While The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom is one of the most hotly-anticipated video game sequels of all time, that’s not the only reason it’s notable this week. It is also, sadly, the first Nintendo game to hit the $70 threshold.
While physical copies of the game have previously been available for preorder at places like GameStop for $60, Nintendo’s press release for the game following tonight’s Direct confirms that the cheapest version will be selling for $70. Preorders for the game at that $60 pricepoint suddenly stopped being accepted by retailers on Tuesday night.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: An epic adventure across the land and skies of Hyrule awaits. In this sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you’ll decide your own path through the sprawling landscapes of Hyrule and the mysterious islands floating in the vast skies above. Can you harness the power of Link’s new abilities to fight back against the malevolent forces that threaten the kingdom? In addition to the standard version, which will be available at a suggested retail price of $69.99, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Collector’s Edition will release on launch day at a suggested retail price of $129.99, and includes a physical version of the game, an artbook with concept art, a Steelbook case, an Iconart steel poster and a set of four pin badges.
That would make it the first ever Nintendo game to hit that $70 threshold, at least as a recommended retail price, which is a bummer for us as consumers (since wages aren’t increasing in line with the inflated cost of…everything) but also expected from a business (because all their costs have gone up). This is why it’s called an inflation crisis, baby!
Back in November, Nintendo responded to Sony’s decision to increase the price of the PS5 by saying “it won’t take such actions at this moment, but will continue monitoring situation and carefully consider (whether we need to take the option).”
While that Switch hardware increase hasn’t materialised—yet—maybe recouping an extra $10 per copy of a game expected to sell millions will help Nintendo’s bottom line, especially since the company just saw its share prices tumble after analysts predicted the aging Switch is “rushing to end of its lifecycle at a faster-than-expected pace,” and that without news of replacement hardware on the horizon things might just get worse.
This is now, by my count, the fourth time we’ve posted about a Dark Forces x Unreal Engine remake. It is, however, the first time I’ve been able to post about one that is downloadable and properly playable by you, today, right now.
Previous attempts have either been graphical showcases or tech demos, but this latest effort—by Ruppertle—is fully interactive, containing not just two storyline missions from Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight, but some sandbox and endless modes to enjoy as well.
“The goal was to recreate one of my favorite games back from my childhood while keeping the base look, feeling and gameplay”, Ruppertle says. “After nearly 3 years of development the project is finally at a point where I feel ready to share it with you.”
I’m not 100% sold on some of the visual changes here; some of the environments look a little too busy now, where their previous sparseness had a certain Star Warsy charm to them. The characters and weapons look great, though, even in third-person.
Things are looking dire for Syria and Turkey.Photo: Anadolu Agency (Getty Images)
Twitch isn’t just a place where artificial intelligence festers and drama proliferates. It’s also a useful organizational platform for raising awareness around and funds for various global causes, which is exactly what a handful of big-name streamers, like Ben “CohhCarnage” Cassell and Hasan “Hasanabi” Piker, are using it for in the wake of the calamitous earthquakes that have devastated Syria and Turkey in recent days.
In response to the destruction impacting both countries, popular Twitch and YouTube streamers, from Hasanabi to IShowSpeed to Ludwig and more, are raising funds to aid in the humanitarian crisis.
The fundraiser, which was started by Hasanabi and will benefit charities such as the nonprofit organization AKUT and Turkish rock star Haluk Levent’s organization Ahbap, has already brought in over $700,000. Scrubbing through the list of top donors to the effort reveals who else has joined the effort and donated money. This includes content creators like Seán “Jacksepticeye” McLoughlin ($10,000), Rachell “Valkyrae” Hofstetter (also $10,000), Ludwig “Ludwig” Ahgren ($5,000), CohhCarnage (also $5,000), Darren “IShowSpeed” Watkins Jr. ($2,000), and many more. Even notorious gambling streamer Tyler “Trainwreck” Niknam pledged to gift $150,000 in bitcoin to “legitimate humanitarian charities” that take the cryptocurrency. And, of course, Hasanabi donated $25,000 of his own money to the cause.
G/O Media may get a commission
Kotaku reached out to CohhCarnage, Hasanabi, IShowSpeed, and Trainwreck for comment but did not get a reply in time for publication.
This is amazing to see. Too often, Twitch coverage focuses on the negativity of the platform. Sure, there’s always something absurd and strange happening on Amazon’s livestreaming service, like the AI Seinfeld show that was recently banned, but it’s beautiful to witness some of the biggest stars—and those who have since left the platform for greener pastures on YouTube—coming together to help those that need it. If you can donate, please consider lending a helping hand.
While we’ve known for a while that New Orleans Pelicans star Zion Williamson loved anime, things are about to get a little more serious with the release of an upcoming pair of sneakers.
Nike have announced that Williamson, who has his own signature shoe with the company (the Zion 1), will soon be lending his name as part of a collaboration to an anime-themed pair of sneakers from a different line, with a pair of Air Jordan 37s to be released in a “Rasengan” colourway.
A rasengan is the name of the “spinning ball of chakra formed and held in the palm of the user’s hand” in Naruto, a series Williamson loves so much he spoke about it in depth during an interview with GQ last year, calling it his “north star”:
Williamson talks about Naruto with the same reverence with which other NBA players talk about the Bible—it brings comfort and clarity in equal parts. Over the course of this past year—an unusually tumultuous one in his otherwise starry career—Naruto was his north star.
Featuring spiky yellow on the tongues (an allusion to Naruto’s signature hairstyle), the Air Jordan 37 includes monochromatic serene blue uppers. Claw marks strike the ankle pads, while the tongues are emblazoned with metallic silver – inspired by Naruto’s forehead armour. Naruto’s catchphrase だってばよ! (‘believe it!’) is inscribed on both tongues, and the Rasengan chakra orbs adorn the insoles.
Accessible for all Safe Haven prioritizes your needs with flexible and individuated substance abuse treatment, specifically opioid & alcohol addiction.
The Rasengan Zion x Naruto x Jordan 37s will be releasing on February 20, and being a general release model of Jordan might actually be fairly easy to get your hands on. I’d expect Zion will also be wearing them on the court around the same time as well.
