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A study by the Universities of Oxford and Rochester has revealed the main source of gaming aggression.

Welcome to Postcards from The Elder Scrolls Online, a look at Bethesda's new MMO. Stay tuned for more entries in the coming weeks. Prior to writing about games for a living, I was spending much more time on MMOs than I do now. Once upon a time, I was hell-bent on topping the Everquest 2 server leaderboards for quests completed, and I put more hours into that game than I did my university course (maybe that's not saying much). After that, I got up to Level 65 in World of Warcraft - I even queued up for the Burning Crusade launch, something I've not done for any other game. Since then I've had brief skirmishes with Rift, The Old Republic, and Final Fantasy 14, but no MMO has grabbed me (and my time) like EQ2 and WoW did.

Still, the pangs are always there, so when Richard asked if I wanted to check out The Elder Scrolls Online, I was happy to. If anything, Bethesda Game Studios' recent efforts had done great jobs of satiating my hunger for games gone by. Skyrim in particular felt like a single-player MMO, constantly rewarding me for every little thing I did in its timesink of a world.

So, don't consider this a review of TESO. Instead, it's offered as my musings on returning to the fold with Bethesda's first foray into it. And in my first week I encountered Harry Potter flashbacks, smart-talking cats, and almost-naked epiphanies. [Images: Bethesda]

You know who digs Ikea? Japan, that's who. Ikea stores are popular destinations for shoppers. And what better way to go to Ikea than in Tokyo's Ikea monorail? No, make that, the Ikea "Party Train."Read more...

New York-based LEGO builder Baron von Brunk has a pretty cool and original ongoing series where he builds LEGO consoles with transforming abilities. He made Nintendo 64 and NES Zapper Megatrons, and while we wait for one that can transform into the Nintendo R.O.B., here's his latest in the form of a Game Boy Advance.Read more...

PlayStation All-Stars fans, the ultimate balance update is here. With more than 100 balance adjustments combined across all characters, and a wave of additional improvements, this update creates a new playing field for all challengers. Click here to see the full changelist in this patch.

Click here to get the Graveyard Pack

This update also unlocks the previously promised third costumes for both Zeus and Isaac characters in-game, for all players that currently own them. If you don’t have these bonus characters in your roster, we’re happy to inform you of a significant DLC price drop on The Graveyard Pack to $1.99 — which includes both Zeus and Isaac, as well as a stage based on MediEvil’s Graveyard mashed with hidden elements from the world of The Unfinished Swan. This DLC sale will last until April 22nd.

Finally, we’ve partnered with fighting game community powerhouse Level-Up Series for a Spring Tournament at The Runback. This is a 10-week, offline tournament at Super Arcade here in Southern California, and will be live streamed weekly on twitch.tv/leveluplive on the road to the finale. The season grand prize is a PS4, and awesome PlayStation All-Stars community notoriety.

Even if you can’t make it, you can still win weekly mystery prizes just by tuning in to the livestream every Thursday starting this week at 9:30PM PT.

Watch the tournament live

PlayStation All-Stars fans, we cannot thank you enough for your patience and continued passion throughout the community, and especially on our message boards. Over the past months we’ve read every word, clicked every thread, assessed the game balance inside and out, to ensure that this balance update would not only bring a superior new challenge to the game, but also feel heavily impacted by your voice. Thank you, and our hats off to SuperBot Entertainment for creating an incredible fighting game for PlayStation fans worldwide.

To download the PlayStation All-Stars update, just boot up the game, ensure you are connected to the internet, and you’ll be automatically prompted to download.

Follow us at @SonySantaMonica and visit our official studio website.

Rezzed 2014 was a place where games were crammed into every corner, even some that weren’t scheduled to be there. Daniel Ratcliffe, creator of Minecraft mods ComputerCraft and qCraft, sat on the floor to the left of the Leftfield Collection to show me his puzzle game Redirection. It’s a maze game in the Stephen “increpare” Lavelle mould in which you place blocks to re-shape paths and direct robots towards objectives.

