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Let’s just dive right in, shall we? If you want 30 days of free streaming anime, go to Twitch Prime, find the Crunchyroll Premium button and click on it to start your 30-day free trial.
While there’s no direct correlation between gaming and watching anime, the Venn diagram of the two subsets has a pretty significant overlap. The people at Twitch and Crunchyroll realized this, which is why they worked together to offer 30 days of free Crunchyroll Premium.
Dubbed the Epic Mega Sale, the store is offering markdowns up to 75% off on some PC games. In addition, $10 is slashed off the price of any game over $15, including already discounted games and pre-orders, at no cost to the publisher or developer. That encompasses upcoming games like Borderlands 3, one of its biggest exclusives, which you can now pre-order for $50, and the recently announced John Wick game, John Wick Hex, which you can pre-order for $8 instead of $20.
Just purchased something from Epic and wish you’d waited? If you bought a game between May 2 and May 15 in the Epic Store, you’ll be refunded the difference between what you paid and the sale price. And if you’ve pre-ordered a game from the Epic Store that cost more than $15, you’ll receive a $10 refund within the next couple of weeks. The only exceptions to the $10 off deal are DLC, game add-ons, season passes, and in-game purchases, such as V-bucks in Fortnite.
In addition to all the store-wide discounts, Epic announced its free biweekly game deal is expanding during the Mega Sale, which runs now through June 13. In that time period, a free game will be given away every week, starting with today’s offering, genre-bending anthology Stories Untold.
Dates for Steam’s 2019 Summer Sale leaked (once again) yesterday–it’ll start June 25 and last two weeks–so Epic’s Mega Sale seems strategically timed to precede that one. While Steam’s sale will no doubt have the greater volume of games, Epic’s deals (particularly the $10 off one) are nothing to sneeze at, and it’s a good chance to grab cheaper pre-orders on upcoming games and some free PC titles. Either way, June is gearing up to be a great month for PC gamers on a budget.
I spent last Halloween on the set of a horror movie that was filming at a haunted asylum.
The film? This summer’s remake of the 1988 killer doll cult classic Child’s Play. The location? Riverview Hospital outside Vancouver, a mental health facility that local legend insists is haunted. But the vacated hospital wasn’t being used as any sort of creepy setting in the story. Instead, it was doubling as the basement of the apartment building where Aubrey Plaza’s character, single mom Karen Barclay, lives with her adolescent son, Andy (Gabriel Bateman).
Join GameSpot as we celebrate gaming history and give recognition to the most influential games of the 21st century. These aren’t the best games, and they aren’t necessarily games that you need to rush out and play today, but there’s no question that they left an indelible impact on game developers, players, and in some cases, society at large.
In 2000, PC gaming was largely a “serious” scene. Counter-Strike, Diablo II, and Deus Ex all launched that year, Valve’s Half-Life had launched two years prior, and id Software’s Quake still had legs four years after its release. They were joined by one very odd duck: The Sims. It was the evolution of developer Maxis’ previous success in SimCity, but on a more personal scale. It was freeform, goofy, and much more “casual” than its contemporaries, and it was clearly something special.
The Sims blended the best of what simulation games could offer with lessons learned from none other than Quake, which laid the foundation for modern game modding and the communities that surround it. With accessible modding tools and a built-in sharing platform, The Sims brought community-made content to a broader audience. Through this platform, it fostered a space to explore games as a passionate and social experience. That had a greater impact on players than it did the development of other games, but it was an important one all the same. The Sims resonated especially with girls and women–for many of them, it was a gateway into a world that was otherwise incredibly hard to reach.
When The Sims arrived, there wasn’t really anything like it. There were Maxis’ own Sim games, the highlight of which was SimCity, and 3D home-design software was popular. But a virtual dollhouse, one in which you controlled the narrative, the relationships, the look and personality of a person and their home–that was novel. The Sims took simulation and scaled it down, not in complexity, but in scope. Rather than managing an entire city, you managed a life. And, unlike most other games at the time, there was no real way to fail. Whether something was a win or a loss was entirely up to you.
