The word “casual” is more often used as an insult than a description, but it doesn’t have to be. It can instead be a useful way of describing a genre of games that are just as likely to be your jam as any other—the kind of games anyone can pick up and play, whether they’re familiar with typical gamer conventions or not, perfect for short sessions as well as deep dives.Casual games don’t have to be easy (endless mode in Plants vs. Zombies is no picnic), they just have to be easy to get into. Match-3 puzzle games like Bejeweled…

From 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett wrote Crapshoot, a column about rolling the dice to bring random obscure games back into the light. This week, prepare to see beat-em-up action like you’ve never seen it before! With women fighting in skimpy, ridiculous costum— waaaaaaaaait…Karate translates as ‘Empty Hand’. Damn, no easy joke opportunities there! But is Bikini Karate Babes the gaming equivalent of Ronseal—primarily aqua and potassium tripolyphosphate? There’s only one way to find out, and we’re going to do so by trying something roughly 98% of online write-ups of Bikini Karate Babes have never even dreamed of: actually installing…

Fortnite week 9 challenges are here, and it’s yet another chance to earn a big helping of XP. With the season likely about to start winding down, this could be one of your last chances to do so. This week, in addition to a bunch of the usual challenges, you’re tasked with stoking three campfires at the Cape Cod location.If you’re unsure of where to look and don’t want to waste time combing the island of Cape Cod, we’ve whipped up a guide to help you find all campfire locations.First, here’s a helpful overhead view of all the locations at…

In one of the strangest and most public legal disputes in recent memory, two of the biggest companies in the world (three, if you count the side-grapple Epic is having with Google) are currently fighting to see who gets our hard earned money in exchange for a John Wick skin. A brief rundown of how we got here:Epic Games installed a workaround in the Fortnite mobile app that allowed players to buy V-Bucks directly from Epic, rather than through Apple; this stopped Apple from taking a 30 percent cut of transactions.Apple then pulled Fortnite from the Apple Store……Which led Epic…

Frantic party royale Fall Guys is a massive hit, and despite only being out a week everyone already has strong opinions—and wrong opinions—about which of its game modes are the best and which are the worst. We’re wading in too, with judgments about every single minigame. Click the upper right corner of the image below to see just how fervently you agree with our Fall Guys Tier List. And beneath, you’ll find our reasoning for the rankings.(Image credit: Mediatonic)S TierTip Toe – “Very dangerous. You go first.” Slime Climb – Brutally separates the beans from the chaff. Egg Scramble – Team games…

(Image credit: US Army)The US Army is once again livestreaming on Twitch, and it is not going great for the Army. The Twitch chat is once again being flooded with comments about war crimes, and this time it seems that no effort is being made to stop them.The Army’s troubles began when its esports team’s livestream came to widespread notice in July, which led to a flood of users in Twitch chat repeatedly asking the streamers about war crimes. Bans were issued, predictably, but the matter took a big turn when Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute said that, because…

Cheap gaming laptop deals may be our very favorite PC gaming deals to track down. Why? Because gaming laptops are the do-it-all devices that let us work and game from anywhere, and modern laptops manage to do that while delivering hours of battery life and performance that nearly rivals a desktop PC, at least when it comes to the best gaming laptops. Of course, putting all that into one system that weighs only a few pounds is going to be expensive. But not if you find a cheap gaming laptop deal.Every week we go searching for the best cheap gaming…

Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord mods have been around since the game first released on Early Access back in—wait did Bannerlord seriously only release four months ago? It feels like it’s been forever. Holy hell that feels surreal for some reason. Anyway, mods. So, yeah, players have been hacking and modding Bannerlord for a long time now, but I’m predicting that scene is going to explode with cool stuff pretty soon because its official mod tools are just weeks away.Today, Taleworlds showcased what to expect with a new developer update video breaking down its suite of official mod tools, and…

Horizon Zero Dawn on PC is really good—unless you happen to be one of the apparently very many people who have run into the technical and performance issues that have plagued the game since launch. As we noted earlier this week, it ran fine for Jacob, our senior hardware editor, but our reviewer experienced issues with stuttering and wonky framerates when he tried it at 4K, even with a muscular CPU and 2080 Ti graphics card.Developer Guerrilla Games said on Steam shortly after Horizon Zero Dawn’s launch that it was aware of the problems and investigating them, and followed up…

The twisted, hopelessly pessimistic universe of Warhammer 40k is impossibly large. Carefully spelled out in over 300 tie-novels and codexes, it’s full of way more vibrant and bizarre details than you might expect if your only exposure to it has been through the lens of a seven-foot-tall Space Marine. There’s a daemon planet that’s actually a really large obese man in the fetal position and an ork warlord once accidentally travelled back in time and decided to kill his past self just so he could have a second copy of his favorite gun.It’s these kinds of fascinating details that are…

Earlier this week we said that a Call of Duty: Black Ops – Cold War ARG was teasing an upcoming reveal for the next game in the series, leaked long ago as Black Ops – Cold War, that was set to happen today. But with the big day here, it appears that what we’re really getting, sorry to say, is more ARG.The first change came before 12 pm ET, with the appearance of a sticky note on the television at pawntakespawn.tv, with the world “tangledweb” on it. That led to a different image of a typewritten message, rambling about tactics,…

Microsoft Flight Simulator will let us hop into the cockpit and soar across the world next week. It was only announced last year, so it’s not been a long wait, but every extremely pretty screenshot and clip has made it agonising all the same. And there’s still time for one more: a visual history of the series. Microsoft Flight Simulator is quite a bit older than most people writing about games today, including myself, and first appeared way back in 1982. Back then, it was a bunch of white lines that, if you squinted, kinda gave the impression that maybe you…