Video SCP-087 is a first person horror game where all you do is walk down stairs. Or, to be fair, you decide to walk down stairs. As you get further down, you may begin to hear some things that aren’t very promising, or think you saw something out of the corner of your eye, it’s up to you to decide to keep going or to just turn the game off. The game constructs tension through restriction of agency, not allowing the player to do more than walk (very slowly), turn, look and jump. I tried jumping down the staircase in an…

Here’s the news for today: – Rovio is planning on building theme park Angry Birds Land in China. – Leap 3D is a new competitor in the motion control space and outdoes Kinect by 200 times the accuracy. – Overkill Software is partnering with Valve to blend Payday: The Heist and Left 4 Dead. – The Wii U controller has been rumored to be redesigned. – CCP hf, the developers of upcoming  FPS Dust 514, have released a video introducing players to the EVE Online-integrated world and game. That’s it for today girls and guys!

In an article at Gamasutra, Chris Sutton, art director at Sony Santa Monica discusses the interplay between art and technology at the studio. Rather than keeping the two teams discrete entities, the studio encourages constant communication between the two. Visual aesthetics and technology are “so interlinked with the way we work” that they can’t be separated, he says.  “We just get the features that we want, to create the art style that we want,” says Sutton. The art team is “constantly asking for new tools.” The two teams meet frequently to hash out ideas between what’s technically feasible and what’s…

As everyone now knows and to every girlfriend’s dismay, Diablo III was released last Tuesday. The internet exploded with cries of server malfunctions and error numbers while anyone that was able to get in to the game secluded themselves from the rest of the world for periods of time likely to bring on Vitamin D deficiency. Another game was released last Tuesday and actually deals with some similar subject matter: Journey of Jesus: The Calling is a social game made by Lightside games. Unlike Diablo, the game has been praised by several Christian leaders due to its accurate representation of Jesus’s…

That, my friends, is a play-doh controller. If you don’t believe me that it works, you can (and should) watch the video here. That was MaKey MaKey. It’s a Kickstarter by two graduate MIT students who look set to blow out our perceptions of what is and isn’t–or can be–a controller. Through an extremely simple DIY circuitboard that needs no more interaction than a couple clips, you can make seemingly anything into a controller whether it’s a banana, stairs, or pencil drawings. The circuit and its connections seem to work by magic. In fact, the whole thing almost seems to…

Community‘s latest season has been (I would argue) its best. As the show has been given more time to develop and spread out, it’s been able to really dissect television and what we love about it. Each episode has used and subverted television tropes to fantastic effect, commenting on genres and mediums along the way. With the release of the second season’s Christmas episode, the show traipsed into stop-motion territory, moving past the realm of TV into the land of the television special. In another episode, the show decided to spoof and critique the musical episode/series. Now, they’re doing a video…

Parameters, available here in both English and Japanese, is the very abstract version of an RPG. It contains most of the elements of an RPG: monsters (the yellow bars), quests (the empty bars), items, stats, and leveling. Missing from the game are storylines, characters and graphics, but who’s counting? Actually you are. That’s most of what’s left. The game’s only input is clicking. Through it, you can attack “monsters,” complete quests, buy items, and spend your skill points. After you defeat a monster, or while you’re on a quest, various amounts of money and experience will spew out of the…

As Joystiq has reported, Rhode Island’s government has taken a special interest in Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning developer 38 Studios. After the state’s 75 million dollar loan about a year and a half ago, hopes were high that the developer would create new jobs. But others, like the state trasururer Frank Caprio, were concerned that such a big investment might backfire and mean that taxpayers would have to foot the bill if the studio went under. Well, here we are. Despite the game’s successful launch, it seems that the studio may not have made much money in revenue from the project. The…

A few days ago, stealth iOS title République successfully completed its Kickstarter. This was really impressive news given that as the campaign drew to a close, the game would be tasked with raising over 200,000 dollars in four days. Not an easy feat, yet they still managed to accomplsh it. Wired recently featured a timeline tracking the kickstarter’s progress and creator Ryan Payton’s outlook throughout. As the article’s writer Ryan Rigney recounts: With no new announcements to make or content to release, Camouflaj gave fans the tools they needed to spread the word themselves. It launched the #KeepHopeAlive Twitter campaign (“Hope” being…