As it turns out, that appealed to a vast audience. The Sims was a near-instant best-seller, and critics adored it, too. Common praise included the game’s infectious personality and charm, its great sound effects, and its hard-to-define “addictive” quality. It was even GameSpot’s Game of the Year in 2000, and what we wrote then captures what made it stand out so much:
“Despite the game’s basic strategic elements, one of the reasons The Sims is such a remarkable game is because its central conflict is essentially life itself. Most any other game gives you a concrete objective: You’re pitted against powerful enemy armies, arch-rivals, deadly aliens, or fantasy creatures. The Sims offers a similar challenge, but in the unlikely form of your having to manage the mundane details of an average suburban life. This witty, ambitious premise actually turned out to be a truly impressive game as well.”
In 2002, the Sims surpassed Myst to become the best-selling PC game of all time. More than half the players were female, which surprised people–including Maxis co-founder and Sims creator Will Wright, who had thought of The Sims as a game with broad appeal rather than a game specifically geared toward women. Even more so than in recent years, this was a time when gaming was very much considered a male hobby. But it was women that treated The Sims more like a hobby, and a popular hypothesis was that they gravitated toward its domesticity, lack of violence, and emphasis on interpersonal relationships. However, while the exact demographics were unexpected, the passion with which these women approached the game was, indeed, by design.
The Sims was built from the ground up to be a community-led experience. Maxis released modding tools months before the game itself came out, and player-made content was brought together by an official website called The Sims Exchange. There, players could upload buildings and Sims they’d created and download others’ creations–and these sharing features were accessible right from the game’s menu. That meant even a casual player would have no trouble finding, participating in, and becoming more and more involved in The Sims and its community.
The entire purpose of The Sims Exchange was to enable creativity and storytelling. Custom content uploaded there wouldn’t fundamentally alter and/or build upon what The Sims was, as was the case with some popular mods for other games around that time (and to this day). Instead, you found carefully handcrafted parks and buildings that you could easily fit into your game as it already was. You followed that kind of customization as far as was possible and used your imagination to fill in the rest, and that, too, tied in with the community; The Sims Exchange was home to vast libraries of annotated screenshots that comprised player-created stories.
Even a casual player would have no trouble finding, participating in, and becoming more and more involved in The Sims and its community.
Even outside the proper channels, it was easy to connect with others through The Sims. Sims did a lot of crazy things, not the least of which was setting themselves on fire while trying to cook, and exchanging those stories was good for a laugh. We also can’t overlook the importance of The Sims as an inclusive experience. It was one of the only games at the time to include homosexual relationships (though that part did and still does get overlooked), and you could, of course, make your Sims look how you wanted. Critically, and likely because of its broad appeal and comparatively normal themes, The Sims didn’t carry as much of the stigma that other games did. For adults and especially for female players, playing and talking about The Sims wasn’t met with the same kind of derision that playing something violent or “nerdier” often incited. If you felt isolated from or unwelcome in gaming before, The Sims was your ticket to freely explore it.
In 2003, one big competitor emerged: Second Life. The MMO-like life simulator allowed you to create and customize an avatar as well as virtual property, and much of the content was user-generated. Because of its online nature, however, Second Life was also at the center of a number of controversies, including gambling and pornography worries. It also suffered from technical problems and security concerns. Compared to the disappointing and short-lived Sims Online–which didn’t have custom content, a key part of The Sims’ popularity–Second Life was a far greater success. But Second Life emphasized role-playing with others over creativity or management aspects, which ultimately made it and The Sims very different games.
For the most part, The Sims cornered the market on itself. Maxis released seven expansion packs between the game’s launch and the end of 2003, keeping interest high. And, of course, the community also gave it legs. The Sims stayed popular and active through the release of The Sims 2 in late 2004. Now, after four main installments, The Sims is one of the most successful video game franchises of all time, ranking among series like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty.
There are other life-sim games out there, some of which most likely took inspiration from The Sims, but the full extent of The Sims’ influence is seen in its players rather than in other games. The Sims 4 has an incredibly dedicated YouTube community, and custom content is still thriving. The Sims doesn’t have many direct progeny in games, but it’s a household name; it’s still the game that even the gaming-averse can pick up and become absorbed in.
