twitch

With over 900 deaths and and over a month spent on the endeavor, the community of Twitch has vanquished Gwyn, thus beating Dark Souls.

It took them a while to figure out. For a very long while, it looked like this:



But, as Kotaku details, the community eventually found a system that works:

After a few days of fumbling around, it was decided to change the rules of the game or call it quits. In some circles, this disqualified Twitch Plays Dark Souls from being a legitimate playthrough; it subverted the way Dark Souls plays. They essentially changed it from a 3D action game into a turn-based affair.

Was it cheating? Sure. Was it the only way for Twitch Plays Dark Souls to move forward? Probably. Does that mean their achievements are meaningless? No.

Soon enough, they beat the Asylum Demon.

A little later, they beat the game's hardest boss, Orstein and Smough. With O&S slaughtered, it seemed a matter of time until they'd actually beat the game.

That time, as it turned out, was on Saturday. 43 days, eight hours, 14 minutes, and 23 seconds after attempting the nearly impossible, Twitch Plays Dark Souls was able to finally say they'd beaten Dark Souls. They only died 904 times, too!

Naturally, they are already on Dark Souls 2 and it's just as interminable to watch.

Which you can do right here.

Well, well, well, you naughty dog, you.

During a recent Twitch live stream discussing the Uncharted Nathan Drake Collection, a Naughty Dog designer seemed to let a cat out of the bag when he mentioned the first Last of Us game.

Folks, there has only ever been one Last of Us released or announced or otherwise. This careless reference seems like a plain admission that the fantastic developer is working on a sequel to the incredible 2014 release.

Games Radar broke it down

It was Uncharted series writer Josh Scherr who had a slip of the tongue, talking up his co-worker Eric Baldwin's facial animation work on "all of the Uncharted games and the first The Last of Us."

Baldwin immediately recognized his error and attempted to backpedal, but he couldn't seem to come up with anything else to say. "Uh, did I say 'the first The Last of Us'? The first The Last of Us. Uh, The Last of Us! The first Last of Us."

They were also kind enough to upload a YouTube video of the incident in question. See for yourself:

This reveal doesn't come entirely out of the blue. Nolan North mentioned the unannounced sequel last June.

Secrets are hard to keep when people talk about them a lot.

Are you excited for another Last of Us?

About a month ago, Twitch, as a community, decided it would try to play Dark Souls, fabled as one of the toughest modern games.

It didn't start off too well. It took them hours and hours to climb a ladder because everyone was inputing different control options at once and so it became a maddening spectacle of spinning around and continually drinking the limited health potion.

Things changed along the way and they implemented a system whereby they would pause the game after every control input, vote on the next action, unpause, take that action and then pause again. Using this exhaustively patient system, they beat the first boss.

But, as Kotaku points out, far worse laid in store.

The real challenge for Twitch Plays Dark Souls was always going to be Ornstein and Smough, though. It's one of the few times Dark Souls throws two bosses at you, and it's a moment that's broken many a Dark Souls fan. One of them is fast, the other is slow. One can pluck away at your health, the other can stomp you into dust. It's a potent and difficult combo even when you're fully in control of the character, and there's a reason it's the spot many people give up on.

It took the Twitch community 28 days, eight hours, seven minutes, and 14 seconds to beat that dastardly duo. And it's super impressive.

Speaking personally, it took me over 10 actual hours on that one boss fight to vanquish the pair. I have never felt more actual rage from a video game and my neighbors complained about the yelling.

Give them another two months and they just might lick this thing.

Also, go play Dark Souls. It's the best.

Twitch has dominated the new market of video game streaming and now YouTube wants a cut of the action.

As they announced at the beginning of the summer, YouTube has planned to launch YouTube Gaming, a separate site dedicated to streaming, watching and chatting about video games. On Aug. 26, they began a slow release of the new platform.

Mashable says the introduction is fairly painless:

Getting started is a simple process of navigating your browser over to gaming.youtube.com and following the steps in a setup process (that includes phone verification). You'll need to set up encoding software, fill out the necessary info for your stream and tick off any optional features. There's a checklist right there on the setup page, but Google also put together a more involved guide to getting set up.

