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News: Friday Indie Game Review Roundup: Old-New School

This week's FIGRR is all about games that are old-new (or new-old, if you like) school. Each celebrates a different vital, yet largely taken for granted, aspect of video game history in the decidedly new-school world of indie games. Their titles betray them. Blocks That Matter is all about blocks. Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is all about item shops. Neither are particularly sexy aspects of gaming, but both are ubiquitous elements of great games that can stand on their own.

News: Cooking on Google+ with the Social Skillet: Interview with Eric McKee

On Google+, one of the very first creative projects using the popular hangout feature revolved around cooking. Foodies +Lee Allison and +Eric McKee decided to start their own "G+ Cooking School", which has now expanded into the Social Skillet. Although neither have formal training, they're both quite accomplished cooks and skilled instructors. Using hangouts, they've taught their students how to create dishes like margherita pizzas and chicken marsala.

News: Child Molesters and Sexy Fighters: A Study of Video Game Commercials

The Kinect for Xbox 360 and PlayStation Move might be fun to play with, but people do not look very cool while they're doing it. Air guitar is not particularly flattering (even if done on stage), and neither is air-anything else, as pleasurable as it might be. This is why I find it strange that a group of admen somewhere in the world think these kinds of commercials would appeal to anyone.

Not Your Ordinary Gamer: Yahtzee Croshaw Does It All

Most employed in the game industry have two-word job titles that start with “game”—game designer, game producer, game critic, game tester, etc. Usually, they’re one or the other, even though some can be both a game designer and a game tester or game critic and game tester. And rarely does one person get to call themselves a “game everything”. Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw is the exception.

How To: Clean Your Computer

I love my laptop. It goes wherever I go. Unfortunately, that means that it also gets pretty grubby after a while. The screen gets dusty. The frame gets smudgy. The spaces between the keys fill up with crumbs of questionable origins. And my desktop? That thing is a dust bunny magnet.

Adult Swim Games: It's Not Just for Aqua Teen Anymore

The days of having to pay for video games are over. Generally, retail games are better because they're made with more effort and care than their free counterparts. But free browser-based game sites are insanely popular, specifically Kongregate, Armor Games, and the grandaddy of them all—NewGrounds. Despite not receiving funds directly from the players, they’ve become a profitable niche in the games industry. And that popularity has attracted more talent and money to the production of web game...

How To: Create Strong, Safe Passwords

Movies like to show hackers breaking passwords with fancy software and ludicrous gadgets. The reality of busting passwords open is much more mundane. Simple as it may sound, most passwords are broken purely by guesswork. Check out this infographic from ZoneAlarm, as well as this list from the Wall Street Journal of the fifty most common passwords gleaned from the 2010 Gawker hack. If your password is on one of those lists, you need to change it. Right now.

News: Is the Metascore Algorithm for Rating Video Games B.S.?

Guiding internet users to useful content is one of the most lucrative businesses in the world. This process is called aggregation. Google and other search engines form the top of the food chain, aggregating all of the content on the web in response to queries. There are all sorts of other important aggregators though, and you probably use at least one every day: Fark and Reddit for web content, Rotten Tomatoes for movie reviews, and Metacritic for a variety of media, but most importantly, vid...

Project Cafe: The Specs Behind Nintendo's Newly Rumored Console

In the past 25 years, there have been five generations of home video games systems. Since Nintendo changed the world by releasing the NES in 1987, there has always been at least two consoles competing for dominance in the wild west of the games industry. This competition— coupled with rapid advancements in technology—has led to a new generation of battling systems coming out every five years, like clockwork.

News: Amazon Mechanical Turk

It's really a shame that it is so hard for people to make money on the internet these days. The dot com bubble has receded and scams are plentiful on the web. There are, however, a couple of legitimate ways to make a few extra bucks online, Amazon Mechanical Turk, or MTurk for short, is one of them. The idea of MTurk is to hook up programmers with people that do tasks that computers can not, these tasks are called HITs (Human Intelligence Task). These tasks include article creation, creative ...

Blue: The Color of Schadenfreude

Does the above card seem a bit unfair to you? I see that Bacheeze has already poisoned your minds with his anti-blue propaganda. These are the words of one who has had his 7 mana-Force of Nature Unsummoned one too many times. He seems to think that those of us who play blue are all a bunch of malcontents who deal with our misery by spreading it around. This is entirely true.

Metro 2033: Life

What separates Metro 2033 from other FPS games? Life. There are underground towns, markets, children, music, and so much background chatter than sometimes you can't single out a particular conversation.

How To: Things to Do on WonderHowTo (05/23 - 05/29)

WonderHowTo is a how-to website made up of niche communities called Worlds, with topics ranging from Minecraft to science experiments to Scrabble and everything in-between. Check in every Wednesday evening for a roundup of user-run activities and how-to projects from the most popular communities. Users can join and participate in any World they're interested in, as well as start their own community.