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If you’ve been thinking about making a majestic gaming room in your abode, now is a good time to stock up on arcade cabinets. Walmart has a number of Arcade1Up machines on sale right now. And if you’re lucky, the Mortal Kombat 2 Arkade Kabinet might be available at your local Walmart. If it is, you can order it now and pick it up anytime.
All Arcade1Up machines are about four feet tall (you can add a riser to bring them up to full height) and feature coin-less operation. They come in flat boxes for easy transportation, and you can assemble them yourself with the help of a short video tutorial. Let’s see which cabinets are on sale today.
You’re facing down the scattered remnants of the last, great Han warlords, and your entire adult life so far has been building to this moment. Ever since you first took up arms at the age of eighteen against the corruption bleeding China dry, vengeance has been the one thing driving you forward. People call you the Bandit Queen, spitting the title at your feet in battle before your twin axes cleave their heads from their shoulders. As your forces pursue routed, scarlet-clad warriors, you feel the gaze of one of your lieutenants upon you, pivoting almost too late to meet their steel with your own. However, you’re resigned to this by now, and he meets a gurgling end like so many before him who disagreed with your methods. No general suffers any threats to their rule, even when the peasantry starts to mutter about you and the old tyrant, Dong Zhou, in the same breath. There are no saints in Total War: Three Kingdoms, just a castell of death and destruction with its apex pointed squarely at the throne.
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is essentially the Chinese version of The Iliad in construction. Larger-than-life characters, an at-times heady mix of romance and intrigue, and a hell of a lot of fighting are what define it. However, it’s almost entirely unique as a text because of the fact that it is widely treated as a reasonable record of the events of the turbulent period of 169 AD to 280 AD in Chinese history, despite embellishment. The Total War franchise is no stranger to adapting the militaristic trials and tribulations of our world’s past, but Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a work that has at times straddled the dual worlds of academia and fantasy.
While the popular Dynasty Warriors games have very successfully depicted the fantasy, it’s not been as easy to capture the intricate, personal stories of now-recognisable figures like Cao Cao, or to capture how they played into the wider scheme of the world as we know it. Total War: Three Kingdoms focuses keenly on those key figures and their motivations, using the literature’s extensive canon as fodder for your own strategic in-game actions. Thrown into the thick of the battles and diplomacy of 190 AD, you’ll need guts, gore, and perseverance to either unite China or to break the chains of oppression that hold its people fast, and Creative Assembly has succeeded in translating the themes from a decades-long, larger-than-life epic into a form that will appeal to both Total War enthusiasts and rookies alike.
For the uninitiated, Total War is a mix of turn-based strategy and real-time battles where you take full control of squadrons of warriors and watch them duke it out against your foes on a picturesque patch of blood-stained grass. When you’re not exerting military might on everyone else, entries in the series have historically focused on strategy elements akin to those that you would see in traditional 4X games like Civilzation. You have to balance expanding cities with diplomacy, manage population growth and happiness, and also deal with the very real concerns of keeping enemies off your tail. You do this by managing a series of complex, interconnected systems that influence everything from your inner circle to what a certain township might have to trade in winter. Give a town a governor with a green thumb and see trade flourish, or marry off a dissenter to an enemy and see previous peace treaties wither. As with every strategy title, the consequences of your choices are far-reaching, and Total War is an exercise in choosing wisely.
The first thing that will stand out with Three Kingdoms is how it puts its best foot forward on its production values. Dynamic weather, lighting, and beautiful watercolour environments–ranging from mountains to besieged cottages–paint a striking backdrop for the conflict and bloodshed to follow. Your generals themselves remain rendered larger than life and in great detail, and their idle chatter (fully voiced in Chinese, if you so choose) lend them a lot of personality when you’re taking your time deciding on your next move. The UI is also clean and well-designed; Three Kingdoms is a return to the usual gamut of interactive windows providing the minute details and statistics seen in older Total War titles, but information can be pinned and dismissed at will so you aren’t fighting a battlefield of clutter.
