream live from E3, and will be watchable on any of Epic’s official platforms like, YouTube, Twitch or Mixer. Epic has slowly announced the tournament’s participants in the lead up to the ev

Pokémon Quest is the newest Pokémon title and a deviation from the previous games. Instead of the traditional RPG-style of the previous Pokémon games, Pokémon Quest is designed to be a mobile game. Pokémon Quest was released on May 29 for Switch via the Nintendo eShop. As with most mobile games, Pokémon Quest is free to download and play — but there are packages available to purchase to alleviate waiting times, unlock special moves, and improve your equipment. There are two main activities in Po

Thirty years ago today, on the shelves of your local computer store, catalog showroom or the Babbage’s in the mall, John Madden Football made its debut. Madden NFL is more than just the longest-tenured sports video game series today. The first Madden didn’t suggest it would amount to such a cultural or even marketplace impact. It sold all right, but the fact it had 11 players on both sides — a first for a football video game, as Tecmo Bowl on the NES only had nine — overwhelmed most computers of

A YouTube lifestreamer who goes by “Arab Andy” online was arrested last night in Seattle after walking into a University of Washington classroom and playing a text-to-speech bomb threat. “Arab Andy” can be seen walking into a classroom and playing audio of a text-to-speech donation from a viewer. This isn’t the first time that “Arab Andy” has caused a public disturbance while lifestreaming and using text-to-speech technology. “Arab Andy” isn’t the first person to use text-to-speech donations in

One week ago, Elle Mills, a creator with more than 1.2 million subscribers, uploaded a video that included vulnerable footage during a breakdown. Everyone from PewDiePie (62 million subscribers) to Jake Paul (15.2 million subscribers) have dealt with burnout. Lately, however, it seems like more of YouTube’s top creators are coming forward with their mental health problems. Posting infrequently means a creator’s videos won’t be recommended. Instead, YouTube’s only direct reaction is a playlist de

This week marks a new era in Superman comics, making it the best time to get in on the ground floor. It all started in November of 2017, when DC Comics announced that veteran Marvel Comics writer/architect Brian Michael Bendis had accepted an exclusive contract with DC. He was going to take the reins on both core Superman titles, Superman and Action Comics, effectively becoming the architect of the Metropolis setting. “Writing Superman in today’s day and age is a such powerful experience,” Bendi

If you played Destiny, you may be familiar with Xur, the weekly exotic item merchant. This scales to your character’s power level, so make sure you’re buying Xur exotics on your highest-level character. WINGS OF SACRED DAWNWings of Sacred Dawn is one of the weirdest looking exotics in all of Destiny 2. Its exotic perk, Tome of Sacred Dawn, allows you to hover while aiming in the air, keeping you suspended for a short period of time. Wings of Sacred Dawn is very fun to use but requires you to equ

My Child Lebensborn, out now for Android and iOS, is more interested in the consequences. She faces bullying from kids, and from adultsIn My Child Lebensborn, I struggled with Karin’s emotional turmoil, as she faces bullying from children, adults and even teachers. At times, My Child Lebensborn feels like a dreary affair, especially when the story arc dips between budget management rigamarole. Although its set in post-war Norway, My Child Lebensborn manages to capture the damage wrought by bully

I’ve spent the last few weeks demoing its first offering, called the Victrix Pro AF ANC, and I’m pretty impressed. The design of the AF ANC includes four external microphones, and the results are impressive. When it comes to positional audio, however, the AF ANC underperforms. The soundstage on the AF ANC is also much more compact inside this new headset. Bottom line is, if you’ve got $299.99 to burn and need an active noise-canceling solution, the Victrix AF ANC comes highly recommended.

Anytime a clueless substitute took over for our Halo-weary teachers, you better believe the boys started a LAN party. They might be good people or they might be bad people, but neither outcome has anything to do with Halo. So when I recently had the chance to finally play Combat Evolved on a beat-up Xbox 360, I took it. More importantly, I finally get why everyone was so obsessed with Halo all the way through high school. It only took me 17 years to do so.

The Crew 2’s closed beta is available this weekend and with it, gobs of videos and streams. That’s because the game, an improvement on its predecessor in nearly every way, looks different than it feels. It’s a fools’ errand for a racing game developer to compete with Forza and Gran Turismo, and shrewdly, The Crew 2’s creators have opted not to — at least not directly. How wonderful diving into a racing game without all the typical baggage. This is a racing game, after all, and the best bit it bo

Players could plug the camera into any version of a Game Boy — including the soon-to-be-released Game Boy Color — and use the handheld’s screen to compose and capture photos. To truly complete the Game Boy Camera experience, though, Nintendo wanted you to buy its companion device: the Game Boy Printer. The Game Boy hardware was 9 years old by that point, and its successor — the Game Boy Color — was only a few months away. It also didn’t hurt that the Game Boy family’s backward compatibility mean

The Nintendo Switch is one of the fastest growing consoles on the market. A series of leaks indicate a Nintendo Switch reveal for Fortnite during E3. Leaked Switch games that might be announced at E3…FORTNITE IN THE SWITCH!?!?! That image would be thin evidence, but a Switch version of Fortnite was also spotted in a much more interesting place. A release on Nintendo Switch seems inevitable, and the timing of this announcement makes a lot of sense.

Pokémon: Let’s Go!, the franchise’s first role-playing games for Nintendo Switch, look familiar. But Pokémon: Let’s Go! thus far has been largely good from fans: The trailer has amassed millions of views and positive ratings thus far, and Pokémon: Let’s Go! So perhaps players who are playing Pokémon GO can catch Pokémon and send them over to Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! The kids can then raise those Pokémon on their own and get a variety of Pokémon that way.”With direct connections to Pokémon Go,

Kosmic, the all-star speedrunner held Super Mario Bros. Any% record until another top-flight speedrunner, somewes, took it from him six days ago (more on that in a moment). Kosmic has a new pursuit for now: the Super Mario Bros. Any% record, one-handed. Kosmic made the first sub-five minute run of the speedrunning mainstay, using just one hand, on Monday. Meantime, if Kosmic is going to retake the overall Any% world record in Super Mario Bros., it is going to be a tall order. Admirably, his reac

Epic Games has announced that it is bringing back Fortnite’s competitive mode — originally called Solo Showdown — with a new version called Blitz Showdown. Thankfully, for Blitz Showdown, Epic has addressed most of the community’s concerns and improved the mode considerably. First and foremost, the Blitz mode is going to take a lot less time to complete than Solo Showdown did before, as players will only have to play 25 matches of Blitz Showdown to receive their rank, instead of 50. Blitz Showdo

LGBT Pride Month kicks off June 1 — which means it’s running right now until the end of the month. A free PS4 theme called “For All the Players” is now available on the PlayStation Store — a quiet release that Sony merely calls “a special theme.” The theme’s aesthetic is rainbow-themed, appropriately, transforming all menu icons into far more colorful versions of themselves. There’s also a big, rainbow-colored signal boost of the DualShock-inspired PlayStation logo toward the top of the screen,