October 17, 2011
Tommy Wiseau, best known for writing, producing, directing, and starring in cinematic train-wreck "The Room," is now starring in a web series by Machinima.com: The Tommy Wi-Show. Each episode, he's abducted by an alien and forced to play videogames, while providing his own commentary.
Yes, it's as bad as you're thinking. But in a funny way.
October 11, 2011
October 10, 2011
Beret (freeware, Win/Mac/Linux) is the best game I've played this year. It has gotten a shockingly small amount of press despite sporting some of the most consistently well-crafted level design I've seen. It may on the surface look like an early-90s 2-D platformer, but it is in fact a brilliant puzzle game in disguise. Its central mechanic is limited-range telekinesis, and while it steadily introduces new, novel elements throughout the game, your little avatar gains no new abilities. It also makes use of a save-/restore-state feature to distill what might otherwise feel like action sequences into their pure puzzley essence. And while the developer has implemented an unlockable level-editor, at the moment no user-crafted levels have been posted to the game's burgeoning forum. Please fix that. [more inside]
October 5, 2011
Very very awesome PS3 ad. Seems to unify rather than divide the gamers. Kotaku is currently trying to find all the characters and from which games they came from. There are way more than expected from initial viewing. Enjoy.
September 29, 2011
For my daughter, I play Shadow of the Colossus Sumo Attuquayefio recounts how gaming has helped him though his daughter's ongoing battle with cancer.
September 28, 2011
Good news, everyone! There's a new Humble Indie Bundle out. Though it's not so much a "bundle," as it is "Frozen Synapse."
September 25, 2011
Eurogamer's Lewis Denby writes an ode to the frustrations and triumphs of Chris Sawyer's sim classic, Rollercoaster Tycoon.
September 23, 2011
who killed videogames? (a ghost story) and its companion piece, a review of The Sims Social by Tim Rogers [more inside]
September 19, 2011
Tom Bissell takes a look at Dead Island and asks: "Can games be too gamified?"
September 14, 2011
Mini Troopers! Send your cute little dudes to shoot other cute little dudes. Fun, low-impact web game. [more inside]
September 13, 2011
Sports games just got a bit more inclusive. EA's NHL 2012 will allow for players to create female as well as male custom players. (Globe and Mail article, Yahoo article). [more inside]
September 8, 2011
Brandon Boyer's defunct Boingboing subsite Offworld is being reborn as Venus Patrol. This is likely worth rejoicing over. [more inside]
September 5, 2011
September 2, 2011
A lengthy excerpt from Tom Bissell's new book, The Art and Design of Gears of War. As of today, it's only available if you shell out for the $150 Epic Edition.
August 31, 2011
What if you built Minecraft inside Minecraft? It's Notches all the way down.[via]
Kate (of the excellent but infrequently updated gaming blog Falling Awkwardly) examines the metaphysics of The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind as revealed in the copious in-game literature scattered throughout the land of Vvardenfell, and finds parallels between the game's denizens and the game's players: "Breaking the rules is just another way of playing the game. Sometimes the best way. Just ask Vivec, the Thief of The World, the ultimate cheat." [more inside]
August 30, 2011
Super Mario Bros. World 1-1 with a portal gun.
Area man plays through every* PC role playing game ever made. (via) [more inside]
The making of: Left 4 Dead Valve’s co-op take on undead horror redefined online play and scared us witless. Not bad for an apocalypse with just 30 zombies.
August 25, 2011
Escape from City 17 came out a couple of years ago, and now there's a Part 2. See also: Beyond Black Mesa and Singularity Collapse, more fan-made movies set in the HL2 universe.
August 24, 2011
Escapist forums users have found that buried in the Origin EULA is a clause that lets them gather "application usage (including but not limited to successful installation and/or removal), software, software usage and peripheral hardware" information, but more importantly, gives them the right to sell that data to any third-party company, in contrast to Steam, which gathers less data and does not reserve the right to sell it off. Makes that Battlefield 3 decision a lot easier, maybe.
August 23, 2011
Achron is a real-time strategy game where both you and your opponents can travel through time. Players can send units and orders into the past, and changes to the timeline propagate forward in waves. It's even possible to cause paradoxes, should a unit make a change in the past that prevents it from being created.
August 22, 2011
Why Being Poor and Having No Budget is Good For Making Games
August 21, 2011
A real life GLaDOS potato AI! Prop/Replica of a working potato GLaDOS, built by Robot Dialogs.
August 20, 2011
Gameboy and Intel 8080 emulators running inside Garry's Mod in the Source Engine. Video here. Another 10 years, and its going to be turtles all the way down. [via waxy]
August 19, 2011
Got a TF2 backpack full of crap and neither time nor patience to figure out what to do with it? Try the TF2 crafting advisor -- it'll tell you exactly what goodies you can make, and how.
August 18, 2011
Wonderputt is like minigolf meets Grow/Eyemaze
Scuba is a charming flash 2d crafting/exploration game in the vein of Terraria but without the attacking monsters.
August 17, 2011
Splash Damage lead designer Neil Alphonso reflects on Brink. Eurogamer took notes at GDC Europe 2011 as Splash Damage's Neil Alphonso talked Brink. Splash Damage has been very open post launch, talking about what worked, what didn't and what the company learned from the game's development.
August 16, 2011
Duke Nukem Forever: How Well Did It Succeed? Better than you might expect, sadly.
August 15, 2011
The Story of Boone Nathan Hardisty played Fallout: New Vegas. One of the courier's companions left a lasting impression on him: "From a simple little scripted story about a broken soldier, a dialogue choice mechanic and that age-old ‘shoot people’ mechanic I have made myself a story of heartbreak, redemption and peace."
August 13, 2011
The evidence strongly suggests that exposure to violent video games is a causal risk factor for increased aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, and aggressive affect and for decreased empathy and prosocial behavior.
A meta-analytic review (PDF).
August 12, 2011
Two Canadian gamers decided to pay the Valve offices, protesting for the release of Half Life 3. Bungie's Jason Sussman decided to snap a shot of a visit and lunch delivery from someone unexpected.
Well, that's interesting. "If we could force people to always be connected when you play the game, and then have that be acceptable, awesome. In the end, it’s better for everybody."
id Software's Tim Willits is, I agree, completely full of shit. [more inside]
August 10, 2011
Old and cranky and not fond of headgear? Or just running an old computer? Well, now you can get rid of TF2 hats (and other frippery) entirely, if that's the way you want to roll.
August 9, 2011
Jesse Schell gives his personal perspective on how games are discussed and used in our social context and how we could think about them them differently. Jesse Schell is a game designer and speaks regularly on game design. His book "The Art of Game Design" is a great reference and his talks are generally quite entertaining.
In this talk he presents an argument for and against the idea that video games lead to more violent behavior and while I don't always fully agree with exactly what he says, he usually succeeds in making me think about game design from a slightly different perspective.
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