Easily the most anticipated title on this list, Starfield is notable for two reasons: It’s gaming’s next big sci-fi RPG epic and its the next evolution in Bethesda’s open-world formula. Bethesda is no stranger to science fiction, having a number of Fallout games under its belt. But from everything we know about Starfield right now, it’s aiming for an unprecedented scale, featuring over 1,000 worlds for you to explore.
Though we haven’t seen a whole lot of Starfield gameplay, the reveal last summer showed a bit of what we can expect. Here’s your hype fuel for Starfield before its expected release this year:
“Hard science fiction” setting with 1,000 explorable planets
A mix of “handcrafted content” and procedurally-generated environments
The classic Bethesda mix of first-person combat, exploration, and roleplaying
Bethesda
It’s hard not to get excited about a game like this. While the commonly voiced concern that such a high number of planets may mean we’re in for some serious “quantity over quality” is a fair one, I’d argue that’s always been the case with Bethesda games: Unprecedented scale, unprecedented jank. Despite all of that, Bethesda games of this sort usually cohere to form a unified experience that’s hard to get anywhere else. The question for Starfield will be: Do enough aspects of this epic space sim work well enough to create an intense level of immersion for, oh I dunno, hundreds of hours? I mean, I still don’t feel like I saw everything in Fallout 3 and 4.
For the first time ever, tonight’s Grammy awards featured a category just for video game soundtracks. And the first ever winner in this new category was Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed. Congratulations! A momentous occasion for everyone involved, but for the rest of us, also a very funny moment of live television.
The nominees were veteran games composer Austin Wintory (hilariously given his previous body of work, for Aliens: Fireteam Elite), Bear McCreary (Call of Duty: Vanguard), Richard Jacques (Guardians of the Galaxy), Christopher Tin again (for the Civ-like Old World) and Stephanie Economou for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla’s expansion Dawn of Ragnarok.
Composer and violinist Economou—who at time of publishing had a Twitter bio simply saying “Non-award-winning composer”—is now an award-winning composer. Congratulations Stephanie! Making the occasion even more memorable for everyone watching at home, though, was presenter and comedian Randy Rainbow (also nominated tonight, for best comedy album) being given an envelope that had “Assassin’s Creed Valhalla” written inside it then reading it like this:
G/O Media may get a commission
It’s a camera. For your car. The Ring Car Cam’s dual-facing HD cameras capture activity in and around your car in HD detail.
It must be nerve-wracking at the best of times being up there and announcing awards knowing that so many people (even if this was the earlier “premiere” ceremony) are watching you. Then imagine being asked to read, not “Beyonce”, but “Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarok” when you’re not someone who has been exposed to those words non-stop for three years, and has somehow internalised them and made them seem even remotely normal. It is not a normal collection of words. It would be hard!
You can watch Economou’s full acceptance speech, in which she thanks everyone who “fought tirelessly” for this category to be included in the awards, here.
STEPHANIE ECONOMOU Wins Best Score Soundtrack For Video Games & Other Interactive Media
A video game store called Gameco, in Joplin, Missouri, was absolutely trashed over the weekend when a car drove straight through the front wall and ploughed through several shelves of stock, tyres screeching the whole time.
Pocketoidand CRTpixels’ Jordan Starkweather shared some video of the crash—it’s his local games store— on Saturday, which you can see below in a video which is best watched with the sound on:
As Starkweather explains on Twitter, the driver was “the grandparent of the person who dodged out of the way” in the video (you can see a man on the left of the screen step aside moments before being hit), and appears to have been parked out front and accidentally reversed into the store—which was open and trading at the time—instead of driving away from it.
Having spoken with the lady behind the wheel, Gameco staff say she told them “the throttle was stuck”, and that “she had to slam it in drive to get it to stop going backwards or she would have went thru the entire building”. They also say that while she was “very shaken up and embarrassed”, they told her “no one was hurt and that’s all that [mattered]. Everything else can be replaced. Lives cant.’
G/O Media may get a commission
It’s a camera. For your car. The Ring Car Cam’s dual-facing HD cameras capture activity in and around your car in HD detail.
The cases driven through were mostly the store’s 3DO and PS1 collection—this is an independent games store trading in loads of cool retro stuff, not a GameStop—though thankfully most of the games themselves were in storage out the back, with only the cases damaged.
Incredibly, this is the second time this has happened to the store, with the first instance coming at their old location. A photo taken after crash shows that aside from a broken rear window the car is in surprisingly good shape. Better shape than the Xbox cases crushed under its wheels, anyway.
While this would be devastating news for any local retailer—doubly so since this is the second time it’s happened—the Gameco staff at least appear to be taking it in their stride, posting on Facebook “Alright guys we get it, you want a GAMECO Drive-thru!”.
The store will be closed until repairs can be completed, but once they’re done, you can check them out here.
Logan Paul, the YouTuber and wrestler has been saddled with a class-action lawsuit over “fraudulent actions” regarding his NFT game, CryptoZoo.
After a year of investigation, Stephen “Coffeezilla” Findeisen, a YouTuber who looks into fraudsters and fake gurus in the crypto space, discovered that Logan Paul’s CryptoZoo was something of a scam. CryptoZoo, a blockchain game that was supposed to function like passive income for Paul’s ardent fans and early investors, actually wound up being a rug pull for just about everyone involved because Paul’s team preemptively sold the in-game currency, zoo coins, before everyone else. Aside from some of the folks hired to work on CryptoZoo, who allegedly made thousands of dollars, others interested in the “game” lost hundreds if not thousands, according to Coffeezilla’s multi-part investigatory series.
Initially, Paul was furious with Coffeezilla’s year-long investigation, calling him the “Keemstar of crypto in finance” and threatening to sue him in a since-deleted YouTube video. Paul has walked that statement back, apologizing to his fans and Coffeezilla while also putting forth a three-step plan to “finish and deliver” CryptoZoo, which has been basically broken since its August 2021 launch. Now, as Coffeezilla tweeted on February 3, Paul has been hit with a class-action lawsuit.
G/O Media may get a commission
It’s a camera. For your car. The Ring Car Cam’s dual-facing HD cameras capture activity in and around your car in HD detail.