Detailed mechanics from previous titles return, which means a lot of information for more recent Total War fans to contend with. This is particularly noticeable when wrangling your allies, which is now essentially a full-time job. Managing relationships within your own coterie is no longer as easy as paying them to look the other way, nor are the effects almost instantaneous. It’s now a long game of min-maxing retinues, victories, ideal reforms, and placation. While you’re picking a general, faction identities are not as set in stone in practice as they may have been in previous titles. Playstyles ranging from expansionist and war-mongering to diplomatic can all be found in the same faction, and this translates nicely to create a dynamic inner circle.
Some of the streamlining done in recent Total War titles has been walked back, potentially to emphasize Three Kingdom’s focus on cults of personality in adherence with the source material for the game; your advisors and family members are all fully-fledged characters of their own with personality traits that will conflict, sometimes fatally, with your ethos. Making concerted decisions over a long period of time that are in line with your vassals’ beliefs are necessary to keep them keen, lest you cop a challenge and a sword in the back when you least expect it. The threat of defection from your wider allies is always on the horizon too; the factions fighting over China are as fractured as the land itself. Where Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia invited you to ruminate upon keeping your faction cohesive so as to ensure that your reformations would live on, diplomacy and faction politics in Three Kingdoms feel much more like putting pressure on a bleeding wound. Everyone starts at each other’s throats, with the major balance of power being in favour of the Han Empire.
Whether you were part of the Yellow Turban rebellion, an independent warlord, or a former seneschal of the Empire, everyone at the time was clamoring for a piece of the pie, and having that reflected in Three Kingdom’s mechanics is a nice touch. But you can sometimes feel pigeon-holed into conflict in a way that restricts your agency as a player. War declarations come hard and fast, with AIs as mercurial at decision-making as their portrayals in the source material. Sure, you can suggest marriage or pay a tithe, but taking the peaceful road often shakes out to be incredibly costly in negotiations. By the time you’re staring down a line of cavalry encroaching on your territory, you can often feel like you only have one real option: to fight to the death.
Combat in Three Kingdoms’ main campaign has two distinct strains depending on which mode you’re playing in: Romance, or the more traditional Historical option, which is more reminiscent of how Total War usually operates. While you can delegate combat to a dice roll of AI-generated auto-battling odds, getting bogged down in the minutiae of the battlefield is incredibly thrilling. You’ll marshal your forces and pit them against those of your foes’ in the pseudo weapons triangle of cavalry, infantry, and assorted others, all in real time. Whether it be a relentless siege against a settlement, meeting the Han empire in open combat, or simply trying to hold it together as someone else knocks on your gates with axe-wielding bandits, Total War’s depiction of battlefield conflict is where it has always excelled, and Three Kingdoms is no different.
However, the distinctive, much-trumpeted difference between Three Kingdoms and previous titles is the aforementioned Romance mode. This is where the fantastical merges with the historical in a way that offers you a new way to dominate opponents on the battlefield. In this mode, your generals stand head and shoulders above the rest, capable of single-handedly taking out entire squadrons on their own even as they yell out orders to the men rallying around them. In Romance mode, the strength of said generals grows in epic scale and scope over time, much in line with the fantastical deeds they perform in the source material. Generals also have the option to engage in duels with each other, which provides a spectacular, clash of the titans-style combative satisfaction. Three Kingdoms also lets you take these types of confrontations one step further in the new Battle mode, which lets you reenact famous skirmishes from Chinese history as these storied generals. It’s both nicely educational and a refreshing change of pace.
