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It’s Friday, so let’s take a look back at the week. We’ve taken a break from some of the year’s biggest releases to write about video games for you, so consider yourself loved.
Happy reading, and have a great weekend!
Pieces of flair and opinion
- The DeanBeat: In VR industry, a thousand startups will bloom. Most won’t make it
- Watch us play Star Wars: Battlefront
- Watch us play StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void
- My mom reviews Call of Duty: Black Ops III
- Pornhub’s traffic dipped significantly the day Fallout 4 came out
- Unity has democratized game development
- How Dead Secret became a virtual reality horror game]
- How Friday the 13th: The Game exploded from Gun Media’s fun horror ideas
- Arnold Schwarzenegger stars in Machine Zone’s modern warfare game Mobile Strike (updated)
- Fallout 4: a tour of the buggy, janky mess — and why I don’t want Bethesda to ‘fix’ it
- Steam Link is a good idea, but I’m not buying into streaming PC games yet
- Valve’s Steam Controller is a weird mutant with potential
- Wrapping up a 17-year narrative, StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void finally goes live
- BlizzCon 2015 in pictures: Warcraft film cast, cool cosplay, and more
- Tales of Zestiria is one Japanese role-playing game trope after another
- AR VR there yet? The experts weigh in on the growth of augmented and virtual reality
News
- StarCraft II: Blizzard explains why Legacy of the Void isn’t the end of the series
- Today’s tiny World of Warcraft news: Gnome hunters
- Unity has democratized game development
- Epic’s Tim Sweeney believes virtual reality will evolve more like console games than mobile
- Bethesda says it shipped $750M and 12M copies for Fallout 4’s launch
- Gambling on virtual reality: the online casinos of the future
- New Xbox One backward compatibility tutorial takes a cheeky swipe at Sony
- October 2015 NPD: Halo 5 leads gaming to $805M month
- Xbox One outsold PlayStation 4 in October thanks to Halo
- Nintendo Direct trailer roundup: Zelda HD, Cloud in Smash, and more
- Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam gets January release date
- Cloud from Final Fantasy VII joins Super Smash Bros. as DLC
- Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow are coming to 3DS with wireless trading
- Fire Emblem Fates gets February 19 release date and $80 special edition
- Dragon Quest VII and Dragon Quest VIII are coming Stateside to the 3DS in 2016
- Star Fox Zero gets new April 22 release date
- Pokémon Picross is real and is probably the game of the year
- Super Mario Maker is making it easier to find levels
- Zelda Wii U is still coming in 2016 — for real
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess gets the HD treatment for Wii U
- Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft — The League of Explorers guide: How to beat Temple of Orsis
- Gameforge hits North America with its Hearthstone competitor, Hex: Shards of Fate
- Hearthstone’s League of Explorers adventure is now live
- Microsoft’s HoloLens gets its first augmented-reality rival: Asus
- How Friday the 13th: The Game exploded from Gun Media’s fun horror ideas
- Eve: Valkyrie creator CCP Games raises $30M for virtual reality games
- Street Fighter characters are invading DeNA’s Blood Brothers 2 strategy game
- Huuuge Games raises $4M from Korean firm to make casino games more social
- Hands-on with the 10-vs.-10 Total War: Arena multiplayer brawl
- How to make easy money in Fallout 4 with this vendor glitch
- Watch epic performances of popular video game music by a Finnish orchestra that kicked off Slush
- How to get the New Xbox One Experience tonight
- Scopely partners with mobile startup Redemption to make ‘top-grossing games’
- Xbox Live is down intermittently and preventing Fallout 4 players from uploading screenshots (updated)
- Last episode of Telltale’s Game of Thrones arrives on November 17
- Study finds American families love playing games together on consoles
- ‘Star Wars’ director’s Bad Robot is making a game with Infinity Blade studio Chair
- Disney Infinity 3.0 launches on Apple TV
- Eyefluence raises $14M for eye-popping eye-tracking technology for
- Brain game maker Lumos Labs gets a different brain in new CEO Steve Berkowitz
- Call of Duty: Black Ops III sets record with $550M sales in three days
- Game engine startup MaxPlay scores its first customer: Finger Food Studios
- Faster hard drives help with Fallout 4’s stuttering Xbox One performance
- Why game developers need smaller teams and more diverse projects
- Improbable’s new software brings huge games and VR simulations to life via the cloud
- Iceland’s Sólfar Studios gets $2.1M for VR games from Asian and Nordic investors
- Hearthstone’s League of Explorers add-on is its most risky adventure yet