The plaintiff, a Texas police officer who poured about $3,000 of his own money into CryptoZoo in the hopes that it would yield big returns, filed the litigation in the city of Austin. According to the suit reviewed by Kotaku, the plaintiff is seeking damages north of $75,000 for “conspiracy to commit fraud,” “fraudulent misrepresentation,” “negligence,” “unjust enrichment,” and more. The plaintiff named everyone involved with the game’s creation, including Paul and former lead developer Eddie Ibanez. In the end, the plaintiff wants repayment for copious damages, from attorney’s fees and the costs of action to civil penalties and mental anguish.
Paul has not responded to the lawsuit at all since it was filed. However, he did make an appearance (and got injured) during WWE’s 2023 Royal Rumble event on January 28. His YouTube accounts, including his Impaulsive podcast, have been pretty quiet since February started. As all of this is going on, though, Paul’s likeness is slated to appear in developer Visual Concepts’ WWE 2K23when it comes out on March 17.
“No, but Gyariana killed it,” Caveat writes in the caption, perhaps underselling the surreality of watching a sharp-toothed Water/Flying type handle Ariana Grande’s vocal runs with ease while she’s dressed as a tastefully nude Misty.
The puppet was a collaboration between friends, Caveat tells me over email—Matti made the head and puppet, Zac and Alex worked on the body.
“It was inspired by Carmen Farala from Drag Race España who did this amazing snake look I loved,” she says. “I wanted to reinterpret it in my own way. Why not Misty being constricted by a Gyarados? I even had Staryu earrings from my friend, Girl1000 Jewellery! It was a fun interpretation that hadn’t been done before and it meant that Gyariana (her name) could duet with me doing “Rain On Me” for the show finale. She even shot water out in the final chorus!”
G/O Media may get a commission
It’s a camera. For your car. The Ring Car Cam’s dual-facing HD cameras capture activity in and around your car in HD detail.
A jaw-dropping Gyariana, to me, marks just another night for Caveat, who has been performing her video game-themed drag show SlayStation in London since December 2021. The Gyrados performance was part of its recent Pokemon-themed Master Ball.
About founding SlayStation, Caveat says she “decided I wanted to start my own show and space and thought, ‘Why not combine my two passions, video games and performing?’”
Caveat, who is trans, had never attempted cosplay before starting SlayStation, but felt like “video games have always let me express myself and my identity in a safe space, especially while I was still figuring it out in the real world.”
“I really wanted to portray the importance of that for me and so many other people with the event,” she continues.
Video games form the rhinestone-glued platform to Caveat’s plans—even her name was inspired by Odin Sphere. And only a little over a year old, SlayStation has already motivated plenty of video game drag, including a Goldeen cosplay topped with inky fake lashes, a glamorous Lopunny, and for Caveat, Bayonetta.
“As a 6’4” woman, I felt like I could really do her justice,” she tells me.
The event is already gaining recognition through TikTok and through industry pros like Kim Chi, who competed on season eight of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and British Drag Race star Dakota Schiffer, who both attended SlayStation’s Master Ball event.
But it isn’t only fun to look at. it’s also creating a vibrant and comfortable space for queer video game fans.
“The best show I’ve seen in a good while,” one Instagram commenter wrote on SlayStation’s post highlighting the importance of trans representation. “So much love in the room, cannot wait for the next one.” They’ll only have to wait a bit longer—there’s a Doki Doki Literature Club-themed event coming in February, and Caveat tells me she’s already planning “a big Final Fantasy show in a few months to celebrate the new games.”
And a very happy Black History Month to you, Sista Balinska. Image: Square Enix / Kotaku / Mike Marsland (Getty Images)
Square Enix’s new fantasy parkour game Forspoken has had a bit of a rocky launch in terms of public perception among gamers, who found its Joss Whedon-esque dialogue in advertisements cringe-inducing. However, Forspoken’s lead actress says she isn’t bothered by all the discourse the game’s dialogue has caused online, and honestly more power to her.
Forspoken, which was released on January 24, follows a down-and-out New Yorker named Frey who must save the denizens of the fantasy world she gets isekaied into with the help of a talking cuff named Cuff. In a recent interview with The Verge, Ella Balinska, who plays Forspoken lead Frey, said she’s proud of her performance in the game because she knows that she got to take on a role that her eight-year-old self would have been psyched to be a part of.
“I always reference my eight-year-old self whenever I talk about something I’m really proud of doing, I’m just speechless right now,” Balinska told The Verge. I just never would have thought me playing games downstairs with my mom’s hairdresser’s son while she was getting her hair done. Now, to think that he can pick up this game and play as me, it’s just unbelievable. And I hope it inspires other people to realize that if you commit to the bit hard enough, something really crazy can happen.”
When asked what she thought about the online memes folks were making about the game’s dialogue, Balinska simply said that, “there are things that we all do that might be eyebrow-raising to other people,” and that
“I think people always have a positive or negative response to something they’re not used to seeing, and that’s completely okay because that’s the way we incite change,” Ballinska told The Verge. “This is such an extraordinary game that has come out with this amazing protagonist who’s so bold, so unapologetic, so reluctant in the best way possible. I think audiences might not be so used to seeing that.”
G/O Media may get a commission
It’s a camera. For your car. The Ring Car Cam’s dual-facing HD cameras capture activity in and around your car in HD detail.
In our Forspoken review, we said Square Enix’s parkour isekai deserved better than what shipped on its release date because the strength of its story and protagonist outpace its performance issues and oft-admonished dialogue.
There’s a phenomenon in the Overwatch community that has persisted through the original game’s 2016 release, its gradual decline, and the launch of the sequel. This phenomenon is an interesting one, a sort of “IYKYK” situation that requires membership in a specific community in order to recognize its members: in Overwatch, a lot of queer players choose to play as healers. Maybe you haven’t noticed this—maybe you’re straight (I’m sorry) and can’t spot an alphabet army soldier in your lobby, but if you’re in the LGBTQIA+ community and play Overwatch 2, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Mercy mains with rainbow player icons, Moira one-tricks wearing her Bowie skin, two-stacks who instalock support with some iteration of “-ussy” in their gamertag—if you pay attention, you’ll see that the gays are everywhere in Overwatch, and most of the time they’re playing healer.
But this is all anecdotal evidence, right? Surely gays don’t gravitate to playing healers that disproportionately, do they? After hundreds of hours logged in Overwatch 2 comp , most of which I played as a healer, I felt a burning desire to delve deeper into this phenomenon and figure out why I kept encountering fellow gays in the support role. I had my theories: queer people are used to supporting their found families in the real world, support roles are notoriously less toxic, many of the healer characters are femme or androgynous—but I needed more.
