I was super-impressed along with everyone else when I saw the code’em-up Hack ‘n’ Slash at a live demo a month ago. The idea is that you solve puzzles like those found in the overhead Zelda games, but instead of dropping bombs and pushing blocks, you pull up a computer terminal and alter the code.
Star Citizen is quickly becoming something of a big deal. Sure, the $41 million raised is impressive, for a crowdfunding campaign. But what finally convinced me that this spiritual salute to Wing Commander has escaped the echo chamber of the Internet into broader culture was when a random stranger I
It’s been said that badness is only spoiled goodness, but obviously whoever said that had never played a truly bad videogame. Case in point: there is nothing even remotely redeemable about the majority of the games in this week’s PBS Game/Show’s episode. Well, except that it’s pretty funny when Jami
This outrageous video of two Italian guys showing off virtual reality gear from the early ‘90s is pretty laughable—a great reminder that while the Oculus seems like the holy grail right now, in a few decades time it will almost certainly be badly outdated. Here’s a little background on these VR enth
You can get a distinctive whiff of Earthbound-ness in the new trailer for Citizens of Earth, which if you recall is the scent of scratch-and-sniff pizza. The endearing cult JRPG that bombed on Super Nintendo but lives on on Virtual Console and in the collective heart of the Internet hasn’t seen too
Your de facto business card is a no-frills presentation of your name and number and Twitter handle, so potential business partners can contact you later on. But if you are a game designer among an expo of game designers, it might be advantageous to flaunt your chops by designing an entire game that
When Squall took an ice shard to the chest at the end of the first disc of Final Fantasy 8, you were probably secretly wishing that the most emo dick Square ever created would be blotted from existence. (Uh, 15-year-old spoiler alert?) Apparently some people wanted this so badly that they’ve postula
Vektropolis is a cyberspace-y visual orgy of a crosshair shooter. What’s particularly impressive is the level of details in the vector graphics, which back in the day only rendered crude outlines of tanks killing tanks and stuff. Yeah, these are simulated vectors, but this is pretty much what your m
You know the rap against predator drones. Operators thousands of miles away are making hits on targets who are but tiny blips on the radar. It’s a cowardly if efficient method of killing, as the drone operator slang “bug splat” for a downed person of interest clearly illustrates. That’s why a colla
Here’s a feel-good story about the educational power of games: a group of kindhearted educators have founded The Play to Learn Lab in Cape Town, South Africa. Their initiative? To use games to familiarize underprivileged primary school kids about technology. To do this affordably, they’re constructi
Yesterday Nintendo opened the floodgates on Smash Bros. news, going well beyond the typical stuff they’ve been spoon-feeding fanboys about Peach being a playable character or whatever. In particular, the “Smash run” mode, exclusively in the 3DS edition (which is coming in summer, the Wii U version d
The reality series Tabletop Deathmatch is a no-holds-barred, drama-packed throw-down between 16 aspiring boardgame designers trying to get their projects approved by a ruthless panel of judges who are basically the game design “Shark Tank.” OK, it’s not as misanthropic as I made it sound. But what w
Not being particularly German nor particularly old, I admittedly have little firsthand knowledge of the subculture surrounding krautrock, the musical movement that gave us electronic bands like Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, although I did once hear a bootlegged CAN show. But Fract OSC sure looks l
Claptrap was a pretty outstanding non-playable character. In the first two Borderlands, he was sort of a curt, demented WALL-E. He made you laugh. He made you cry. OK, really he just made you laugh, and doled out some side-missions. But in the new Borderlands game announced today, we get to see what
The Playground Society has to be one of the noblest, most jubilant societies ever. Their mission is to use mobile technology to foster a sense of playfulness in people’s daily lives, and I don’t think they’re talking about catching a round of Flappy Bird at the stop sign. Rather, by following @Playg
One of the coolest features in the Souls series is the ability to scrawl hints, boldfaced lies, and evidence of your existential duress on the ground for other players to read. The app Slice, available on iTunes, lets users mark their physical environment in a similar way, well, except for those blo
Shard, by Roger Hanna and Anita Tung, is very much your indie platformer with a painterly, abstract vibe, something with which we’re all plenty familiar. But you really never get tired of good art, and a large part of what makes this game refreshing is the visual eye candy. The backgrounds and foreg
There was a very brief window of time, way back in the early 90s, when the future of 3D graphics was up for grabs and the voxel was a contender. Obviously, polygons blew them out of the water. But CubeTeam—the multiplayer, browser-based voxel editor—lets you build and print via a 3D printer the cub
And that is something of an achievement. The highly praised 2012 original was a visceral bloodbath, complete with Al Capone poetic justice and almost problematically satisfying baseball-bat beat-downs. But judging from the new trailer, Hotline Miami 2 is upping the ante in the brutality department,
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is a game where a player wearing an Oculus Rift has to defuse a bomb per the instruction of her non-mask-wearing teammates. The clever thing here is it plays off many of the Rift’s faults: Strapping a mask to your head is exclusionary and awkward, there’s only one he
These are the words of outsider adventure game creator Dave Gilbert, author of games such as the Blackwell series, and also the publisher of many fine independent adventure games at Wadjet Eye Games. Here’s the whole quote from his interview at Gamasutra: What’s important for a lot of developers to
Granted, there’s a lot to love about the pig masks. But Scarface-types in animal masks aside, the smooth, distinct vibe is realized in the music video/not-quite-a-game Honey by musical artist James Dean and video artist Vince Mckelvie. There are the rows of palm trees receding in the horizon; the th
As someone who has personally experienced the queasy aftermath of virtual reality firsthand, lemme tell you it’s no picnic. For me it was worse than smoking too strong of a cigar, but not as bad as being in rough waters on a fishing boat with a bucket of squid in your face. Somewhere between there.
Vlambeer’s manic new shooter Luftrausers is taking some heat not for its relentless gunning but for its provocative art direction. A blogger has claimed that the game’s edgy imagery bears resemblance to the Nazi aesthetic, a view he shares with one Game Informer reviewer who called it an “edgy, styl
![Dave Gilbert: "Adventure game fans [are] a very insular kind of community."](/content/images/size/w960/previously/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2014/04/blackwell.png)
