Well, it looks like we’re going to get a movie based on Team Ico’s last game before we get their next one. Seth Lochhead, who wrote the pretty-good-not-great teen assassin movie Hanna, will write the script, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Josh Trank, who directed the great-great teen superpowe
In honor of the silver annivesary of Hironobu Sakaguchi’s baby, a group of Final Fantasy fansites banded together to create a wonderful tribute: a one-off digital magazine. The project includes retrospectives for each game in the series, profiles of important developers who have worked on the games,
–Ben Murch, cofounder of Rodeo games, on the just-announced Nvidia handheld.
Endgame: Syria, a simulation/strategy game in which you play as the rebels in the two-year-old uprising in that country, has been rejected by Apple for distribution on their app store, according to the game’s makers. A press release from Auroch Digital, Endgame‘s developer, states that the game was
You know that annual study that quantifies how much money is lost through hours of unproductive worktime during March Madness? Well, I’ve got news for the bosses of the world: browser-based gaming is the final frontier of workplace time-wasting. It’s not enough that we’ve got browser-based SNES emu
According to the comment thread in r/gaming, this big version of one of last year’s very best indie games was set up at Fantastic Fest in Austin. Heroic work.
The first act of Kentucky Route Zero, the new adventure game by Jake Elliott (our eminently talented web designer) and Tamas Kemenczy, is out today. KRZ is …a magical realist adventure game about a secret highway in the caves beneath Kentucky, and the mysterious folks who travel it. Gameplay is insp
More than twelve years after it released the system in North America, Sony will no longer produce new PlayStation 2s. The system, which sold 150 million units worldwide, was released in the United States on October 26, 2000. To give you a sense of just how durable Sony’s persistent black rectangle w
In September we told you about Neocolonialism, the Catan-style computer game in which players try to become global financial hegemons. The game, we wrote, works as follows: To gain control over the world economy, players snap up regional sovereign bonds, which in the game’s shorthand, give their own
Once in a long while, a game appears that changes the way we think about gaming, about storytelling, about, I daresay, life itself. Soda Drinker PRO! is not that game. Instead, it’s a five-level first-person soda-drinking simulation (coded in a 19 hour binge of frenzied genius) in which you can 1.
I’ll admit that my experience with chess is basically limited to two frustrating eras: childhood summer vacations in which I got waxed by my stepdad in a house in Maine where we had nothing better to do than play chess, and in English class in 7th and 8th grade where Mr. Sotella liked to play with a
-From Edge’s hilarious and dark history of griefing, or multiplayer trolling.
Dark Souls was such a massive achievement that I think it actually led to the unfortunate consquence of rendering its predecessor, Demon’s Souls, obsolete in the eyes of many gamers who haven’t played it. It’s not uncommon for me to hear that someone has played and adored Dark Souls but does not see
Five or eight years from now, when Adrian Peterson retires from the National Football League, he may be considered the greatest running back in the history of football. What he did this past year is ridiculous: after tearing his ACL in December 2011, he came back to have the second-best statistical
From Metacritic.com’s “Best Games of 2012” feature. As we wrote in our game of the year list yesterday, 2012 may have been slight on AAA highlights but was undoubtedly rich with diverse gaming pleasures. This feature, crucially, does not measure the total number of “Good” games (defined as 75 and ab
From the San Francisco-based engineer and artist Rama Hoetzlein:
Over the past few months we’ve written about the rise of so-called “esports”, from the “athletes”, to the regulators, to the technology that has allowed a boom in remote viewership. It’s a nascent culture, to be sure, with its own tropes and mores and beliefs, and as such it seems ripe for a well-ob
We – and many other outlets – just named an indie game as our finest of 2012. If anything, it looks like this year may bring an even richer crop of games made by small and independent studios. From the Braid followup The Witness to the years-in-the-anticipating group heist coop game Monaco, to the r
Last fall we interviewed Miriam Bellard, one half of the duo behind Seduce Me, the indie converse-and-get-perverse game that Steam yanked from Greenlight for indecency. Speaking to Bellard, I realized that the game wasn’t a cash grab or a stunt; she legitimately wants to address what they perceive a
Rami Ismail, of Super Crate Box developer Vlambeer, forecasted the impact of the Ouya to the Penny Arcade Report’s Ben Kuchera.
These graphs, from a larger paper done by Mike Zuurman of Xentax, show a dramatic decrease in the number of games released since 2009. As the author notes, this may be due to decreased reporting by gamers (entries at MG are user-generated), because it doesn’t seem to square that the real number of g
As you have no doubt been told by now, there are AT LEAST two different kinds of gamers: core (slobbering, mouth-breathing tweens, teens) and casual (moms, people who put games in the same category as toasters). Well, it has started to strike some folks that this binary is not particularly subtle, n
Though created for different mediums and concerning totally different worlds, Half-Life and Jurassic Park share an overarching theme, one at least as old as Mary Shelley: experimental science, taken too far, can have enormous destructive power. Now, they share something else: an engine. The fan-made
Grim Fandango, the greatest game ever made, is now playable on Mac thanks to the perserverance of some aboslute heroes. Hijole! We won’t miss the poisoning after all! The day is finally upon us, after 9 years, 4 months and 6 days, we are proud to announce the first stable release of ResidualVM, and
The Sims, like most transcendent games, feels natural, like it always existed. It’s almost hard to wrap your mind around the idea that very complex and very painstaking design had to go into making something that is so elegant and so parsimonious, but of course, it did. Don Hopkins, a progammer inst