So, I put out a call for “gay people” on Twitter, I interviewed players and peers, and I spoke to a queer-identifying counselor, all in an attempt to properly investigate Overwatch’s gay healing agenda. The result is a fascinating look at a subculture within a subculture, one marked by real-world social queues, kink play, emotional connections, and, unfortunately, a frustrating lack of scientific research.
Gay icons
Image: Blizzard / Nico D.
The most obvious answer (and one of the more common ones I received on Twitter) as to why queer people play healers in Overwatch is that the characters themselves are gay icons. Even though the only two openly queer characters are both DPS heroes, the lineup of support characters looks a lot like the line outside of Happyfun Hideaway on a Saturday night: the uber-feminine and soft Mercy, the muscular and bold Brigitte, the sweet but strong Baptiste, the spunky and sarcastic Kiriko, the calm and collected Zenyatta, the androgynous and tall Moira, the soothing and maturely sexy Ana. Compared to your typical FPS lineup, and even most of the other Overwatch characters (save for outliers like Zarya and Mei), the support squad in this game feels demonstrably queer.
Overwatch player and freelance writer Nico D. echoes this sentiment via email, saying the characters “are designed in such a way to be desirable to queer communities—Moira is a REALLY good example of this, but I also know a lot of queer women or other queer people who are attracted to women that love Mercy, Ana, and Brig.” Nico suggests this has to do with the futuristic, sci-fi fashions depicted in the game “that also happen to be on characters with typically queer-coded appearances like slightly more atypical body types/silhouettes/haircuts.”
That definitely describes most Overwatch support heroes. And though Mercy is slim and white and traditionally attractive (Blizzard does, after all, historically have a problem with portraying women’s bodies), she still doesn’t feel as aggressively sexualized as someone like Widowmaker, whose impossibly long legs and massive tits scream The Male Gaze everytime she runs (in heels) across the screen.
Others who identify as queer and play Overwatch predominantly as healers tell me that the support characters are “gay icons” whose presence/vibes suggest queerness even though it’s not outright stated. “They feel queer” is a sentiment that, while scientifically impossible to prove, is consistently echoed in both messages to me and Overwatch community spaces. But “feeling queer” is a helluva lot different than being canonically queer—so why doesn’t it seem like members of the community play Tracer and Soldier: 76 as much as they play healers?
Gender roles
Image: Blizzard
Venture into the Reddit or TikTok trenches in search of an answer as to why gay people play healers and you’ll likely stumble across the “I can’t aim” meme. Like many internet fables, this one is somewhat rooted in reality. Evie Mae Barber, writer and narrative designer, tells me via Twitter DM that when she played Overwatch, she mained Lucio and Mercy because she finds healers in FPS titles “require less precision and more strategy,” whereas the DPS characters’ effectiveness are largely rooted in accuracy.
A desire to avoid roles that require accuracy could be a side effect of traditional multiplayer FPS titles being largely unsafe spaces for women and non cis-het men—it’s hard to feel comfortable or competent in these roles when the skills you need to excel at them should have been honed in the dark and scary servers of Halo 3 or CS:GO, during a time when the mere hint of “otherness” was met with viciousness, slurs, and threats.
The boys’ club of FPS titles may not exist in such severity today as it did in the early 2000s, but its effects linger. “There was a meta-analysis done that had several results, specifically about Overwatch,” says Dr. Sarah Hays, a queer-identifying counselor at nonprofit org Game to Grow and director of programming at Queer Women of Esports, during a video call. “Of course, it was on a gender binary, but male esports competitors are seen as more competitive than female competitors. Female players believe support to be the easiest position to play and prefer to play it because they don’t want to be blamed for not doing well.” She pauses. “That meta study has a whole bunch of data. I just hate that it’s done on a gender binary.”
It’s clear that the lack of adequate research around LGBTQIA+ gamers and the roles they choose to inhabit in multiplayer titles frustrates Dr. Hays. “My plea is: ‘people, let’s do research on this because it’s so cool,’” she says earnestly before returning to the meta study, combing through it to try and find some more connections to the theory at hand: “Non male-identified people tend towards picking a character that they can feel confident in. So they reduce harassment and they reduce some of that input. ‘It’s easier to play support because I’m not getting as much shit, I’m not getting blamed for that.’ That’s something we’re seeing both based in research and generally: people want to look and appear and feel like they know what they’re doing, so they’re not going to receive flack for being another ignorant non-dude. Which sucks. But it’s true.”
Dr. Hays doesn’t say this word during our chat, but it lingers overhead: toxicity. “I think queer folks trend toward support as it feels like the least toxic role or at least one that has less toxicity associated with them,” says Threshold Games’ community manager Colin Cummings in a DM. So, part of the reason queer-identiying gamers may be choosing healers is to avoid the rampant toxicity that comes with playing competitive FPS games. But how much do real-world experiences outside of gaming tie into choosing the support role?
Support systems
Image: Blizzard / Nico D.
I’m pleased when one of my theories is echoed by a few fellow healers: queer people, so often forced to protect themselves because the government won’t protect them, so connected to found families made up of supportive friends, would naturally gravitate towards characters who provide safety and security.
“I don’t think that it’s a far stretch to imagine that the fantasy of support or healers is appealing to groups of people who require communities around them for safety and affection,” Nico writes.
When I mention my theory in a DM with Eric Ravenscraft, product writer and reviewer at Wired, he’s on board, too. “Honestly, that wouldn’t surprise me too much,” he writes. “Support is very much herding cats, keeping your precious babies alive while they’re getting chased down by a mean dude with a hammer…most of the LGBTQIA+ folks I know live in a very found-family kinda space that becomes very protective of outside threats. Every single person I know in that space knows what it’s like to protect their friends—or even randos—from a bigoted parent or institution or whathaveyou. That kinda mindset maps pretty cleanly onto keeping four randos you just met safe online.”
This social connection between support roles IRL and in Overwatch is something Dr. Hays “loves” during our chat—it clearly sparks her interest, and I can see her cogs turning on our video chat as she begins pondering the larger ramifications of this idea. “I wonder if there isn’t a correlation between oppressed identity and feeling better as a person in the position of healer, because it means that you get to avoid the blame, but also you get to be reinforced as someone who’s helpful and supportive, and more effective in that role? Yeah, because of the way that our real-life experiences have catered to that, as well.”