The game’s tutorial is decent at helping you parse the essential mechanics from the math soup, but it feels like a large expository information dump as Three Kingdoms attempts to get you up to speed on both the world’s ingrained politics and what to do with all these damn menus and buttons. You’re given a crash course in everything from how to wage war to how to manage the people under your rule within the first 20 turns, which is mechanically almost a lifetime in-game, but not very long at all for someone who isn’t familiar with Total War or the Three Kingdoms story to get properly acclimatised. But to its credit, Three Kingdoms does provide plenty of helpful supplementary material and difficulty adjustments to help rookies learn what they need to know to succeed, given enough time–from instructional videos to the pace in which the game unravels its conflicts on Easy difficulty, as well as the ability to streamline processes like waging war and building prosperous townships (the latter mostly through a one-size fits all approach to reformation). With enough patience, it’s easy to be infected with Total War once you finally get your mouth around that first, overly-large bite.
Three Kingdoms feels like a breath of fresh air. By harkening back to the intricacies of older titles and builds on some of the foundations laid by Thrones of Britannia, it offers a distinctly contemporary and thorough experience. This is the most ambitious that Total War has ever been, from the variety of different ways that you can enjoy the game to the sheer scope of the stories that they’ve weaved around each unique character’s playable experience. Three Kingdoms feels like the rightful evolution of the series, pulling from its roots in historical military tactics to come up with an engrossing modern strategy game that is always a delight, even in its less well-oiled moments.
Season 9 of Fortnite kicked off on May 9, bringing a new Battle Pass and a bunch of fresh cosmetics to unlock with it, and resetting the weekly challenge rotation. By now it should all be second nature to you, but on the off chance you’re new to the game, here’s the skinny: To unlock the rewards that are part of the Battle Pass, you’ll need to do the weekly challenges. These award you Battle Stars, which level up the pass and grant access to items attached to the various tiers.
What makes it slightly more complicated is that there are two kinds of passes. The first is a free version available to everyone. The second is a special one you need to pay V-Bucks to get. If you cough up the cash, you’ll get more challenges on a weekly basis, which naturally means more Battle Stars and unlocks.
Week 2’s challenges are now available and, in large part, are pretty easy to complete. The one that may give you a bit of trouble is exclusive to the premium pass and asks players to “visit an oversized Phone, a big Piano, and a giant Dancing Fish trophy.” If that’s confusing, don’t worry about it, we’ll have a guide for it up shortly. You can see the remaining challenges below.
Free
Launch off of Air Vents in different matches (5) — 5 Battle Stars
Stage 1: Land at Snobby Shores (1) — 1 Battle Star
Eliminate opponents in Sunny Steps or Shifty Shafts — 10 Battle Stars
Premium
Deal damage with Pistols to opponents (500) — 5 Battle Stars
Visit an oversized Phone, a big Piano, and a giant Dancing Fishy trophy (1) — 5 Battle Stars
Search a chest in different named locations in a single match (3) — 10 Battle Stars
Stage 1: Eliminate an opponent from at least 50m away (1) — 3 Battle Stars
Fortnite’s v9.01 patch arrived on May 15 and added the tactical assault rifle to the game, which is handy because John Wick has made an appearance in the game, and we all know he loves a good assault rifle. Make sure to check out all the new skins and other unlocks to see what you could earn for keeping up with weekly tasks. If you need a hand with Week 1’s challenges, head over to our Fortnite Season 9 full challenge guide.
This week also marks the arrival of a John Wick limited-time mode. You can unlock some cool rewards that have been plucked straight out of the movies, but you’ll have to work for them by completing the Wick’s Bounty LTM challenges.
Sega has announced 10 more games for the lineup for its Genesis Mini, bringing the grand total of revealed games up to 30 out of a total 40. The latest round includes some notable franchises and hard-to-find gems.
Leading the list this week is Mega Man: The Wily Wars. The compilation of the first three Mega Man games was an exclusive to the Sega Channel, so many fans may not have gotten a chance to play the ports. Capcom also gets representation with the addition of Street Fighter 2: Special Championship Edition. Other additions include Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, Phantasy Star IV, Sonic Spinball, and more.
As part of the announcement, Sega also revealed that the 6-button controller will be available as well. It will release in late August at a price of $20. That means you’ll actually be able to grab a controller or two ahead of the Genesis Mini worldwide launch on September 19. The mini-console will cost $79.99 US/£69.99/€79.99/AUD$139.95
Check out the full list of revealed games so far, with the newly announced additions in bold.
