With a name like Japanese role-playing games, you’d think the genre would be geographically bound to the land of soba noodles and adorable lucky cat shrines. But recently there have been a slew of games that play more or less exactly like JRPGs, but with one major difference: they’re not made in Jap
Digital photos are great, except when they’re not. As this series of books containing digitally compressed copies of Romeo and Juliet show, Jpegs are gradually turning the Web into a sinkhole of blurry, bad photography. Because Jpegs are lossy, whenever you save or edit a digital photo in the forma
Yeah, sure, drones are pilotless killing machines guided by unscrupulous soldiers from afar, but not all drone pilots have bad intentions. Take this dazzling footage of fireworks shot by a DJI Phantom operator from smack in the middle of the explosions. It should be noted that Phantoms aren’t the de
As part of his visit to Japan, the President recently kicked around the soccer ball with Honda’s Asimo robot at a science museum in Tokyo. Let me tell you, there are few things stranger than seeing a very athletic Commander in Chief being subjected to the superior ball-handling skills of a humanoid
Working alongside Cory Archangel, the artist best known for removing everything but the clouds from Super Mario Bros., a team of archivists and forensic experts has extracted early digital artwork of Andy Warhol from some corrupt disks. The art is what you’d expect to find Warhol doodling on his ho
Things didn’t go so hot for the creator of Virtuix Omni when he appeared on “Shark Tank,” a reality show on ABC with an ensemble of filthy rich hosts known for chewing up and spitting out young optimistic entrepreneurs like expired caviar. But one of the rich guys, millionaire investor Mark Cuban, w
As evidenced in this new interactive video of space cadets shooting bullet-spongy, albino mutants, Evolve is getting its multiplayer-online-battle-arena on. The 4-on-1 giant monster battling game from the makers of Left 4 Dead, coming to PCs and next-gen consoles later this year, could be a bellweth
The developer of Cookie Clicker has created a highly verbose random game idea generator and it’s ridiculously good. Some of the gems we’ve been clicking on around the office include: -a god game where you explore hipsters through terrorism; -a social media game where you cook jewels to buy virtual
A bullet point for Lethal League is “no weak shit,” and that’s the truth. The still shots aren’t much to look at, but the announcement trailer for this alt-sports game from Reptile Games is sizzling. It’s a solid minute of two characters slinging a ball or puck or other dangerous round thing at each
A researcher at Stanford has modded an Xbox controller to tap into and measure a player’s emotional states, such as whether they are happily engaged with a game, or if they’re ready to throw his very expensive controller across the room. The hand sensors gather signals such as your pulse, skin tempe
There’s a heartbreaking documentary in the works on the equally heartbreaking game That Dragon, Cancer. The film is called Thank You For Playing and judging from the newly-released teaser trailer, it looks like it’ll be powerful stuff. Two independent filmmakers have captured the personal tragedy o
The imagery for George and Jonathan’s interactive music videos for their album III is simple yet savvy: bright polychromatic lines streak across a grid towards infinity. It’s pretty much like the light-cycle scene in Tron, which is suiting enough for electronic music, but with one catch: all the com
We’ve seen a lot of great videogames that deal with social issues, but we haven’t seen that many boardgames. The crew of Italians behind Riot want to change that by putting you in the shoes of a citizen who is caught in a dangerous riot situation, where tension between protesters and officers is eru
When we heard that China was loosening its reigns and allowing gaming consoles in the country, we figured there would be some stipulations, with everything we know about the extreme censorship behind the so-called Great Firewall. Well, we were right. The Shanghai government has released some guidel
No, this astounding glass orb which contains beautiful rippling graphics is not the same thing as that plasma globe that sat on your nightstand when you were 11. Sorry if you got your hopes up. It is actually something much cooler: a volumetric display. The term volumetric display is just fancy jarg
The trouble with reading digital comics if you also play games is that you’re always choosing between, say, playing Hearthstone or reading Fables on your tablet. SXPD, as we see in this 30 seconds of footage, asks, “Why limit yourself to one or the other when you can do both?” The offering is not so
The most upscale game of Breakout ever has been spotted at Louis Vuitton’s online shop. This is totally the way to play Atari while drinking rosé and sunbathing on yachts. The game is part of their campaign to promote their line of pricy, checkered-patterned, calfskin iPhone and iPad cases, in tande
Hover is like Jet Grind Radio without the rollerblades. It is plainly Jet Grind Radio Frenchified with the urban sport of parkour. They have replaced the inline skates with a grind-rail riding pair of feet. It’s all good because the cartoonish, purple and black city traced with pink electricity scin
Grave is a game that understands there are multiple kinds of fear. One is more a feeling of anxiety, which you will find in games with eerie surreal landscapes but without much action, or upon entering a Wal-Mart. Then, there is a much more nocuous, immediate kind of fear, where you feel your life i
Jenga is a game that requires finesse and a steady hand, unless of course you are playing with a stack of 600-pound wooden blocks. Then, heavy machinery is called for. Enter Cat’s excavators, which are, for the mechanically uninformed, huge construction trucks equipped with claw arms. This real-life
We knew that commercial erotic apps for virtual reality were coming. But guess what? They’re here. Play Girls, coming out later this year, and compatible with Oculus Rift, has a lot of things that give me pause, such as the uncanny valley weirdness of the bikini-clad actress, who was professionally
There are certain things you just expect from your classic 16-bit action-JRPGs. These include grinding and secrets and battling giant transparent-green Jell-o molds, all of which Secrets of Grindea delivers in spades. But when your classic 16-bit action-JRPG is coming from a team of Swedes twenty y
A fair critique of RPGs is that you inevitably wind up overseeing the same wimpy wizards and quick-witted rogues no matter which game you’re in. But Obsidian’s Kickstarted fantasy Pillars of Eternity gives you the option to disassemble those tried-and-true archetypes of the ancient rulebook. Josh S
According to a national survey that asked people about near-future technologies, the doomsday scenario is a bunch of genetically superior post-Gen Y’ers who’ll admit them to nursing homes with robot caretakers while they prance around in augmented eyewear, flying drones. That is to say that well ove