While Dr. Hays is clearly inspired by these ideas, she reiterates that there’s just not enough research about this kind of stuff to provide us with much concrete evidence. She does, however, bring up a scientific study that leaves my jaw on the floor.
Piss play
I have used this image three times on Kotaku.com.Image: Blizzard / Kotaku
When I wrote about how Overwatch 2’s shorthand is a specific brand of twisted, the slang term for Moira’s healing (pee) was at the top of my mind. So when Dr. Hays starts talking about a scientific study about Overwatch’s “healsluts,” I am, as the kids say, gagged—the connections are there, drawn together by queer players who are, in fact, little freaks.
Assuming the role of a healslut, according to the study from Finnish academic journal Widerscreen, “[invites] players to deploy elements of BDSM kink and sexuality not merely within the vocabulary and design of the game, but also in a communal paratext surrounding the game involving forums, voice chat, and viral fan-designed images.” Kotaku already wrote about this kinky phenomenon almost eight years ago—a r/healslut moderator toldwriter Luke Winkie that healsluts take classic dominant and submissive roles that are synonymous with traditional BDSM and apply it to the roles laid out in Overwatch.
The tank (dom) protects and compliments the healers (subs), occasionally scolding them if they fail. Healsluts have one main duty, and it’s to protect their doms (DPS characters are considered darker, more violent versions of tanks, which makes sense if you’ve ever tried to pocket heal a Genji). Though much of the writing about this community was published several years ago, I can confirm that r/healsluts is still an active subreddit.
In many cases, the Venn diagram of kink and queer communities is a circle, with kink playing an important role in Pride events and in the history and legacy of LGBTQIA+ people. Kink play in Overwatch is a “a way for resisting ‘masculine-normative hegemonic fandom’ in video games,” according to the aforementioned study, and it persists even after Overwatch 1 was sunset in place of a free-to-play sequel.
So whether it’s because of cishet-y FPS pressure making support a more attractive role, social roles within found families that translate to games, the indefinable but still somewhat tangible queerness of the healer characters, or a preternatural need to heal big, dommy tanks, it’s very clear that there are a lot of LGBTQIA+ people playing support in Overwatch 2.
I could happily unpack this phenomenon in another 2,000 words, but maybe I should just leave it at what Kaitlin Jakola, managing editor at The Trace and former Gizmodo employee, had to say about it:
“I assume we all heal because gays love to be both extremely powerful and woefully unappreciated in our own time????” Work, bestie.
Game director Jeremy Russo shared the news in a blog post published earlier today, saying the game’s servers will be shut down on June 6, and that after that Knockout City “will no longer be playable”. Or, at least it won’t be in its current form (emphasis mine).
Today we are announcing that Season 9 will be Knockout City’s final season. Then, on the morning of June 6, 2023, over two years after our initial launch, all servers around the world will be shut down and the game will no longer be playable. This was an extremely difficult decision for us, but a necessary and important one for our studio. Before that happens, there are a ton of new updates in store. We’ve got a jam-packed Season 9 full of all the amazing new content you’ve come to expect, an epic send-off both in and out of the game, and even a private server version on PC so Knockout City can live on forever.
While an online game shutting down is always a shame for the community left still playing it at the time, it’s also a reality of this business, even for a game that launched with five million players. When that time inevitably comes, it’s a cruel and disappointing twist that the game usually disappears forever, leaving nothing in its wake except screenshots and memories, and no way for future generations to see what it was all about it.
So the news that Knockout City will be getting a “private server” version on the PC is great, both for fans of the game as well as anyone interested in game preservation (which should be all of you). Russo says this will be “a standalone player-hosted version of the game”, which will be released shortly after the existing version’s shutdown in June.
BRIGHTEN YOUR SMILE Whiten your teeth at home with Smileactives’ one-two punch: the Whitening Powerhouse Pen & Gel Duo. This set will get you the kind of teeth brightening power that uses the same ingredients that dentists rely on for in-office whitening treatments for a fraction of the price.
If you’re a player, the team will be running all kinds of updates between now and June, which you can read about in more detail here.
2016 was T-Pain’s Twitch channel’s inaugural year, and it’s also the first time Pain remembers getting trolled. “At the time, my music career was kind of on a downward spiral,” he says during our Zoom call this Monday. “People were coming into my chat and telling me stuff like, ‘You’re only streaming because you don’t have any more music money.’ It wasn’t true, but it kind of hit home because I was thinking that same shit.”
T-Pain is now the CEO of Nappy Boy Gaming, a passionate piece of his 2006-founded media empire Nappy Boy Entertainment. He runs and selects the members of its stream team, which includes BigCheese and Granny. When NBG started, he wasn’t used to getting trolled. But he does have experience with backlash—you might remember some of it from when you knew him best, when he was the guy on the radio singing with Auto-Tune.
Born Faheem Najm in Tallahassee, Florida (his artist name means “Tallahassee Pain,” because he struggled while living there), T-Pain started making music as soon as his 10-year-old hands would let him. He was only 20 when his debut single “I’m Sprung,” certified platinum in 2006, came out. That song makes Pain’s voice glossy with extreme pitch-correction, and later hits like 2007’s “Bartender” and “Buy U A Drank (Shawty Snappin’)” feature the same Auto-Tuned vocal cascades.
He was always committed to the art of it. He used to sample games like Streets of Rage 2 and GoldenEye007 (he reminisces about working with the former back in “oh my God, 1998, this was way back,” he says, laughing). In using Auto-Tune, he never sounds robotic (“Kids today wouldn’t understand what it’s like to sing into a fan and try to sound like T-Pain,” says a YouTube comment with over 20 thousand upvotes), he sounds like T-Pain, pleasantly metallic, the sound you get from clinking together a couple of $400,000 diamond necklaces. It became a covetable sound, reproduced by other 2000’s club rulers like the Black Eyed Peasand Kesha, and even still by huge rappers and alt-pop stars, like Travis Scott, Lil Yachty, and Charli XCX.
