Scott Cawthon is retiring from the Five Nights at Freddies series. You can read the full details over on his site right now, but since it will change, we’ll include the full announcement at the bottom of this post. For FNAF fans this is kind of big news, but in reality with where the franchise is now, I’m not sure that is exactly is for the reasons I’ll outline below. Scott has sort of long moved more into a visionary role than an actual core programmer of everything. The original FNAF games were mostly developed by him (I’m not exactly sure the exact percentages of his development vs. outside help for each game). They were simple and easy to develop. Streamers and YouTube gamers made the series popular with their reaction to the game’s relentless jumpscares and, in later games, the increased difficulty modes where precision button mashing was required…
Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) has gotten a wave of folks to take up the $1 offer for Microsoft Game Pass today. The question is, outside of MSFS what else is there to play? Here’s seven suggestions focused mostly around recent releases. Game Pass no longer has a “free trial” but does have new user bonuses. The following games have been reviewed for 2024 and remain awesome games to play on game pass. Touhou: Luna Nights An amazing Metroidvania game that is based on a popular bulletheck arcade style game. Very fun time control mechanic. Great for those new to Touhou and aren’t into bulletheck style games. Crusader Kings III A game that someone you know probably talks about so you should play it to find out what it’s about. You can delete it afterwards, no biggie, it’s only about 7 gigabytes. Fun to play with no intention to win and…
GameStop is the last vestige of brick and mortar electronic gaming stores. It is a business of acquisitions, claiming most other large competitors and merging them into the fold and is on every YouTube and blog’s “Top 10 Companies Soon to Pull a Blockbuster” for the last six months to a year or so. Are they right? Is GameStop about to go under? I honestly am not some kind of market wizard, I can’t say if their current plans will save them or not, but we can talk about what’s gotten them to this point, in context of video game sales (not the whole who bought who what when and where, lots of that is already out there). So this chart pretty much tells a very, very interesting story. The company went public in 2002 at around $10 USD a share. In 2002, we were still in the world of…
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…
Don’t Die, Minerva! (Steam / Xbox) has an early access release date: December 5, 2019. This is really cool for a myriad of reasons, the first being that it’s being developed and published by Xaviant, a gaming studio in Dawsonville, GA a short hop / skip / jump (and 3 exits) away from Dot Matrix Media. They’re known for the The Culling series, if you’ve ever heard of it and for being one of the few studios here in Georgia. The other cool thing about the game is that it’s a rouge-lite that takes Luigi’s Mansion and throws it into the spooky adventure horror genre that it belongs. You’ve got procedural generated dungeons, loot and enemies along with difficulty ranging from “I just want to see the pretty graphics and story” to “typical Dark Souls comment.” I mean, Dark Souls is pretty much a difficulty slider setting at this point.…
In this guide we’re going to walk you through some spoiler free tips on how to deal with Lost Ember, a “walking simulator” that has you moving through an abandoned world uncovering the story of a soul who can’t move on and a wolf that can transfer itself into other critters. You’ll gain throughout the story to the freedom to fly through the skies and take into the water and other freedoms as you uncover the story bit by bit. To move forward past the barrier, you must find all of the flares. Once you’ve found a flare, if there are additional flares to uncover you can use your right mouse button to track them down. As you advance in the story you’ll have to combine different critters to get to different spots.Sometimes the flares are underwater. In Chapter 4 for instance, you’ll find one of them underwater.You can return…
I love watching horror games on YouTube, at least ones that don’t rely only on jump scares. Games like Baldi’s Basics, Outlast, Resident Evil 5, etc. are all fun haunts to watch someone else deal with the tension of being chased. Being chased is the primary theme of most horror games. There is a monster, somewhere hidden within the game world and he’s coming for you. Seriously, look at the below: Most horror games involve fear being from the unknown element of a stalker. Something is out there and you could run into it at any given point. Fear is the motivator but Luigi’s mansion is different. It’s creepy and spooky and scary and it has jump scares, plenty of them, but it doesn’t use time as a motivator. It doesn’t make you have to run and hide and constantly test different locations for you to hide in order for…
The Movies, a business simulator, launched in November 8, 2005 and is still, today, played by an ongoing community who loves not only the fun of building your own movie studio but also the fun things you can do with the movie creation tools. YouTubers Life OMG! is, in so many ways, a modern streamlined version of The Movies, just without the animated movies built in. YouTubers Life takes you into the life of a burgeoning online video star who starts their career with a potato for a PC, mic, webcam and general setup while living with their parents and follows their career house to house as they expand their video making empire. Each video you produce allows you to choose cards to decide outcomes that impact the videos script, acting, editing and sound level. You then go in and edit the video, working in post-production to match scenes together…
This is a difficult topic for me because I believe that games journalism is just such a weird thing to begin with. I’ve been writing in this industry now for over 15 years professionally, as in paid to write and it’s still hard for me to even consider myself a journalist. I’ve sourced stories, been featured on TV shows as someone who predicted World of Warcraft going free-to-play and in general have spent most of my time honestly just writing guides and covering games I liked. Here’s the thing, people look at the folks writing about games who do present themselves as journalists and pass some interesting judgements good and bad about their content, but these days it’s actually really hard as a text based site to matter to the marketing companies that are hired by developers and publishers unless you’re the mainstream media. It started back when video was…