- Rodea the Sky Soldier reaches lofty heights but can’t soar over its pitfalls
- Rise of the Tomb Raider enables your Twitch viewers to control part of Lara Croft’s adventure
- Overwatch impressions, Part 3: the three new BlizzCon heroes
- How an injury drove one artist to make a tower defense-meets-Pokémon game — and a woman-led studioDigi-Capital unveils its first global best-in-class AR/VR benchmarks
- The new $100 Oculus-powered Samsung Gear VR opens for preorders in the U.S. today
- Maingear’s Drift PC brings 4K gaming and the SteamOS to the living room
- The Call of Duty: Black Ops III cover star is actually a Phoenix reserve police officer
- How Logitech’s betting on bold design to ditch its ‘mice and keyboards’ legacy
- Steam Controller left me grumpy in 2014, but now I’m open to these alien-feeling controls
- Steam Link is a good idea, but I’m not buying into streaming PC games yet
- Valve’s Steam Controller is a weird mutant with potential
- Wrapping up a 17-year narrative, StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void finally goes live
- Twitch finally adds two-factor authentication to boost livestreaming platform’s security
- Playfield.io launches to stop the ‘indiepocalypse’
- World of Warcraft: Legion’s Demon Hunter class — the complete starting experience
- BlizzCon 2015 in pictures: Warcraft film cast, cool cosplay, and more
- Tales of Zestiria is one Japanese role-playing game trope after another
- AR VR there yet? The experts weigh in on the growth of augmented and virtual reality
- 100,000 students and counting: Google brings VR kits to schools in 15 more cities
- Twitch fans watch 545.9M minutes of famous painter Bob Ross making art
- Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang says that VR’s 250 startups remind him of the dawn of graphics chips
- Call of Duty: Black Ops III is the best shooter game of 2015
Mobile and social
- Unity has democratized game development
- Epic’s Tim Sweeney believes virtual reality will evolve more like console games than mobile
- Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft — The League of Explorers guide: How to beat Temple of Orsis
- Gameforge hits North America with its Hearthstone competitor, Hex: Shards of Fate
- Hearthstone’s League of Explorers adventure is now live
- Huuuge Games raises $4M from Korean firm to make casino games more social
- Scopely partners with mobile startup Redemption to make ‘top-grossing games’
- Last episode of Telltale’s Game of Thrones arrives on November 17
- Study finds American families love playing games together on consoles
- ‘Star Wars’ director’s Bad Robot is making a game with Infinity Blade studio Chair
- Eyefluence raises $14M for eye-popping eye-tracking technology
- Brain game maker Lumos Labs gets a different brain in new CEO Steve Berkowitz
- Game engine startup MaxPlay scores its first customer: Finger Food Studios
- Why game developers need smaller teams and more diverse projects
- Improbable’s new software brings huge games and VR simulations to life via the cloud
- Iceland’s Sólfar Studios gets $2.1M for VR games from Asian and Nordic investors
- Hearthstone’s League of Explorers add-on is its most risky adventure yet
- Playfield.io launches to stop the ‘indiepocalypse’
- AR VR there yet? The experts weigh in on the growth of augmented and virtual reality
- 100,000 students and counting: Google brings VR kits to schools in 15 more cities
Previews and interviews
- Epic’s Tim Sweeney believes virtual reality will evolve more like console games than mobile
- How Friday the 13th: The Game exploded from Gun Media’s fun horror ideas
- Eve: Valkyrie creator CCP Games raises $30M for virtual reality games
- Huuuge Games raises $4M from Korean firm to make casino games more social
- Scopely partners with mobile startup Redemption to make ‘top-grossing games’
- Why game developers need smaller teams and more diverse projects
- How Logitech’s betting on bold design to ditch its ‘mice and keyboards’ legacy
- Playfield.io launches to stop the ‘indiepocalypse’
- AR VR there yet? The experts weigh in on the growth of augmented and virtual reality
Reviews and impressions
- Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft — The League of Explorers guide: How to beat Temple of Orsis
- Overwatch impressions, Part 3: the three new BlizzCon heroes
- Steam Controller left me grumpy in 2014, but now I’m open to these alien-feeling controls
- Steam Link is a good idea, but I’m not buying into streaming PC games yet
- Valve’s Steam Controller is a weird mutant with potential
- Wrapping up a 17-year narrative, StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void finally goes live
- World of Warcraft: Legion’s Demon Hunter class — the complete starting experience
- Call of Duty: Black Ops III is the best shooter game of 2015