But, in the beginning, Pain’s peers were unwilling to give him credit. Usher, at one point, told him that he fucked music up, and Jay-Z bitterly called for “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)” with his 2009 song (“this shit violent / This is death of Auto-Tune, moment of silence”). The collective backlash led to a depressive period “that left [T-Pain] unmotivated to make any more music,” a New Yorker profile from 2014 says, but the fog lifted around that time, which happens to coincide with when Pain was first exposed to Twitch streaming at a PlayStation event in 2013.
He became attached to “this feeling that I wasn’t alone,” and realized streaming was a social, gratifying alternative to gaming alone in his room, or being stuck on a plane or stage without another human being to connect with.
He tells me he “took the reins into [his] hands” in 2016, starting his own channel and eventually forming his own stream team because he felt like it.
“I saw Markiplier watching BigCheese,” T-Pain says, “and I immediately got this feeling that I need to create something where I can use my name and my platform to get this guy seen. I need to get more eyes on this guy. I was like, ‘I need to create a gaming organization.’”
“It was kind of on a whim,” he admits, but he sticks with it partially because he likes being on his stream team, too, and protecting the sense of wonder that video games give him.
It was difficult initially. It turned out that internet commenters inherited Jay-Z’s objections to T-Pain’s career.
“The negativity sticks out so much,” he says about receiving his first round of hate comments. “I was screaming in my house, and I was getting mad at my wife for nothing because these fucking assholes on Twitter talking shit. Telling everybody, ‘don’t talk to me today, this one guy on Twitch said I was a fucking has-been.’”
But he learned, as everyone online must learn, that the anonymous losers in your comments section can’t be trusted.
“This is when I was getting 200 viewers, like, that was my top, that was big for me. When a lot of those viewers were saying ‘you’re on the stream because you don’t have money anymore,’ […] I started feeling like that. […] But I realized that those were just terrible people.”
Once he came to conclusion that “fuck those guys. Nevermind. Back to our regularly scheduled program,” like he says, he committed to streaming and nourishing that wonder. He cites TimTheTatman, Moistcritikal (“that’s the fucking homie”), and virtual YouTuber CodeMiko (“there’s a whole $10,000 system sitting in my game room doing nothing because I found out [motion capture] was more instructions than I thought it was”) as streamers he’s a fan of. It’s obvious that he loves streaming as a discipline.
You can also tell from decades of interviews, podcast appearances, and music—I noticed it, too, during our call—that T-Pain loves laughing. He slips into booming ha ha ha!’s as cheerily as you wiggle off a sweater when you’re warm, which could be why he found so much success on Twitch, where he now has close to 900 thousand followers. He is palpably nice.
Tabloids and DeuxMoi have mostly trained us out of believing celebrities can be so nice, no strings attached, but T-Pain exudes undeniable charisma. He has so many interesting stories to tell, and I’m happy to sit and let time pass as I listen.
Like, in 2021, he told his viewers about meeting Prince’s bass player. He called him on the phone so that T-Pain and Prince could introduce themselves, but Prince instead shouted “where the fuck you been at, man, we’ve been trying to jam for an hour!” as soon as he picked up.
The bass player “said ‘hey man, I’m sorry about that, but, man, I got T-Pain right here.’ Prince said, ‘I don’t want to talk to no motherfucking T-Pain,’” T-Pain recalls, cackling so hard he needs to rip his headphones off for a second. It starts a chain reaction—everyone in the room is cracking up, and so is everyone watching at home. “I was like, ‘bro, it’s fine!’”
He talks to viewers like we’re all at the bar together; he doesn’t operate with the untouchability of someone who influenced two decades of popular music, though he’s willing to demystify that world for everyone. He does it a lot—he just streamed for six hours the other day, scrolling through YouTube and analyzing his music while chat asked him innocent questions, children talking to their teacher. “What’s your favorite music video?”
He’s willing to entertain in infinite ways, giving subscriber insider looks at how he makes music, playing Battlefield 1, Fortnite, racing games with a steering wheel controller, Call of Duty…whatever he can get his hands on, really. The NBG team is similarly eclectic, playing Red Dead Redemptionin full grandma drag or, like Cardboard Cowboy, showing viewers hours of custom animations before finally deciding to play The Last of Us.
That impulse T-Pain had once, to support and amplify creators he admires, has proven to be long lasting. It continues to guide Nappy Boy Gaming. When it comes to adding new streamers to NBG’s roster, “I still look for people who would otherwise not be seen,” he says.
T-Pain likes streamers who seem like pure fun. Good people. “I scour Twitch, and I watch people, and if I stumble upon you and see you may need some help, or you got low views, and I feel like you deserve more…there you go. That’s how you get signed to Nappy Boy Gaming.”
“You don’t have to be really good at games [to get signed to NBG],” he continues. “You just got to be a good person that likes to make people laugh and lift people up. Just don’t be a dick.”
T-Pain has a genuine joy for streaming, but there are materials to be gained from it, too. He told famous jackassSteve-O on his podcast last year that he makes a lot of money on Twitch, and actually, “I’m making more money off of video games than I’ve made in the last four years,” he said. But he’s not sticking to Nappy Boy Gaming—continuously adding streamers to his roster, chatting for hours with subscribers—solely because he needs the money. Not to brag, but he’s good.
“This isn’t, like, my main thing. I have other ways of making money. It’s fine,” he says, though, if he did dedicate all his time to streaming, it would work out to something like $60,000 per hour, he claims, and that doesn’t hurt. But what might matter more to T-Pain is that NBG is helping him fulfill a long quest for overdue legitimization. He says that the NBG accomplishment he’s most proud of is getting recognized by the games industry at large.
“We just did an activation last night with Ubisoft. Just having Ubisoft not say, ‘We got T-Pain to play our game,’ they said, ‘We got Nappy Boy Gaming to play our game,’ you know, to be recognized as an organization and not just having people be like, ‘We’re cool now, we got a rapper to play our shit,’ […] is the crowning achievement,” he says. “It’s not just somebody that we think is famous. It’s not just a celebrity endorsement. It’s Nappy Boy Gaming. That’s the crowning achievement for me, just having that thing be separate.”
Gaming has helped T-Pain, once spitefully shouldered out by his industry, reach an unconventional, but still triumphant, apex. That, in addition to using the fame he kindled anyway for a good cause, is enough for him.
“When I ultimately leave this earth, I want people to be able to say, ‘That was fun. That was a good goddamn dude, he helped a lot of people,” he says, his comfortable laugh rolling out again like spilled marbles.
