On October 7th, the IndieCade Conference will open its doors to some of the most innovative minds in the independent gaming industry. The three day event located in Culver City, California includes presentations by notable indie designers, workshops, galleries, and mixers. On the following day, however, the IndieCade Festival begins. Unlike the conference, the festival includes events targeted at gamers and the general public. While a $15 wristband will grant you access to keynotes, events, a...
MACHZOR 73 points (23 points without the bingo) Definition: mahzor; a Jewish prayer book [n]
Giveaway Tuesdays has officially ended! But don't sweat it, WonderHowTo has another World that's taken its place. Every Tuesday, Phone Snap! invites you to show off your cell phone photography skills.
In a recent announcement, Hewlett-Packard announced that they're considering spinning off their PC hardware business, but even more recent was the decision to completely off webOS devices. Though they aren't eradicating the once popular Palm platform altogether, they are liquidating all of their HP branded smartphones and tablets in a fire sale, including the Pixi, Pre and Veer phones and TouchPad tablet, which is less than two months old.
Children under the age of 13 possess insight that can blow the minds of their elders, but not the wherewithal to make important life choices for themselves. This is exactly why there are strict rules against marketing cigarettes to them. In 2000, a law went into effect called the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act that institutes similar consumer protections for our youth's online identities, prohibiting companies from soliciting personal information from children under 13 years of age ...
Localizing a game is a task many do not fully understand. Not only do localizers have to translate the games they work on into a different language, but they have to translate it into a different culture as well. Oftentimes art assets, plot elements, and menu systems are changed to suit regional sensitivities. Japanese media tends to have their common drunkard characters removed or censored in American versions, for example.
Google started culling Google+ accounts. There are two main targets: businesses and those who are using pseudonyms. For businesses, Google is promising to provide their own version of Facebook Pages, which will be released later this year. For those who use pseudonyms, they aren't so lucky. According to Google+'s community standards, users must "use the name your friends, family, or co-workers usually call you". The purpose of this rule is ostensibly to discourage spammers and people from set...
Three years ago, Double Fine productions held an in-house event called the Amnesia Fortnight. The company was split into four teams, each of which set out to spend two weeks developing an idea for a small game and present it to the other groups at the end of the duration. All of the ideas turned out to be winners, and founder/owner Tim Schafer secured publishing deals for all four games to be released on a combination of XBLA and PSN. In honor of the excellent Trenched becoming the third game...
Xe Systems, the Private-Defense-Contractor-Formerly-Known-As-Blackwater, has been busy attempting to re-brand themselves. They have a new name, several new sub-names, and have at least titularly shifted their focus to training rather than mercenary work. Controversial founder Erik Prince is no longer with the company, which is now owned by a large investment consortium.
It's typically not the kind of video game you would see on WonderHowTo. Instead, you'd learn about games with gruesome zombies or beer guzzling dwarfs, even a controversial, dystopian war. But Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure deserves some serious praise.
In case you haven't noticed, I absolutely adore video games. Most of my friends don't, so to get my fix of knowledgable video game conversation I have turned to podcasts. They're free, they feature the smartest people in games journalism, and can be enjoyed while doing just about anything. Working. Walking the dog. Crying yourself to sleep. Whatever you're into.
Sticking with our theme of XBLA games with uninspiring names, we have Outland. This game shares its name with an unrelated sci-fi cult film from 1981, unrelated comic strip from the '90s, and unrelated region in World of Warcraft. Didn't exactly try hard to build name recognition. Other than that, Finnish developer Housemarque has created the best 2D platformer I've seen in years.
FEATURED DOCUMENTARY: Exit Through the Gift Shop, the first film directed by reclusive street-art legend Banksy, is a little puzzle-box of a documentary. It's perfectly designed and pitched to be enjoyable on multiple levels: on one as an entertaining, illuminating mini-history of "street art" and on another - one entirely more convoluted and entertaining - as a light-hearted "up yours" to both street artists and their patrons.
ANIMATED FEATURE: Thanks to Tom Berger for another animated movie review!
When I heard that a man wearing a pink wig and matching PVC dress won the 2010 National Scrabble Championship yesterday, I wasn't that shocked. After all, it was Halloween. But it turns out that it wasn't just a Halloween costume. In fact, it's a way of life for this champion scrabbler.
Get to know Congresswoman Lucille Roybal-Allard: Congresswoman Lucille Roybal-Allard was born in Bolye Heights, Los Angeles, County, California on June 12, 1941.
This week Farmville is revisiting some old themes for 24 hours each. Tuesday
Yeah it's... that's a good movie there Thanks to Tom Berger for another animated movie review!
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." -Leonardo da VinciLearning a kata requires that you go through several stages. First you have to learn the basic pattern and the techniques. Then you have to perfect what you've learned. Then you have to deconstruct what you've learned and perfected in order to truly understand what the kata is teaching you vis a vis close quarter engagement.