YouTube Gaming supports streaming from PlayStation 4, Wii U and Xbox One consoles, provided you've got a capture device sending video from the console to your computer. Google specifically calls out Elgato's HD60 as a YouTube Live Verified device, but there's a good chance that other game capture solutions work as well. If you've got one, try it out before you run out and buy something new.

Apparently, mobile apps for Android and iOS are also around the corner so you can watch your gaming of the go.

The launch comes only a year after Google prepared a heaping ton of money to purchase Twitch, but then Amazon swooped in with $970 million and bought the streaming service.

There's no telling yet whether the search giant will have any luck in a space already dominated by Twitch and executives at the leading streamer seem to think not.

Matthew DiPietro, Twitch's SVP of Marketing released a statement Aug. 25, basically bragging about how their numbers are so much bigger:

For our current stats, we have 1.5 million broadcasters (11K Partnered channels), 100 million viewers per month who watch 106 minutes per person per day on average, and 38 million installs of our mobile app with 4.7 billion minutes watched across 10.3 million unique devices.

YouTube is set to launch its own video game dedicated website and app later this summer with streaming capabilities to rival Twitch.  The service will highlight the plethora of gaming content on YouTube, while weeding out unrelated content.  YouTube Gaming will feature pages for individual games, letting you follow, say, all the Dark Souls content without subscribing to every Let's Player who streams the game.  It will also feature pages for game companies and content creators, so you can follow whoever you want at will.    

Get in on the action for the next two days before they move on to the Pokémon Omega Ruby demo.

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Twitch Interactive, Inc., the leading live video platform for gamers. In July, more than 55 million unique visitors viewed more than 15 billion minutes of content on Twitch produced by more than 1 million broadcasters, including individual gamers, pro players, publishers, developers, media outlets, conventions and stadium-filling esports organizations.

"Broadcasting and watching gameplay is a global phenomenon and Twitch has built a platform that brings together tens of millions of people who watch billions of minutes of games each month – from The International, to breaking the world record for Mario, to gaming conferences like E3. And, amazingly, Twitch is only three years old," said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. "Like Twitch, we obsess over customers and like to think differently, and we look forward to learning from them and helping them move even faster to build new services for the gaming community."

"Amazon and Twitch optimize for our customers first and are both believers in the future of gaming," said Twitch CEO Emmett Shear. "Being part of Amazon will let us do even more for our community. We will be able to create tools and services faster than we could have independently. This change will mean great things for our community, and will let us bring Twitch to even more people around the world."

Twitch launched in June 2011 to focus exclusively on live video for gamers. Under the terms of the agreement, which has been approved by Twitch's shareholders, Amazon will acquire all of the outstanding shares of Twitch for approximately $970 million in cash, as adjusted for the assumption of options and other items. Subject to customary closing conditions, the acquisition is expected to close in the second half of 2014.

If you're wondering, yes, that other fish is still playing Pokémon.

The fish named Grayson Hopper has been playing for around 135 hours. Grayson has even acquired his first Pokémon, a Charmander named AAAABBK, and defeated the rival's Squirtle!

Gamer n0thing was raided by the police while playing Counter Strike after someone swatted him, and the whole encounter was captured live on his Twitch channel. The video above shows the majority of the action, but if you want to watch it in full, check out his Twitch stream below. N0thing disappears at the 1:39:00 mark, and the cops enter his room just before 1:46:00. He returns at the end of the video saying everything is all good and that nothing happened.

The people at Mario Marathon are playing Non-stop Mario to raise money for the charity Child's Play. Check it out!

Watch live video from Mariomarathon on www.twitch.tv

The deal, in an all-cash offer, is expected to be announced imminently, sources said. If completed the acquisition would be the most significant in the history of YouTube, which Google acquired in 2006 for $1.65 billion.

YouTube is preparing for U.S. regulators to challenge the Twitch deal, according to sources. YouTube is far and away the No. 1 platform for Internet video, serving more than 6 billion hours of video per month to 1 billion users worldwide, and the company expects the Justice Department to take a hard look at whether buying Twitch raises anticompetitive issues in the online-video market.

This poor sap has to play Asphalt 8 for 24 hours. If you're confused as to why, it's to celebrate Asphalt 8 as the first game to offer iOS mobile streaming on Twitch.