The Global Esports Federation is going green! At the UN Summit of the Future, GEF committed to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, aiming to make esports a key player in global sustainability efforts. From carbon-neutral tournaments to inclusive digital education, gaming is evolving for the planet.
Imagine having a seamless experience playing almost any retro game you could think of. That is Anstream Arcade, an online subscription service that allows you to play over 1300 classic games from the classic arcades, to the NES/SNES all the way to PS1. Universal control schemes, including using your mouse for the laser shooter in games like Operation Wolf make each game seamless to load and play. This is a strange one to review because it’s a subscription platform for retro games, but it does offer such an amazing value that it’s remiss to mention it. It’s only $39.99 a year for access to pretty much every single major arcade game I could think of, without the need to set anything up and the ability to play across multiple platforms. There isn’t anything to say about the games, outside of the previously mentioned seamless controls. Fantastic in that regard, I…
Helldivers 2 can sometimes liberate itself from your control and send itself into orbit like a Helldiver diving into a Bile Titan’s walking path. It’s frustrating to have your samples, your team and your extraction but find that you’ve returned to the desktop, empty handed. While a lot of crashing can only be resolved by the developers, there are a lot of things you can try to shore up your defenses to bring liber-tea to one and all. Update Everything AMD and Nividia have released tons of fixes within their drivers to address issues with Helldivers 2, so get your graphics drivers up to date. While you’re at it, update Windows as well. If you’ve got frequent crashes, you might want to run a “Verify Integrity of Game Files (steampowered.com)” on the game as well. Make sure everything you can think of is updated. If you use a mouse or…
Only Up! is a strange game that’s received a lot of attention lately and dialog around the game has gotten kind of… strange. For some context, Only Up! is a game that’s a Roblox Obby that takes itself as a Getting Over It style game made with Unreal Engine, generic assets and NFTs. That’s a lot, let’s unpack it. Only Up! and NFTs This is a weird one, the game has NFTs throughout it. No links, QR codes or advertisements so don’t believe the misinformation that the game itself is a scam. It does, though, have other NFTs in it which some people have found poor taste? There’s an argument that streamers have been advertising these NFTs unknowingly because they’ve been included in this game. There’s not much else other than a lot of misinformation. The only truth is the game does have NFT images in it, but an NFT…
Hogwarts Legacy, by Avalanche Software, is one of the more fun RPG games of the year but there is a strong stigma around the game. Within that stigma, there are a specific group of militant extremists who believe anyone who purchases the game deserves some kind of retaliation. Sites have popped up, which we will not promote, encouraging communities to search for streamers and users who are playing the game in order to harass them. The issue is that much of the rhetoric is subjective; objectively the game was developed by a diverse team at Avalanche and WB. Playing the game is a choice that each person decides on their own what it means to them and the ability to make that choice is critical to self-autonomy. If you feel you should boycott the game then you should do so; if you do not feel it morally objectionable to play…
I absolutely love following my favorite Twitch streamers. Right now my favorite streamer is Whiskey Ding0, an energetic vtuber (completely unaffiliated with our site) who has an absolute just power to get his chat to reenact the rave from the second Matrix movie. Just nonstop high energy that let’s you relax at the same time as you melt into the fun and excitement of everything going on. It’s a ton of fun and worth a subscription. Content creators deserve to be paid for the work that they do to entertain us and it’s a humbling thought that we all can contribute what we think is fair to them for our personal enjoyment of their content. While recent leaks have shown that is some big bucks; it’s still fair when we consider it’s distributed across millions of people who gained personal enjoyment off of their work. There does come a line…
Back in the early 2000s, when online gaming was a new frontier lag was everywhere. All of the fun and excitement of online gaming was met with rubber banding (where your character would move forward then snap back to a previous spot), in 2005 when WoW launched you would get stuck in the looting pose and in FPS games were heavily impacted on lag with shots being missed as players rubber banded around the map. These issues these days are still a problem, although not as much of one as they used to be. Gamers, to combat the lag, threw down their dial-up modems with 56k of blazing speed and took up cable and DSL as their preferred Internet standard. You had to live near a hub or some other kind of techno-gadget to get fast Internet, but that quickly expanded by 2010 to almost everywhere. That’s not to say…
When we consider the power of gaming one of the things we don’t consider often is its ability to be extremely inclusive and allow for a wide swath of people from the full spectrum of socioeconomic statuses to enter into a video gaming career. Due to the nonstandard approach and ease of entry into the streaming space and just playing, becoming a professional eSports player is “easier” than ever. “Easier” of course being in quotations because it’s not “easy” as in you can just start day one and begin as a professional eSports player. No, the “easy” part is the materials for getting started. The rest of it is up to the skills of a player. You, your child or your young adult may be interested in being an eSports professional. Wearing a jersey, being on stage in front of a large crowd (or viewers at home) and basking in…
When I had cable as a young lad I would rush home and get to the television, a small heap of plastic, glass and clunky noises that was a combination VHS and TV. It was programmed to record DragonBall Z, Sailor Moon and ReBoot so that I wouldn’t have to worry about missing them when I got home from school. Both DBZ and ReBoot would often be on hiatus, meaning that there was nothing to watch and even when finished, there was still a lot of boring TV on at the time, yet there was sort of a nifty solution: TechTV Starting in 1998 I had a chance to watch something really neat – ZDTV, which would evolve later into TechTV. TechTV was a dedicated channel to everything the Internet, gaming and technology. It was like a tech magazine turned into a real life TV show. It’s where you could…
He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have. Socrates Greed can ruin the nicest of things. We’re going to take a deep dive today in the history of YouTube and video sharing online and how monetization has completely ruined what was once an innocent form of expression and turned motivation away from passion and into greed. There was once a time when watching video on the Internet was difficult and nearly pointless to do, especially around the year 2000. The popular media format was “Real Media” which was a very high compression format that was “dial-up friendly.” You could fit a lot of video in a small file size in a very small resolution. Which, to be fair, 800×600 was the common high resolution display in those days, so a 320×240 video was nearly half the resolution of…