A Penn State survey of gamers reveals something a lot of us have already figured out on our own: gaming can be both a boon and a curb on our social lives. In an examination of people who played multi-player, first-person shooter games, like Call of Duty and Halo, gamers who organized their lives aro
Via Game Informer: Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe is an avid gamer and a huge s— talker. Last month, he thought he could defeat Firaxis Games’ producer and designer Garth DeAngelis at his own game of XCOM: Enemy Unknown. DeAngelis wiped the floor with Kluwe, and hasn’t let him live it down. De
The Walking Dead, the episodic adventure game that could, is the game of the year. The first installment is free today for iOS. That’s one hell of an apocalyptic stocking stuffer.
The Journey Down, the delightful reggae-inspired point and click adventure, is now available for iOS, Jah be praised. I and I celebrated irie style by talking to one of the game’s creators, overstand? Theodor Waern, of Skygoblin Games, is responsible for the game’s lovely art style. How did you get
Pyongyang Racer is the first game made in North Korea for Western consumption, and it is a brilliant critique of the tropes of overblown AAA racing games. It’s not fun at all. It’s like the game Bennett Foddy has been working towards his entire life. Instead of a decadent supply of unlimited fuel, y
-The slogan of the new anti-violent gaming movement started by Max Goldstein, 12, of Newtown, Connecticut. Goldstein started the campaign to throw away violent games after attending the funeral of Daniel Barden, 7, who died last Friday at Sandy Hook Elementary.
Permit me to quote at length from DFW’s masterful “review” of usage dictionaries, “Tense Present,” from the April 2001 issue of Harper’s Magazinze: From one perspective, a certain irony attends the publication of any good new book on American usage. It is that the people who are going to be interest
By now, you know the facts. Valve published Hammerpoint Interactive’s massively multiplayer zombie game The War Z. The product description page promised a host of features which did not appear in the game itself. Gamers accused War Z‘s developers of censoring their complaints in Steam forums. Yester
Do you ever notice how a few websites review big games early, and how those early reviews tend to be positive? Well, it turns out that there’s a demonstrable psychological effect at play when this happens: A pair of studies suggests that we remain impressed after reading early positive reviews, even
Badland won Best Project at last month’s Game Connection Europe, and the trailer makes it easy to see why: the game marries the one-button simplicity of Tiny Wings with the mechanical platforming menace of Limbo, under an aesthetic so polished it fairly glistens. The game is the baby of Frogmind stu
At 9:45 PM last night, Eastern Standard Time, the game developer Robin Hunicke – she of Journey fame – tweeted a picture of herself with the query: what does a game designer look like? You know the rest: a hashtag was born and a flood of game designers started snapping selfshots! So, what DO game de
-Long Vo, creative director of Hiptic, which is producing the forthcoming beat-em-up ShaqDown. The game is the Big Aristotle’s triumphant return to gaming, two decades after the legendary Shaq Fu.
The War Z, the not-so-massively multiplayer zombie game that has been pelted by accusations of false advertising and near-plagiarism of DayZ is no longer purchasable on Steam (though the game description page is still up). Earlier today, users became outraged after the apparent censorship of posts c
We’ve become a culture obsessed with getting entertainment early. VOD plays movies before they hit the theater; Chris Nolan leaks the best scenes in the Batman movies as trailers; I’ve listened to half the tracks on most albums I’m looking forward to by the time they hit Spotify. Gamers are at the v
Shadow Love is not going make any end-of-year lists, it’s not going to inspire 50,000 words about issues, and it’s not going to stake a claim for Japanese indies. But this platform game, with its incredible shadow-puppet universe (in which every other thing is some sort of weird hand contortion) mig
The Titan, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, is the world’s most powerful supercomputer. It does 17.59 thousand-trillion calculations (petaflops) per second. The 4,300-square-foot monster achieves this insane number of parallel by pairing powerful CPUs with GPUs (graphical processin
Remember that scene in the first episode of this season’s Breaking Bad? The one where Walter and Jesse use the enormous magnet to destroy an evidence room? Yeah, well, videogame crooks are stepping their game up – these aren’t the usual counterfeiters or torrentors, but the real daring deal: The thi
What’s the point of crystallized intelligence anymore? You can look anything you want up in seconds (such as the volume of a dose of boar semen). Soon the part of the brain that holds facts will be nothing more than a cerebral appendix, and we’ll have it removed to make room for more pure cranial pr
-Ken Levine, Irrational Games creative director, on the ending of his forthcoming BioShock Infinite.
The rise of independent games and the community surrounding them has been the most heartening story in gaming over the past few years. Small studios – sometimes just a couple of friends, as in the case of Super Meat Boy – have produced a handful of truly exemplary games, games that will be played fo
Byzantine! From Best Infographics.
Here at Kill Screen, we often talk about the blossoming conversation about games. Our line goes: games are maturing and becoming more interesting, and gamers are too, and the discussions we have reflect that. It’s a nice thought, but is it true? I wanted to see what actual gamers are actually talkin
The fellows behind Cards Against Humanity, the awesome-Apples-to-Apples-with-a-filthy-mind game, released a pay-what-you-see-fit holiday pack, and it’s netted a neat profit of over $70,000. Instead of buying all the boar sperm and condoms they could – and they could have bought a lot – CaH LLC dona
At the beginning of Resident Evil 2, Leon, the game’s hero, encounters a pile of butchered bodies near the entrance to the Raccoon City Police Station. As you explore the prerendered, fixed-camera scene, one of hundreds in the first few RE games, you have the option to interact with a bank of phones
It’s not the time for us to write about what happened in Connecticut. It’s not the time, in my opinion, for anyone to write speculatively about the role or lackthereof of video games vis a vis what happened in Connecticut. It’s just not right, not now, not with children still to be buried – and this