There is now a block in front of you. Rotate and continue below, where there’s a video and I’ll attempt to explain its appeal a little more.

… [visit site to read more]

Bilbo and the Dwarves are ready to build an unexpected journey.

Microsoft is no longer supporting Windows XP. It's being phased out worldwide. In China , folks are hanging on. In nearby South Korea, the government has set up a special task force. Read more...

Spring means we get rain, flowers, warmer weather and, more importantly, a new anime season. But with 60 new anime in the pipeline, how do you know which ones to watch? Check out the trailers and brief blurbs about each to see which of them catches your interest.Read more...

Welcome to Postcards from The Elder Scrolls Online, a look at Bethesda's new MMO. Stay tuned for more entries in the coming weeks. Prior to writing about games for a living, I was spending much more time on MMOs than I do now. Once upon a time, I was hell-bent on topping the Everquest 2 server leaderboards for quests completed, and I put more hours into that game than I did my university course (maybe that's not saying much). After that, I got up to Level 65 in World of Warcraft - I even queued up for the Burning Crusade launch, something I've not done for any other game. Since then I've had brief skirmishes with Rift, The Old Republic, and Final Fantasy 14, but no MMO has grabbed me (and my time) like EQ2 and WoW did.

Still, the pangs are always there, so when Richard asked if I wanted to check out The Elder Scrolls Online, I was happy to. If anything, Bethesda Game Studios' recent efforts had done great jobs of satiating my hunger for games gone by. Skyrim in particular felt like a single-player MMO, constantly rewarding me for every little thing I did in its timesink of a world.

So, don't consider this a review of TESO. Instead, it's offered as my musings on returning to the fold with Bethesda's first foray into it. And in my first week I encountered Harry Potter flashbacks, smart-talking cats, and almost-naked epiphanies. [Images: Bethesda]

Mad Men's advertising office manager, Christina Hendricks, was the guest of Conan O'Brien, where she talked about her desire for a role in HBO's Game of Thrones, even though she never ever watched an episode of Game of Thrones before.Read more...

A real highlight of the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in the last couple of years has been the Advocacy Track. This is made up of a series of talks, round tables and presentations regarding issues within gaming about diversity, tolerance and inclusivity. And in a GDC where not a single woman was speaking at the Independent Games Summit, there are clearly still some massive issues. Rather brilliantly, the sessions within this track are being made free to all, rather than just those who attended the conference. Highlights are below.

… [visit site to read more]

Launching this month, the latest Radeon graphics card offers impressive performance for 4K gaming and an easy-to-install cooling setup.

Man, the internet! Sometimes it seems like people are cold-hearted jerks. They don't care about anyone but themselves. Here's a Thai Life Insurance ad reminding us that it's good to be nice to others—whether that's offline or on. Read more...

Scrolls - the other game by Mojang - is on its way to iPad, courtesy of Boulder Dash XL 3D and Magicka: Wizards of the Square Tablet dev Ludosity. The collectible card game makes sense for a touchscreen experience, but as for what might be unique to that experience, we'll have to wait and see. Mojang said it'll have more news on the tablet port "soon."

The Minecraft studio also plans to deal out a few tweaks to Scrolls, including a visually clearer ranking system, and some audio and visual additions to give duels a bit more pizzazz. There are also revamped, "snappier" tutorials in the works, as well as a new demo. [Image: Mojang]

"It feels like an unnecessary add-on... I'm sure they're going to release an Xbox One without Kinect. It would be unthinkable that they wouldn't." Game designer and programmer Peter Molyneux, in an Edge interview with multiple industry personalities about the Xbox One's future.Read more...

Richard Boeser is this close to finally releasing his dual-world cooperative platformer Ibb and Obb on PC, as it’s due to arrive this May. He’s apparently not content, as he’s also partnered with Tomasz Kaye to make Chalo Chalo, a racing game “where planning ahead is more important than speedy reflexes.” You play a dot gliding across a world of randomly generated shapes, where different colours of surface slow or speed your journey to the finish line. It looks like the screenshot above, it moves like the trailer below.

