Every year Summer Games Done Quick broadcasts speedruns of video games, all in the name of fundraising for charity – and with many different channels for different languages to boot.

Speedrun is the art of finishing a game as quickly as possible, and often makes use of glitches and bugs within a game to skip chunks of game which is why older games are commonly seen on speedrunning channels. For those games that aren’t exploitable like this, speedrunning is instead a challenge of perfect timing of a chain of actions with one miss resulting in a longer time taken.

This time the charity in question that they’re raising money for is Doctors Without Borders, something that we can agree is a worthy cause.

If you’re interested to see what’s on the menu this time, the schedule can be found here. If you’re interested go and watch people destroy games (although not literally) and donate for a good cause. And if you’re not? Why not donate anyway? It’s still a good cause. 😀

Competitive mode finally arrived for Overwatch last week, much to the joy of players everywhere. However, in some that joy quickly turned to irritation when issues that hadn’t been prevalent within the PTR build began to have a knock-on effect on their enjoyment.

The first was that MMR points weren’t being awarded equally for Control maps, as they had been for Assault, Escort or Hybrid. Blizzard already issued a fix on Thursday for that one having quickly tracked down the issue behind it, but now more have begun to surface.

Another fairly large one concerns players who might have issues with their network connections during competitive play still receiving the Loss punishment, even if they managed to return to the match within the one-minute timeout window allocated for players with such problems. Obviously, this has not gone down well.

Responding to fans who were asking whether they could expect a fix soon, Game Director Jeff Kaplan said that they were working on it and that they should “have some fixes coming (hopefully) next week.”

Also on the cards is a new and fairer way to settle draws, as opposed to the current “Coin Flip” Sudden Death decision-maker which is considered contentious right now by the playerbase.

It has now been confirmed that ESPN is planning to broadcast the final top 8 bracket of this month’s Street Fighter V tournament at the Evo Championship Series in Las Vegas, live on ESPN2.

With over 5,000 entrants registered for the SFV tournament this year, and the final eight players will be competing for the first place prize on live television – a major step up from years past when eSports was still seen as something the ‘general public’ would never want to view. Coverage will begin on ESPN2 from 7PM PDT (10PM EDT / 3AM BST) on July 17 (18 BST) and will also be available online at WatchESPN or Twitch’s CapcomFighters channel, as usual.

“The Street Fighter V World Championship will be one of the must-see competitions from the Evo finals,” said John Lasker, VP of programming and acquisitions at ESPN. “We are always exploring ways to serve the growing and passionate audience of competitive gaming, and we look forward to delivering this event to fans.”

ESPN’s had a growing interest in the broadcast of eSports since last year, when they broadcast the Heroes of the Dorm tournament. At the time former TV and radio anchor Colin Cowherd was not a fan of this, famously saying that he would quit if he was ever ‘forced’ to talk about ‘kids playing games’. He was suspended from ESPN in July of last year and ESPN has since opened an eSports department of the news site; having already aired several eSports tournaments.

Video game movies seem to be everywhere right now, with game series such as Assassin’s Creed and Five Nights At Freddy’s having rumoured projects in the works and in the case of the former, a lot of hype beginning to build around a film coming soon to cinemas. Minecraft is another such game to have a project attached, and now we have a speculative release date for it.

Minecraft: The Movie will release on May 24th… 2019.

The official Mojang announcement on the date says, “Yes, that might seem like a long time away, but it just so happens to be the right amount of time to make it completely awesome. And we all want an awesome Minecraft movie, right?”

Yes, that would be nice. Video game movie adaptions don’t exactly have a great reputation – they’re usually terrible and only few ever manage to beat that. Given Minecraft’s open-world, sandbox nature god knows what sort of a story they’re going to pull from it; but open world does mean a lot of possibilities as well so I guess we’ll wait and see.

People attached to the project so far include the LEGO Movie producer Roy Lee doing the production with his Vertigo Entertainment production compnay as well as Jill Messick also helping with production. Other than that, details are still sparse.

Well, at least we’ve some idea now of when we can expect to start seeing actual news about the film. Right?

It has previously been mentioned by Blizzard that they were planning to balance the console and PC versions of their game Overwatch separately to avoid accusations of one platform ‘ruining’ it for the other platform. Now the first change in this manner is being made, with an incoming patch set to nerf the damage of Torbjörn’s turret.

Comparing the win rates for Torbjörn, they come in as 59.6% for PC but 68% for consoles. While that doesn’t seem like a big markup, you have to remember just how popular Overwatch is. During its first full release week players totalled up 119 million hours of play across all platforms, and many, many copies have sold. Heck, even as I write this someone else across the room is currently playing the game – 10% is a fairly large percentage in this context.

Game director for Overwatch Jeff Kaplan spoke about the upcoming nerf patch on a Reddit topic saying “In an upcoming patch, we will reduce the damage done by Torbjörn’s turret by 30% on Xbox One and PS4. PC will remain unchanged.”

The patch should be coming sometime towards the end of the month once it clears certification and is just the first step on the plan to balance each game separately.

Separate balancing might sound like a lot of unnecessary work for Blizzard but I’m in favour of it. Remember, PC gamers have more choice of input devices while console players usually only have use of their game controllers. As well, the way you will play games on each platform also varies, with console users having less distractions than a PC player who might also be connected into a Discord buzzing with messages or their Skype. Separate balancing for each version therefore makes sense because each platform is bound to have their own little quirks that could make a hero overbalanced on one platform but not the other. If nothing else, it’s nice to see Blizzard taking a chance by trying something a little bit different with one of their games.