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News: Pirates! Possibly the Purest RPG Ever

I love role-playing games. They tell great stories, require intense strategy, and make minimal demands of my tyrannosaurus-like hand-eye coordination. The idea of an RPG experience, at least on paper, is to allow users to play the role of a character. However, real people do not gain generic experience points for killing things, nor do they pause for each other during combat or have the ability to carry hundreds of potion bottles without slowing down. These can be fun gameplay mechanics, but ...

AudioSurf vs. Polynomial: The Battle Between Psychedelic MP3 Games

In 2008, Audiosurf came out on Steam, creating the psychedelic music game genre. If you haven't played it in the intervening three years, you're missing out on one of the coolest things in video games. The player selects any MP3 on their computer, then the game builds a unique level based on that song, which the player must then navigate whilst playing a block-matching, Tetris-like puzzle game. It's an incredibly compelling audiovisual experience, one with immense replay value and surprisingl...

News: Has SimCity Been Destroyed for Good?

Yesterday, Electronic Arts had a nice sale on Steam for 40-60 percent off some of their Sims titles, which included The Sims 3 (along with its DLCs) and SimCity 4. I've never been a big Sims fan, especially with the slew of virtual people games in the last decade, so I didn't realize until now that Maxis had stopped making their SimCity games; They haven't released any city building Sim games since SimCity 4 eight years ago. There was SimCity Societies in 2007, but it was made by a different ...

News: Attack Balloons and SuperMonkeys: A Tower Defense Retrospective

Real-time strategy (RTS) was the most popular genre in PC games at one time. It put Blizzard on the map—one of the biggest game developers in the world. And it buried the once venerable turn-based strategy genre, the only survivor being the Civilization series. But like hair metal in the late ‘80s, RTS reached its saturation point. Many bands (games) were too similar and used ornamentation over innovation. Suddenly, the fans left. From ’95 to ’03, Command & Conquer releases were more like new...

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...

How To: Get Free Windows Software Daily

When you look up the word free in the dictionary, you'll find a lot of definitions, but in the days of digital dependency and a falling economy, free only means one thing—expensive stuff for nothing. And if you own a Windows computer, one of the best sites to get free software from is Giveaway of the Day.

Eyes Officially Popped: The Future of Gaming Looks Awesome

Tune in! Below, an attendee of the Game Developers Conference 2011 captures footage of the new eye-popping visual effects in Epic Games' latest upgrade of their Unreal Engine 3, a "toolset used in blockbuster video games, 3D visualizations, digital films and more." If this is what the graphics looks like captured from an audience cell phone, well, one can only imagine what it would look like on your widescreen... The demo, titled "Samaritan", ran on a custom-built PC system in real-time compu...

News: A Quick Homage to Our Benefactor

Without Richard Channing Garfield the world would be a much grayer and less interesting place today, at least for all of us. He created Magic in college, playtested it throughout, accidentally found a publisher for it, and wound up the the most well-known and successful paper game designer in the world (sorry Guygax, make something new why don't ya?). He does not seek the limelight, has not had a snappy biography written about him (or his game, amazingly enough) and I thought we should pay a ...

New Game by Hasbro: Electronic SCRABBLE Flash

Nope, this isn't a flash game version of SCRABBLE. There's already one of those (and a multitude of imitations) for the Apple iPhone, iPod, and Facebook. This is an electronic game, and it's not a "handheld" game like the SCRABBLE Pocket Pogo Touch Screen Game (pictured right). It's an entirely new way to play everybody's favorite word game, and it's called SCRABBLE Flash (BOGGLE Flash outside of the U.S. and Canada).

News: Alan Wake First Look

A first hands look at the first chapter of the game. "When the wife of best-selling writer Alan Wake disappears on their vacation, his serach turns up pages from a thriller he doesn't remember writing. A dark presence stalks the small town of Bright Falls-" 

News: May feels like November

A November release week in May It used to be that games marked to be blockbusters (expected to sell more than a million in their first month) would always be released during the holiday September to December season. November was always the month companies chose to release their best game. This release model worked fine until the last few years, when too many games were being released in November and companies started to see diminishing returns on their titles because of the release rush.

How To: Download games on your PS3 from the PlayStation Store

After you have your PlayStation 3, you should set up your PlayStation Network account so you can fully benefit from PS3 games. In this video walkthrough, tour everything game related for download onto your PS3. Discover exclusive titles, demos, themes and add-ons to enhance your gaming experience. The PlayStation Store is a simple, user-friendly interface that's easy to use. Download games on your PS3 from the PlayStation Store.

News: Twitch Will Soon Allow Mobile Gamers to Live Stream

There is a seemingly endless supply of games on mobile. While many of these games are fantastic, many are also, well ... garbage. And unfortunately, the platform as a whole has been dismissed because of those garbage games. This situation leaves gamers like myself wondering what can be done to develop a deeper public respect for gaming on smartphones.