Boston.com's The Big Picture posts 2009's most amazing Guinness World Record holders. My favorite fanatics below.
It's currently 2011, but when you fire up your game console, put your hands on the controller and play the new Dead Space 2 video game, you're warped into the future— into the year 2511— just 3 years after the events that took place in the first Dead Space. And it's sure to be a beautiful, frightening, futuristic experience.
Especially today, with the internet making information so readily available, people of all ages, all around the world, are trying to learn magic tricks. Unfortunately, going about this the wrong way won't make you into a magician at all, but will instead make you into someone who simply knows how a few tricks work.
What is Indirect Care? Does it affect the CNA's exam result? Indirect Care entails your behavior in terms of how you communicate with the resident, valuing residents' rights and residents' safety and security. Indirect Care is absolutely important because: (1) it is a graded performance, (2) it has separate score ratings, and (3 )it greatly affects the testees' overall performance during the clinical skills exam.
Go to the zoo. When inside put on a bear wolf or any other fierce animal costume that looks legit and run around.
Two friends spend a nice relaxing day at the beach. Only problem is that they were born in 1902.
Poetry to me is an expression of the sudden noteworthy inner thought, that arrives unexpectedly in an ephemeral, fleeting form. When you are attracted to the idea of creating some verses, do not sit there with the pen in your hand trying to force yourself to create poetry. If anything, you will produce something boring, you will pull words by the ear, and use too many of them absolutely unnecessarily. It is because you do not have direction, and if you think you do, than it is something too t...
Redstone and electricity have much in common. They both have what's called resistance. That is, they only travel a certain distance before the signal degrades to the point where it's unusable, and they take a certain amount of time to get there. With electricity, that time is nearly instantaneous because electricity is extremely fast. Redstone, on the other hand, is pretty slow.
No one likes it when random people wander into your home and mess things up, which is why it behooves you to hide your things from even the most prying eyes with builds like this totally invisible, 2x2, piston-operated door with no visible redstone either inside or outside. The story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears may have gone differently if they would have had one of these babies installed in their home: I did a tutorial for a piston-powered trapdoor and many people wanted to know how to...
Around the world, X-People (yes... there are X-Women, too) are under attack from an intolerant sapiencentric ruling class. Integration without equality is a farce. Autonomy is denied outright. Human prejudice cannot abide a mutant state. Human fear, born to hate, imposes itself on the life of every mutant.
I'm starting a series on the top astronomers, with probably about eleven astronomers that I will be covering overall. So, let's start out from the top, with the top most important astronomer. In my opinion, Galileo Galilei is the top astronomer.
Author's Note: Hi there, some of you may know but most of you probably won't. My name is Semeria and I am an author on the rising. I plan to be posting one of my novels on this website for people to read. Comment and let me know what you think and I hope you enjoy the story.
When you buy computer parts, it can be a tough decision where you want to put all of your hard earned dollars into. Not only that, but when you buy a top of the line component, 3 months later (at most), your hardware will likely be outdated. This puts consumers like us in a bit of a pickle when it comes to purchasing, especially on a tight budget.
Problem: You're a PC gamer who absolutely loves The Elder Scrolls series and were eagerly anticipating the release of the newest game, Skyrim. But as much as you'd like to pick up the new game, money is tight. What do you do?
In 1969, the Apollo 11 crew were the first to walk on the Moon, the New York Jets defeated the Baltimore Colts in the third Super Bowl ever, Led Zeppelin released their first studio album, and one of the most pivotal moments in music history happened—Woodstock.
WENDIGO n pl. -GOS windigo 62 points (12 points without the bingo)
Pumpkins, murderers, vampires, zombies, ghosts, witches, death… these are all the subjects of last week's Scrabble Bingo of the Days, which focused on words associated with Halloween and horror movies. Did you know there was actually a name for someone who suffocated another person? Did you know that Frankenstein, vampires, and ghosts can all be considered one thing? Did you know that there was actually a word for rotten dead flesh?
This week's review roundup is a diverse lot. They really only have two things in common—their indie origins and puzzle elements. Otherwise, they come from France, Spain and the U.S., a few from unknown designers and one by the guy who inspired Minecraft.
Last week, Google+ took a crucial step towards becoming exactly like Facebook. As of now, there are games available for download within the service, most notably Angry Birds, which is already available on at least one of the devices owned by everyone in America today. Some of the other popular games include Bejeweled Blitz and Zynga Poker, and out of all of the available titles, all come from four companies that have come to form the four-headed dragon of U.S. casual gaming: EA, Zynga, PopCap...
Carpe Fulgur translates to something along the lines of "Seize the Lightning" in Latin. Sometimes that is enacted with golf clubs by idiots. But the three intrepid indie video game localizers who work under that name are trying to do it the right way: metaphorically. They are translating and publishing Japanese games for the Americans market—games that have seldom been seen before because every other company thinks it's mad to release them here.
