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The S16 Swiss Draw Gave LPL Two Nightmare Matchups and One Clean Escape
When the draw ended, two matchups stuck first: IG vs GEN and TES vs HLE. BLG, in Pool 2, did not get T1 from Pool 3. When the screen cut to the next group, someone in the training room folded a slip covered in matchup notes and left it folded. AL drew KC, BLG drew MKOI, DK drew G2. The first Swiss round enforces same-region avoidance and seed-pool crossover. Four China-Korea matches were possible. The draw delivered the two biggest ones.
By Jin3 days ago in Gamers
They Bought the Game. Then the Servers Died. Now Players Are Rebuilding It With AI.
On January 12, 2026, EA shut down Anthem’s servers for good. The game had no offline mode. Its world, characters, and content died on the official service. Less than a week later, a community developer named And799 posted a video. Two players had entered the same Anthem lobby on a self-built server emulator.
By Jin4 days ago in Gamers
AI Got Crushed by Slay the Spire’s Hardest Mode? I Looked at the Data, and the Headline Falls Apart
200 runs. One win. That is the full record of 20 large language models against the final boss on Slay the Spire ’s A20 difficulty. GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1, and GPT-5.6 Sol trade places atop other leaderboards. Against the Corrupt Heart, their combined win rate was 0.5%.
By Jin9 days ago in Gamers
Phantom Blade Zero’s 66 Days Mode Is a Death Clock the Developers Can’t Beat
At Tokyo Game Show 2026, a 4Gamer reporter asked Liang Qiwei whether anyone on the development team had cleared the “66 Days” mode without dying once.
By Jin9 days ago in Gamers
Buy-to-Play Isn’t Always the Better Deal. My Steam Backlog Proved It.
Many players say the same thing: buy-to-play games are a better deal. At first, that sounds obvious. Free-to-play games cost nothing. Buy-to-play games cost money. How could the paid option be cheaper? Then you play a few free games. You see how they work. Free is the entrance. Inside, gacha, skins, battle passes, monthly cards, first-time recharge bonuses, limited bundles, and seasonal quests pull money and time out of you through thin pipes.
By Jin11 days ago in Gamers
Why DNF Stopped Being Fun (It's Not Nostalgia)
You're sitting in Grandine. One full fatigue bar is gone. A few fake purples lie on the ground. You don't pick them up. In your storage, you still keep the chainsaw, the flamethrower, the Ice Dragon greatsword you dropped back then. Back then, when a boss pink dropped, you could type three lines in guild chat, hands shaking. Now you open the equipment dictionary. Those things are still there. No one talks about them.
By Jin12 days ago in Gamers
We Beat Video Games Before the Internet. Here’s What It Actually Took.
Blow on the Cartridge, Keep Banging into the Wall The TV was convex, with a layer of dust on the screen. Summer afternoon, the fan spinning, the cartridge hot in my hand. I was stuck on World 4 of Super Mario . I’d been down every pipe, stomped every Koopa, the flagpole was on the right, but I couldn’t clear the jump in the middle. I tried twenty times. On the twenty-first, I fell into the pit. Mom called me for dinner. I didn’t answer.
By Jin12 days ago in Gamers
Sony Locked the PS5. Hackers Found a Key. Players Are Stuck in the Middle.
On September 29, 2026, an exploit chain called Relapse became public. This was not a minor security incident. Attackers combined a WebKit browser vulnerability with a kernel-level aio_multi_wait UAF race condition. The result gave them kernel-level physical memory read/write privileges on the PS5. Every official firmware version from 7.00 to 13.60 was affected. That range covers the original fat model, the Slim, and the recently released PS5 Pro.
By Jin12 days ago in Gamers
AI Built Half This Game. One Human Built the Part That Mattered.
Three days ago I played Qunxia Zhuan: Survivors . The opening cutscene is AI-made. Anyone who has used AI image or video tools will recognize the look. The voice acting is AI too. It sounds oddly familiar, and not in a good way. The action is the weakest part. Poses work. Fights do not.
By Jin12 days ago in Gamers
Everyone Plays Gomoku. Almost No One Competes.
Gomoku is one of the most familiar board games in China. Almost everyone has played it. Almost everyone thinks they know how to play. The rules take a minute to learn. A game can end in five. That is why most people file it under casual entertainment, not competitive sport.
By Jin14 days ago in Gamers
Remember: Before Stardew Valley, There Was Harvest Moon
It may come as a shock to some, but farming simulators didn't begin in 2016. They've actually been around since the '90s, and long before Stardew Valley became the standard against which practically every new farming game is measured, there was Harvest Moon . Don't get me wrong, I've put my fair share of hours into Pelican Town. But judging by the way modern gaming articles discuss the genre, you'd think Stardew Valley was the first game to let players grow crops, raise livestock, and romance the locals, rather than building upon a formula that had already existed for decades.
By Veronica Thor15 days ago in Gamers
He Asked for $1,000. He Got $23 Million. Then He Begged People to Stop.
One October 1, 2026, two in the afternoon. Lao Ma sat in front of his computer and opened the Modian crowdfunding page. The page was simple: a tenth-anniversary illustration for ICEY, a description under two hundred words, and a number: ¥10,000.
By Jin21 days ago in Gamers