With provocative games like No More Heroes and Lollipop Chainsaw, Goichi Suda has been likened to a punk and an exploitation artist. But Michael Thomsen argues that his surreal oeuvre resists easy characterizations and must be likened to nonsense.
Behind the open-world fantasy of Dragon’s Dogma is a system that guarantees progress, but whose definition of progress are we using? Michael Thomsen reviews Capcom’s latest role-playing game.
A list of interactive grant recipients from the Danish government has outed Limbo developer Playdead’s next game. Code-named Project 2, the list describes the game as taking place in a 3D world but with 2D gameplay. The game will tell the story of a lone boy’s fight against an evil group that are tr
video The idea of 3D printing objects has prompted a lot of utopian daydreaming, but it’s also led a host of eager novices to realize they’re actually lousy 3D designers. Tinkercad is a web-based 3D design tool built to make designing objects a simple and communal activity. Speaking in an interview
Many videogame fans are used to the government trying to regulate their hobby, but the Obama administration appears to be embracing the form. Speaking at the Games for Health conference in Boston, Constance Steinkuehler Squire, a policy advisor for the White House Office of Science and Technology Po
Get a helmet, there’s a big storm of game news coming. –The Dark Knight Rises gets a mobile game. –Journey‘s Thatgamecompany raises $5.5 million to help develop next game. -Microsoft drops support for Gamescom and Tokyo Game Show. -Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata admits the company almost abandoned Wii U co
Epic Games has created a new studio, Epic Baltimore, largely staffed by former Big Huge Games employees. Interviewed in a story for Eurogamer, Epic’s Mark Rein explains how Epic responded after hearing news of the studios demise. “Mike [Capps, President of Epic] is the total hero there. They called
Yesterday Blizzard finally launched the real money Auction House for Diablo III, an event the company had delayed a number of times, in part, to address issues with hacked accounts and people using improper gold farming techniques. While Blizzard continues to wrestle with these issues, the Auction H
Must women protagonists be role models before they’re seen as individual human characters? Writing for Think Progress, Alyssa Rosenberg considers the challenges of portraying women heroes in pop culture. “First, members of a minority group, or of a group like women that are a majority but are poorly
Travel to other distant planets is a central conceit for many videogames, from Star Fox to Halo to EVE Online. Being in an alien world gives developers an easy excuse for tweaking the laws of physics for the sake of fun and drama. But just how plausible is the idea of reaching another solar system?
For years players have created a roughshod kind of cinema using the games Halo and Splinter Cell, but rarely have professional filmmakers thought to use game design tools for their films. Shane Acker, who directed the Tim Burton-produced 9, aims to change that. He’ll partner with partner with Valve
The creation of fear in a videogame is an inexact science but there’s evidence to suggest a neurological mechanism can influence it in some important ways. Writing for Gamasutra, Maral Tajerian, a neuroscientist at Thwackel Consulting, explains the role mirror neurons play in connecting players to t
Quinn Pitcock was an All-American defensive lineman at Ohio State and a third round draft pick by the Indianapolis Colts in 2007. Despite the early promise of his athletic career, he developed an addiction to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare‘s online multiplayer mode, which contributed to his decision t
Videogames are beset with rumors and speculation about what secret mysteries developers are holding back. The process of keeping secrets, and determining what should and shouldn’t be a part of public record, is murky and haphazard. Writing in a Quora thread about how Apple keeps its secrets from sli
In another example of people finding interesting uses for Kinect outside of games computer scientists at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville have created a program that uses the camera to keep track of household objects. Shahriar Nirjon and colleague John Stankovic use Kinect cameras in ea
video Neal Stephenson has long been an influential figure in videogame culture, from popularizing the use of the word “avatar” in Snowcrash to imagining a geologically distributed gold economy in an MMO with his most recent novel Reamde. Stephenson is finally ready to make a game of his own and he’s
Though videogames trade in fun and playfulness, the conditions under which they’re made can often be grueling. Earlier this year, Yoshinori Ono, Capcom’s producer in charge of Street Fighter IV, collapsed from exhaustion and was rushed to the hospital. Speaking to Simon Parkin in an interview at Eur
video At E3 Shigeru Miyamoto suggested a full Legend of Zelda game for Wii U won’t be coming anytime soon. The company did, however, show a smaller Zelda game built into NintendoLand, The Legend of Zelda: Battle Quest. The game is a strange hybrid of classic Zelda mechanics combined with Nintendo’s
video Carrying boxes has become a videogame staple. It’s a chore in Zelda games, a satiric puzzle in Portal, and in Far Cry 3‘s co-op mode it seems to become almost slapstick. The 4-player co-op demo on show at E3 involved a multi-step mission where players stalked through a jungle, ambushed an enem
video The Alien movies have become a semi-permanent part of western pop culture. H.R. Geiger’s slimy mouth-within-a-mouth designs, the idea that androids bleed white, and the suspicion that a feverish stomach ache is precursor to a little creature clawing its way out of someone’s chest cavity–these
We have it on good authority the following news stories, when translated into binary code, contain a star map to god. Read at your own risk. -Miyamoto says 3DS is good just the way it is, research has begun on next generation handheld. –Indie Game: The Movie out now. -Blizzard reveals new units for
video It’s sometimes said that scarcity is what gives a thing value. Super Mario Bros. levels offered a model of this balance between scarcity and value, both determined by the game’s designers. The 100 coin benchmark for achieving an extra life had such immediate meaning precisely because of the sc
video In the push toward a kind of pure, rule-based understanding of what videogames really are, the sensory pleasures of being in another place are often treated as secondary experiences. Yet, for many the experience of simply being somewhere can be as powerful as the experience of winning at somet
Though we have become overfamiliar with the terms, it truly bizarre to think of elections as something a person can win or lose. The process of determining how to organize and execute national bureaucracy has become another vessel into which we can pour our needs to be seen as good, great, or better
video Like many shooter heroes Halo‘s Master Chief seldom speaks. Conventional wisdom says the absence of a specific voice makes it easier to identify with the hero, projecting parts of ourselves into the game. During a short video demonstration of Halo 4 at E3, Master Chief again breaks this genre
