The best thing about the Paper Mario series is its bizarre sense of humor. Sure you’re saving the world, but the boss fights are against characters with weaknesses other than fire or ice. The newest game in the series, Paper Mario: Stick Star for 3DS, goes back to its turn-based combat roots. Jason Johnson’s review at Bit Creature renews my confidence in the bizarre landscape of this series. If you couldn’t guess, Sticker Star is far from your typical outing in Mario-land. The bonkers story is a welcome surprise, as I learned in a surreal moment when Birdo, everyone’s favorite transgendered amphibian, dropped in…

A good free-to-play game is a little like a religion. The gameplay has you coming back every day to perform rituals for an abstract goal, and sometimes a little money can help you reach that goal faster. Wait, that last one only counts for influencing mortals. Buying or selling positions of influence within Christian churches is called simony, and Simony is also the title of Ian Bogost’s new game that lets you buy your way to the top of the leaderboards. Leigh Alexander at The Creators Project summarizes how the game’s profits will go towards funding the Museum of Contemporary Art…

It’s the start of flu season, and in my book, that means lots of pain medication for sinus inflammation. In an effort to teach the masses about pain management, London’s Science Museum made a game about what makes pain go away. Use too many painkillers and you’ll develop a tolerance, but spam those placebos as much as possible! Maybe there’s something to those natural remedies.

The board game Guess Who? only has five girls to choose from. If you’re a little girl playing against your older brother, you’ll probably always choose a girl and always lose. Jennifer O’Connell’s six-year-old daughter wrote to Hasbro to find out why such unfairness exists in the world:  I think it’s not fair to only have 5 girls in Guess Who and 19 boys. It is not only boys who are important, girls are important too. If grown ups get into thinking that girls are not important they won’t give little girls much care. Hasbro replies: Guess Who? is a guessing…

With all the Kickstarters and new projects coming out, it can be easy to overlook how an experiment actually turned out. Not all projects are completed or make lots of money. Sadly, the imaginative flash-based MMO Glitch is nearing its end. Last year, the browser-based MMO Glitch launched, boasting a non-violent environment designed in part by Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi. The game created an original non-Tolkien fantasy world with eleven gods to please. The official announcement cites the decline of Flash as part of the difficulty. Unfortunately, Glitch has not attracted an audience large enough to sustain itself and based on a…

Part of what makes losing a game acceptable to me is that I haven’t lost any money losing. The only thing to lose is my pride, and even then, most games have an element of chance to blame losses on. But for some people, a game is only exciting if the stakes are high. With Virgin gaming’s multiplayer service for FIFA 13 and other titles, you too can have the pleasure of knowing ten dollars are riding on whether or not you win your next match.  The game is rated E, though losing real money on a game might have you…

With all this videogame shooting going on let’s not forget that some games are doing an excellent job of being cute. LittleBigPlanet Karting has the racing style of a generic karting game, but the minigames and unique visual style we’ve come to expect from the series. Ryan Smith at Gameological doesn’t like the pinterest-like collection aspect of LittleBigPlanet games, but he did enjoy the game’s humor. Instead of clichéd Ice or Underground maps, you negotiate your way through fantastical creations: puddles of chocolate sauce and giant cupcakes in the bakery-themed Victoria’s Laboratory, for instance, or deadly appliances in The Progress Emporium, a…

This news segment from the 90s looks at the NEAT SPECS of the Super Nintendo and how some parents feel their children are being exploited by marketing. Sound familiar? Maybe some things haven’t changed, though Nintendo no longer controls “80% of the video market.” 

The Odyssey isn’t just a story. It’s Odysseus retelling this story of the adventures he undertook. True to the nature of the epic poem, Odysseus takes poetic license with details. At Play the Past, Roger Travis argues that players of Halo 4 have a similar retelling each time they pass through the game’s final gauntlet. Odysseus, in his bardic reformulation of his own story, makes it very clear: the monsters are at the base of the same clashing rocks through which the Argo passed. When Odysseus tells the story, he elaborates, adding the monsters that will, in the transformation of the…