“That’s really all I want. I don’t really have any other achievements, or anything like that, that I want. I want the people that I helped to feel the way that I feel.”
Image: Kotaku / Shutterstock / Kevin Dietsch (Getty Images)
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, is having a decent day today after beating revenue and user activity forecasts for its final fiscal quarter of 2022. But its VR division isn’t helping the company make money. In fact, it’s costing the company billions in losses.
While it’s true that Meta’s stock is rising in after-hours trading today after sharing fairly positive fourth-quarter financial results, its VR division, Reality Labs, didn’t have such positive news to share, as it’s continuing to blow through money at a shocking rate. Today, the company confirmed it lost over $4 billion to VR and metaverse development in its final quarter of 2022. And in total, it lost well over $13 billion in 2022 trying (and failing) to build a metaverse people would flock to.
In comparison, Meta brought in $32.1 billion in revenue across all departments and apps.
As reported by Decrypt.co, Meta’s Reality Labs only brought in $727 million in revenue in the closing months of 2022. That’s not great when compared to the billions spent on the division in the same year, but it’s also worse than you might think. That figure is down 17% from the division’s revenue in the same period of 2021. Ouch.
Remember too that Facebook’s flagship metaverse software, Horizon Worlds, has basically been a giant flop, with reports that most worlds inside of it are empty and barely played. Not only that, but the company’s own employees barely use it, with a leaked internal memo showing that staff at Meta don’t enjoy using Horizons Worlds because it’s riddled with bugs and other quality issues.
G/O Media may get a commission
Improve your bloodflow BrainMD claims this proprietary supplement increases blood flow to help your cognitive and cardiovascular functions
Really the only big success story from Reality Labs is the Oculus Quest 2 headset, which was seen by many as an affordable alternative to pricey PC and console VR headsets and was also completely standalone. But in July Meta raised the price of that affordable headset by $100, with the 128GB model now costing $400 and the 256GB version now going for $500.
In November 2022, Meta laid off 11,000 employees, blaming covid, “macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss.” Zuckerberg blamed himself for the layoffs, but conveniently didn’t mention in his announcement of layoffs how much money the company is continuing to spent on VR and metaverse development. Over the past few years the company has spent tens of billions of dollars trying to make a VR-powered metaverse a thing.
You can hear someone tell you Tom Brady’s age (45!) and it doesn’t really hit you, because the guy still looks pretty fit and healthy. To fully grasp the length of Brady’s tenure on this Earth, then, you need to realise that the man has appeared in a video game for the PlayStation. Like, the original PlayStation.
Brady, born in 1977, was drafted by the New England Patriots in the sixth round of the 2000 NFL draft—as the 199th pick—and spent his first season in the league as a fourth-string QB. He was so far down the NFL pecking order, in fact, that for his first appearance in Madden—Madden 01, which not only released on the PS1 but also the Nintendo 64—he wasn’t even named, he was just listed on the Patriots depth chart as “QB #12″.
A year later, having moved up to the backup spot, he took over from the injured Drew Bledsoe, led the Patriots to a Super Bowl victory and the rest is history. Brady retires as the statistical leader in almost every category that matters for a QB, from passing yards to passing attempts to TD passes, while also leading the league in ball deflation controversies, crypto scam endorsements and weird ways to kiss your kid on the mouth.
To celebrate his career—or, for many more of you, to celebrate his retirement, announced today—I’ve put together this slideshow showing his video game career, from those early days on the PS1 through to the NFL 2K series, Madden and some other stops in between. It won’t be every game from every year, that would be boring—and for recent Madden games incredibly repetitive—but still, it’ll be a nice little walk down memory lane. Unless you remember playing any of these first few games, in which case I’m sorry for reminding you how old you are.
One of the most interesting developments in the emulation and coding scenes in recent years has been the increasing trend in taking classic old video games and completely reverse-engineering their code.
We’ve seen fans do this for everything from Mario 64 toOcarina of Time to Grand Theft Auto, all with varying degrees of legal opposition. The reasons for doing this are multitude; there’s the challenge of the reverse-engineering itself, of course, but also the benefits it brings, mainly in the form of being able to create genuine PC versions of classic console games, rather than relying on emulation.
What’s the difference? As we’ve explained previously, emulation relies on your computer pretending it’s an old console to run a game coded to run on that console. A reverse-engineered port is able to be built for the PC (or other platforms!) from the ground up, allowing for the seamless insertion of stuff like widescreen support and even (in the case of polygonal games) graphical tweaks like ReShade.
The latest game to receive this treatment is The Legend Of Zelda: A Link to the Past, first released in 1991 on the Super Nintendo and then re-released a number of times since on everything from the Game Boy Advance to Nintendo Switch Online.
As Nintendo Lifereport, a team of 20, led by xander-haj, managed the feat after working their way through 70-80,000 lines of code, and in the process “key enhancements have been added, such as faster transition times, speedier text, widescreen support, pixel shaders, and a more detailed overworld map. Perhaps most significantly, a secondary item slot has been added, allowing users to quickly switch between two items on the fly without having to go into the inventory screen to pick them out one by one.”
SWAPPABLE FACEPLATES Each set of Morph Earphones is crafted as a wearable street fashion accessory, as they come with swappable faceplates that you can switch out to change up your look at will. Choose from everything from trippy smileys to sakura blossoms and much, much more.
Here’s footage of the original game (running in an emulator on PC) compared to this new PC “port”:
zelda 3 emulation vs pc port
Neat! This is now the part of the post where we point out that, legally, this is still a very weird grey area. Reverse engineering itself isn’t illegal, but the use of a company’s assets can be, and these projects are a mix of both. Only they’re also not; the creators or reverse-engineered games like this simply provide the underyling code and ask you to get the assets from a ROM yourself. This game’s description, for example, says “You need a copy of the ROM to extract game resources (levels, images). Then once that’s done, the ROM is no longer needed.”
Nintendo would argue that doesn’t matter, the creators would argue it’s an important distinction, and until we start getting some definitive rulings in disputes like this I’m going to have to keep typing this out at the end of every post about it!
A substantial update for The Sims 4 dropped on PC and consoles today, and with it comes a new suite of control schemes and customization options. This involves things like hearing aids and shapewear, but one addition is expressly targeted at trans Simmers in an effort to make them feel included and visible.
