Living in the Northeast of the United States, David Szymanski grew up surrounded by the eerie woods and old buildings that dot the landscape in that part of the country. This is an area of the U.S. where you can find what Lovecraftian scholar S.T. Joshi calls “The Miskatonic Region,” the setting for
Hugo Arcier’s FPS is about last year’s attacks in Paris, though it is not immediately clear in precisely what way. We know this because the artist says as much on his website: “FPS is a post November 2015 Paris attacks art piece. The artist deals with blindness hijacking video game codes, in particu
Beginning in the 20th century, modern design started being dominated by the saying “form follows function.” The idea was that when creating a building, car, or piece of software, pragmatism should come first, and style should be secondary. In Adult Swim’s upcoming game DESYNC, however, style is the
We’ve written before about how the shooter genre is expanding into a wider variety of games that can do nicer things than shooting dudes in the head. We did a PBS Game/Show episode about that. Also, I collected interviews with the creators of games that use shooter mechanics in surprising ways, like
Google Glass not only does useful and cool stuff like recording your mindless drive to work while making you look somewhat like a robot, but now it can help you kill things. As you can see in this video of one buff dude aiming a huge semiautomatic gun, Glass can display your crosshair and target so
The topic of banning deadly, autonomous robots is on the table in Geneva, meaning that Kill Screen’s plan for world conquest is temporarily on hold. Foiled again. But seriously, this is important stuff. The UN convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (read: killer robots) is a preliminary step on
What motivates someone to utilize aimbots and other banned cheats in an online FPS? The obvious answer is that they want to win but suck, but this pretty fascinating feature article at PC Gamer shows it’s more like a neurosis. It seems some cheaters have an overwhelming and irrational compulsion to
The Klobb in GoldenEye for Nintendo 64 was pure, unabashed Czechoslovakian garbage. You really might as well go gunless into a gunfight rather than pick it up off the concrete slab. It was so bad that it wouldn’t be right to let it slip from our memory without understanding why it’s so fucking awful
You know the rap against predator drones. Operators thousands of miles away are making hits on targets who are but tiny blips on the radar. It’s a cowardly if efficient method of killing, as the drone operator slang “bug splat” for a downed person of interest clearly illustrates. That’s why a colla
These hyper-exotic plastic firearms by Mattel aren’t just kids’ toys. They’re also toys for grown-up kids, thank you very much. As anyone who plays a fair amount of videogames can vouch, it’s only natural to develop a fetish for wickedly exaggerated weapons of destruction that are far too impractica
In first-person shooters, we call them aimbots—little modifications to the code that give your shot a superhumanly unfair advantage. But in real-life, we just call them scary. Designed by hunting enthusiasts (who else?) at Sandia National Laboratories, a defense contractor that makes lethal weaponr
The impression one gets from a steady diet of FPS’s is that everyone is a hero, which is ridiculous and borders on propaganda and doesn’t take into account the far greater number of civilians whose lives become sleepless nightmares. Well, until now. The point of This War of Mine, a horrific, surviv
At an event like Game Developers Conference, it’s easy to get your various incarnations of reality scrambled. Virtual reality has a bigger presence than ever this year, and there’s always augmented reality looming, but there are also the non-categorizable forms: projects that blur the boundaries bet
Over at Top Tier Tactics, the prolific Xiant has been posting brief but useful player’s guides on how not to get smoked in Titanfall. (Never heard of it? Then you should read our review.) This should be a great resource for newbies because it’s a landmark game on a new system which will attract thos
