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The Halo Club, Part 3: Master Chief as Bond
Has Halo entered the realm of the annual never-dead?
Jamin Warren
Jamin Warren founded Killscreen. He produced the first VR arts festival with the New Museum, programmed the first Tribeca Games Festival, the first arcade at the Museum of Modern Art, won a Telly, and hosted Game/Show for PBS.
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What’s the biggest mistake in telling stories to kids?
Guillermo Del Toro’s game project may have gotten the axe from THQ during the publisher’s blood-letting this year, but the director naturally has new projects in the works. Rise of the Guardians will be out soon and that gave the Del Toro a chance to wax philosophically about what makes good stories
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Low-cost mine clearance tool inspired by Afghani product designer’s childhood toys.
As part of his graduation project for design school, Massoud Hassani created a low-cost tool to help locals in places like his hometown of Kabul survey the area for landmines. The cost for finding landmines can be prohibitive, but Hassani’s giant Katamari-style roller is about 40 euros. The crazies
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Is our obsession with 8-bit bad for games?
British author Simon Reynolds recently decried the obsession in music for all things old made “new” again. I wonder why we’re so obsessed with the past, particularly in music, because that’s my thing. A lot of the other retro phenomena I find vaguely amusing, but the music is a genuine worry because
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iPod designer wants kids to builds robots without writing code
While listening to an NPR segment about a young girl who had outfitted her fish tank with MIDI sensors, Michael Rosenblatt realized that more kids should be creating machines. Rosenblatt was part of the first generation of the iPod team and his new project ATOMS Express wants to put machinery in the
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Vermont’s cartoon laureate deals with a borked Wii U
James Kochalka, author of the American Elf series and contributor to KS issue #2, had some problems with his Wii U. So, of course, he made an adorable comic about it.
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Live the 8-bit terror of pumping NYC’s flooded subways dry in Pump Train
If you’re curious what even a moment of a worker of an MTA pump train is like, David Albert, Michael Geraci, and Nicholas Bergson-Schilcock have an answer for you. Much like Diner Dash and Tapper before it, Pump Train is manic “spinning plates” style game that has you thrillingly at the helm of a, u
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Proposed app would let you donate unplayed iOS games for charity.
Students at the Miami Ad School have developed a genius idea for the holidays. Called Donation Box, this app would sit on your iDevice home screen and allow you to turn in unused apps in exchange for charity. It’s just a concept and of course, would require Apple’s full cooperation, but it does poin
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Behind the scenes doc on the art for Runner 2 is much-needed breath of clarity
A couple years ago, journalist Leigh Alexander gave an impassioned speech at the annual rants portion of the Game Developers Conference. Her point was very simple — if game designers don’t more openly talk about process and kept the workings of their engine and development cycle tighter than Apple’s
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Chasing Aurora gameplay looks to make great use of Wii U gamepad
For Wii U launch day, the fine folks at Broken Rules (maker of one of my favorite spinning paper pastiche platformer And Yet It Moves) posted a mini-trailer for their new title Chasing Aurora. We’ve discussed this before, but the Wii U’s tablet opens up new local multiplayer opportunities and a fasc
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Glued is an adorable short about adolescent game addiction
Glued is a hilarious short about one mother’s quest to free her son from the clutches of his Super Nintendo. It was created by four students (Alon Tako, Guy Elnathan, Daniel Lichter and Sivan Kotek) at the Bezalel Academy of the Arts and Design in Israel for their 3rd year of animation studies. If y
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Pau Gasol will catch all of your Pokémon
Last week, Deadspin detailed the online travails of Adria Gasol, the youngest of the budding basketball dynasty Gasol family. Marc’s older brother Pau is an NBA all-star who just crossed the 15,000 point mark (joining other foreign-born pros like Hakeem Olajuwon and Steve Nash). Adria’s other older