… [visit site to read more]

You might not think a hedgehog can pull off impersonations of, say, a dog, a bear or even Pikachu. Then again, you might not have met Marutaro the Hedgehog. Read more...

On April 22, you can demand your Xbox 360 to give you the best wide-eyed, high-decibel Warface it can, because that's when Crytek's free-to-play shooter launches in full.

Warface is the first game from Crytek Kiev, and it first arrived on Windows PC last year. This month's transfer to Xbox 360 signals its debut on a home console. Warface uses CryEngine 3, as per Crysis 3 and Ryse, and it offers online military melee in co-op and player-vs-player flavors. Just a reminder: While the game itself is free-to-play, you'll need an Xbox Live Gold account to access it. [Image: Crytek]

On Japanese game show Tore!, contestants must do more than solve puzzles and show their knowledge. In one part, they must climb a wall. In another, they must avoid mummification. Read more...

This is Mark of the Old Ones, a physics adventure-platformer with a Lovecraftian twist in which you're some sort of a tentacled abomination. Watching the trailer I'm reminded more of Gish than anything. A really pretty, horror-themed Gish. It has an ongoing Kickstarter campaign, if you're interested.Read more...

I’d be a bit unsettled by the notion of random Internet denizens deciding my every action and footfall if they didn’t sort of already do that anyway. I mean, my job only exists because of the web’s ravenous hordes, so I’m basically a puppet for their whims. That said, Choice Chamber sees Twitch chatters taking on a bit of a different role than they did in genre (?) pioneer Twitch Plays Pokemon. The idea here is that one person controls a side-scrolling platformer character, and everybody else decides, well, pretty much everything. Levels formations, level themes, enemies, helpful minions, weapons, power-ups, how high the player can jump, etc, etc, etc. Soundodger developer Studio Bean has taken the experiment in crowd control/cacophony to Kickstarter.

… [visit site to read more]

All this week, our victorious champion will be live-streaming The Elder Scrolls Online. Keep up to speed with his adventures, right here.

Silicon Studio, the creative force behind RPG Bravely Default, has released a tech demo for its next-gen real-time engine. It's pretty stunning.

Courtesy of Blizzard, here's a look at what the Tauren will look, move and act like in World of Warcraft's new expansion-slash-graphical-update, Warlords of Draenor. Read more...

GameSpy, a relic from times long before the modern Internet – or indeed, games and spies – existed is closing down. This on its own is not surprising as the multiplayer service is, by modern standards, buggy and kind of a joke, but it leaves a startling number of games with their e-wings clipped and their online-heaving hams strung in its wake. How many, you ask? Well, Reddit’s /r/Games board compiled a massive list, and the results aren’t pretty.

… [visit site to read more]

Japan's Silicon Studio is perhaps best known for co-developing the Bravely Default games with Square Enix. The studio has a new, next-gen game engine, and it looks beautiful.Read more...

Each new interesting Kickstarter seems to feel obliged to make at least one enormous mistake. The Breakout‘s – a point and click adventure from Pixel Trip Studios – is to not explain the game in its pitch video. Face and Palm, sitting in a tree, K.I.S.S.I.N.G.

However, scroll a few screens down their Kickstarter’s front page and you’ll find, buried there, what should have been at the top – in-game footage, and some gorgeous screenshots. This is a 90s-style (and hand-painted pixel designed) adventure, set in a WW2 prison camp, from which you’re trying to escape. I’m belatedly interested.

… [visit site to read more]

Notch is a little overwhelmed.

While our ancestors might be upset that Age of Mythology: Extended Edition pits their sacred deities against one another for human entertainment, the new global lighting system, enhanced graphics and Steamworks support does make the blasphemy undeniably attractive. [Image: Microsoft]