People like to think of being evil as something extraordinary—we tend to think of it as extreme, or even supernatural. However, game designer and programmer Nicky Case, points out that social psychologists have repeatedly found the opposite to be true—people who we consider to be evil, are in fact i
On February 21, 1986, Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda was first released in Japan. This week, to celebrate the game’s 30th anniversary, series fans Scott Liniger and Mike McGee took to browser to release a complete 3D remake of the first game titled The Legend of Zelda: 30 Year Tribute. Unfortunately
We’re all in agreement that Twitch is a beautiful thing. The ability to display your skills while streaming games in front of a live audience on the Internet has proven endlessly entertaining. There’s no denying that. But here’s the rub: what if all those eyes intensely glaring at their screens jus
In one word: yes. It could be terrible!!! As you may know, the FCC is currently considering new legislation that could radically jeopardize the Internet we know and love. But you may not have considered the implications this would have on the medium of videogames. These days, games are pretty much i
In case you got lost in the desert or your Internet has been down all week, the mecca of videogame expos E3 was held in LA this week. Jamin was there basking in the glow of several thousand games being played simultaneously. In fact he’s still out West, so for this week’s PBS Game/Show episode he fi
What’s the deal with Goat Simulator? (Hmm… it seems my awesome Seinfeld impression doesn’t come across very well in typing.) But think about it. This silly game about goats which has no point, aside from being funny, does some seriously inspired stuff with videogame slapstick. Namely, there are no
The first-person shooter had a good run. Ever since players got a taste of the recoil on Doom’s shotgun, the genre has been firmly planted at the forefront of the industry. They’ve consistently been the biggest moneymakers, pushed technical boundaries, and ushered us into in the era of online play.
You probably passed it off as just the right combination of sleep depravation, screen hypnosis, and Red Bull, but sometimes games make us feel, well, otherworldly. Cognitive anthropologist Ryan Hornbeck, who interviewed gaggles of Chinese World of Warcraft players for his dissertation, has a deeper
Indie games are huge. I don’t know the exact percentage of games we cover nowadays but I’d wager if you ran some analytics the indies would outnumber the big boys by 10 to 1. They’re so predominant, so diverse, and so businesslike that the idea of indie games is quite nebulous. Sometimes we talk aro
The female population in World of Warcraft is a lot smaller than you think, as the game is populated with guys moonlighting as girl characters. This is the takeaway from a new study on the realm of ogres and magic pandas, which found that while 26 percent of male players chose the opposite gender fo
If the past has taught us anything, it’s that the future will be full of awesome videogames the likes of which we can only begin to imagine. But that’s not going to stop us from imagining, nonetheless. In fact, if you look around today’s environment, we can already sense some huge upcoming trends on
As 868-HACK and Corrypt creator Michael Brough mentioned in a blog post earlier this week, “I really don’t like that putting games on iOS means people can’t play them without some expensive gadget. It excludes people.” This gets at the crux of an irksome problem with the medium of videogames: it’s
With a name like Japanese role-playing games, you’d think the genre would be geographically bound to the land of soba noodles and adorable lucky cat shrines. But recently there have been a slew of games that play more or less exactly like JRPGs, but with one major difference: they’re not made in Jap
Say you gravitate to surreal exploratory adventures, but avoid survivor horror games like the plague. The tactical wargame is your jam, but JRPGs are not your cup of tea. Do the types of fun we enjoy tell us a deeper truth about our meat space selves, aside from that we should never ever attempt han
It’s been said that badness is only spoiled goodness, but obviously whoever said that had never played a truly bad videogame. Case in point: there is nothing even remotely redeemable about the majority of the games in this week’s PBS Game/Show’s episode. Well, except that it’s pretty funny when Jami
Seriously, who doesn’t loves gifs? But gaming gifs are worthy of affection in particular because they capture those one-in-a-million moments that your friends, much less your Internet-friends, would never believe. And there are just so many great ones. On this week’s episode of PBS Game/Show, Jamin
The buzz around The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is all about its camerawork, and rightly so. It’s gorgeous. But in an in-depth interview with Edge, the devs talked about how important non-obtrusive storytelling is. After all, if you’re going to create an environment that is indistinguishable from life
There are plenty of valid reasons to throw our hands up and abandon game reviews. For starters, we’re living in a day and age of early access and perpetual updates where games like Minecraft exist in unfinished states. On top of that, it is practically guaranteed that no two players will ever have t
We generally think of cheating at games as a capital offense, worthy of server bans, account suspensions, and having your opponent quickly and decisively press the reset button. But it’s not as cut and dry as you may think. In last week’s PBS Game/Show, Jamin examines the various types of cheaters a
A quick googling of Dark Souls’ story will open a rabbit hole into the churning gut of lore. From the true identity of Sen, who we know of only through a lone kanji character on the side of a deathtrap, to the exodus of the otherworldly mushroom people, everything is laid bare. This exegesis result