Developer Maxis took to the game’s official website to break down The Sims 4‘s latest update, which includes chest binders and top surgery scars.
“Under the Body category, all players can find a Body Scars category with an option for Teen and older male Sims (masculine or feminine frame) to add a top surgery scar to their Sims,” the update reads.
“I finally get to see myself in game,” one person tweeted in all caps.
“Top surgery scars and binders?! That’s so cool,” exclaimed another tweeter. “So happy more representation is being added to the game.”
SWAPPABLE FACEPLATES Each set of Morph Earphones is crafted as a wearable street fashion accessory, as they come with swappable faceplates that you can switch out to change up your look at will. Choose from everything from trippy smileys to sakura blossoms and much, much more.
Binders and shapewear can compress someone’s chest or give more curvature to their body. In other words, these articles of clothing act as extra ways for trans folks to feel more comfortable in themselves, especially if they can’t afford or aren’t ready for body-altering surgeries.
“Binders and top surgery scars in base game,” a tweeter asked in all caps. “[Let’s fucking go, this is a] huge dub of the transmascs.”
“Oh my god I’m literally crying,” said another tweeter with crying emojis. “Finally, binders and top surgery! My little trans heart is so happy.”
There are also medical wearables, such as glucose monitors and hearing aids, which makes The Sims 4 all more inclusive for the disability community as well. It’s good shit.
“Binders, top surgery scars, hearing aids, and glucose monitors?” asked one tweeter about this new Sims 4 patch. “This is the best update since we could have feminine clothing on masculine frames and vice versa.”
Kotaku reached out to EA for comment.
The team also added new ways to actually control and interact with the game on console specifically, making navigation easier and bringing it closer to the PC version. All beneficial quality-of-life improvements.
Again, this is all extremely good shit. Though, there appear to be some kinks that still need to be ironed out a little bit, like confusion around where things are located and top surgery scars seemingly not populating for some folks. However, that Maxis and, by extension, EA is aware of and acknowledge its trans community in such a representative way makes me feel good. Maybe other studios will follow suit, making trans-inclusive representation something worth investing in and implementing in games.
Spanish streamer TheGrefg is one of the biggest stars on Twitch, so much so that he recently held his own awards show that drew almost two million viewers. And everyone watching was, for a moment, treated to a big ol’ ASCII penis.
First, some background. TheGrefg has almost 20 million YouTube subscribers. Over 11 million Twitch followers. Even if you don’t know who he is because he doesn’t’ speak your language, the dude is one of the most popular streamers on the planet; we wrote about him in 2021 when he “obliterated the all-time Twitch viewership record” in a clip…revealing his own Fortnite skin:
For years now, Twitch’s record for most concurrent viewers on a single streamer’s channel has been hotly contested, with streamers topping each other in slow-building increments. Today, however, Spanish streamer TheGrefg made everybody else look like they’d been wrestling for discarded peanut shells. As of writing, he topped out at nearly 2.5 million—a new all-time record that beats not just individual channels, but entire games.
The event we’re talking about today—called Premios ESLAND—is actually the second year running that he’s been able to host his own awards show specifically for Spanish-speaking streamers, streaming and related events/stunts. And it’s quickly become a huge event; this year’s show drew 1.75 million viewers, and that’s not counting the folks in attendance watching it live.
Look at this crowd! That’s Mexico City’s famous Auditorio Nacional, and TheGrefg packed it out for the show:
Gaming time Grants two months of access to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which gives you access to Game Pass on your Xbox, PC, and Phone, lets you play online, and even adds an EA Play subscription too, for even more games at under $10.
Anyway, being the second time he’s run one of these shows—and that he lives on the internet—you might think he or his producers would know not to cut to the live chat on the big screen up on stage. Yet this year he did just that, and as you can see in the video below, he regretted it about as quickly as a human can register the sensation:
In the interests of accuracy and truth in reporting, here is the NSFW image:
Overwatch 2 will make adjustments to both its matchmaking process and its ranked system in the coming weeks, according to the latest developer blog posted today. This is good news for anyone who has spent the months since launch confused or frustrated by the sequel’s ranking system, or those who feel like their matches are almost always lopsided (myself included, as evidenced by my most recent take on Overwatch 2‘s competitive mode).
The lengthy blog post ensures us that Blizzard “has seen [our] feedback on matches with wide skill variation,” and has plans to address our concerns. After explaining away a few of the reasons why I either roll an enemy squad or am rolled by them, the post details what steps Overwatch 2 will take to fix its matchmaking and ranked problems.
Season 3, which will start sometime next month (there’s no set date yet) will “try to place pairs of players with similar MMR [matchmaking ranking] on each role on either team,” which means you’re less likely to get tanks with a wide gap in skill between them on opposing squads. With only one tank in traditional matches, that gap can feel like a chasm, so the goal of the update is to “make the average MMR between each role more evenly matched to each other instead of looking more broadly across the entire team to balance things out.” Yes, Overwatch 2‘s current matchmaking system does not ensure that each role is matched with an evenly ranked opponent.
The next season will also change how often your rank is adjusted in Competitive mode, as the team has heard us loud and clear that playing up to 26 matches just for your role to stay the same is infuriating. “Starting with Season 3, you’ll now get a competitive update with every 5 wins and 15 losses. In the mid-season patch for Season 3, we’re also updating the UI, so information about your progress toward a competitive update will always be viewable.” Praise be.
Oh, and seasonal rank decay and rank resets are getting thrown out the window starting with Season 4—but don’t expect a full rank reset ever, you absolute animal. “A full rating reset wouldn’t create a great experience since it would mean throwing out all the knowledge we have about players. This would cause new players to be matched against OWL pros, which is fun for about 30 seconds (we’ve experienced this ourselves in internal playtests).”
Gaming time Grants two months of access to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which gives you access to Game Pass on your Xbox, PC, and Phone, lets you play online, and even adds an EA Play subscription too, for even more games at under $10.
While I can understand why players may want a full rank reset to get the nasty taste of this current ranking system out of our mouths, it’s clear that it would cause even more chaos. Let’s just be happy that we’ll get more frequent rank adjustments, a clearer picture of where the fuck our rank is going, and better matches going forward. Maybe I’ll enjoy playing again.