Mastering Security, Part 1: How to Manage and Create Strong Passwords

I've seen numerous tutorials on how to create a "strong" password. This makes me laugh. These titles imply "one" password, which is wrong in and of itself. A person should have many passwords, all different, and all extremely long. People may ask how they're supposed to remember lengthy passwords and why their current password isn't good enough. Well, I'm going to show you.

News: Netflix DVD Rentals Becomes Qwikster… Now What Are Your Alternatives?

It's been a long journey for Netflix users. At first, it was a rough ride as Netflix struggled to find its place in the homes and hearts of movie watchers everywhere. Once monthly subscriptions bumped off the pay-per-rental charges, Netflix soared to great heights, known for their flat-fee unlimited rentals without due dates, late fees, or shipping and handling fees. And it was smooth sailing when streaming services were incorporated into monthly plans, with customers being able to rent DVDs ...

News: The Best Books for Mastering Your Canon EOS 5D Mark II DSLR

The manual that's included with the Canon EOS 5D Mark II is a great starting point for learning the camera, but it's definitely not the only place you should be getting your information from if you intend to master your 5D Mark II. If you don't have the manual, you can download a copy of it here from Canon's website. It's great for learning the basics of the camera, but sometimes it can be vague and hard to follow. In order to capture the full potential of the 5D Mark II, you need to go a lit...

News: Scrabble Finally Hits Android Devices... But Does It Beat Words with Friends?

Three years ago, Scrabble was one of the very first 500 mobile applications to appear on the new iTunes App Store, allowing iPhone users the chance to kill their Scrabble cravings on the go. It was a smart move for Hasbro and Electronic Arts (EA), but it's been two years and eight months since the Android Market opened for business, and they've just now released an official app for Android smartphones—Scrabble Free.

How To: MARK BURNETT on How to Become the Biggest Producer in Prime Time Television

Mark Burnett is, financially speaking, perhaps the most successful television producer today. While I had launched America's Most Wanted and COPS a decade earlier, Mark exploded onto network television with Survivor, the glossy and fantastical innovation to reality television. With Survivor now entering its 11th year, I recently interviewed Mark at the Los Angeles public radio station KCRW, where the podcast will be made available. Below, Mark's 10 steps from soldier-to-nanny-to-premiere-Holl...

News: Car Troubles

Okay, so you take an office chair to a car repair shop. Tell them you will need them to repair your broken tire. They will look at you like you are an idiot. Tell them it's your vehicle and you need it to get to point A to point B. When they tell you they can't help you, demand to see their boss. Be completely serious the entire time, cry for more affects. Do all this dressed as either a homeless person on a business man. This is a pretty stupid prank idea but if you guys did it, it would be ...

Red Dead Review part 1: Sandbox Gameplay

Red Dead Redemption is hard to pin down in game play and story. The game offers this massive multi-layered world in which the player can roam freely, offering plenty of challenges, beautiful graphics and atmosphere for the player to experience. Yet after some point the whole world feels barren and unchangeable, and your achievements are nothing more than a trophy that does not matter in the sandbox world the player resides in. The story, told in three arcs, offers an inconsistent narrative of...

News: How Controversy Changed SCRABBLE

OSPD1 In 1978, the first SCRABBLE Dictionary was conceived and published by Merriam-Webster, with the help of the National Scrabble Association (NSA). The idea was to include any word that was found in one of the five major dictionaries at the time:

News: The Best Prank Ever In My Eyes. yeah dude.

Dear Jackass Guys well i am John Fears and i am 27 years old and i already met some of you guys but it would be nice to meet the whole cast on the epic event. That is why i am trying out for this contest. you are rock and i have been a fan from the start of your quest for being a the best jackass. i am a film student and i want to be in show business myself and be like John Knoxville but it s hard to get in to the film industry. i have been trying since i was 14 and still nothing. you can che...

How To: Who Is Anonymous? How the Wall Street Journal and the NSA Got It Wrong

Over the past couple of weeks, there have been a series of high-profile hacks and leaks. From the rooting of CombinedSystems, to a secret FBI conference call leak, all the way to the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on U.S. government sites—with a lot in-between. As governments move to close their long fingers around the free speech that exposes their secrets, this shadowy collective of loose-knit, but like-minded individuals are hell bent on preventing them. Or are they?

How To: The Social Engineer's Guide to Buying an Expensive Laptop

Laptops are almost a necessity in today's society. It doesn't help that a laptop that can actually increase your work productivity will put at least a $1,500 dent in your wallet. I'm sure you have searched around to try to find factory direct deals, or (shiver) even looked at used laptops, but that isn't the way to go. You need something that actually has a warranty, and good performance, but at the same time, doesn't require you to sell a kidney. This can cause quite a dilemma, as it can tak...

News: Tips and Tricks for Gmail

Time to confess a personal bias: I love Gmail. I think it's the best thing since sliced bread. I try to be impartial when I write about software and online services, but seriously -- of all the free email services out there, why would you use anything else?