News: Relive Your Childhood with 100 Classic Games from Atari's Vault
Get ready for a blast from the past.
Get ready for a blast from the past.
Somewhere in a back-end update, Google snuck a Google Maps Trivia game into its mobile Maps apps. The game is accessible through the Google Maps side-navigation menu on Android and iOS (hidden right at the bottom, of course), and it's ready to play right now. It's a rather fun game, too. SmartyPins, as it's called, asks you a series of geography-based trivia questions, where the penalty for wrong answers is deducted in miles. A correct answer within a set amount of time nets you bonus points,...
A small group of students studying Game development at Stockholm University just released their first game.
In the XBox 360 game Dead Rising, you'll probably find Otis's constant calls on the transceiver a nuisance at best. And he doesn't even know where all the survivors are. Take a look at this instructional video and learn how to find the survivors Otis misses in this zombie crazy game for the XBox 360. Find the missing survivor's in Dead Rising.
Just started playing softball? Take a look at this instructional video and learn how to properly bunt in softball. Bunting is a crucial technique in softball and over the years, the game has slowly moved from hitting the ball as far away as possible to a game of speed. Bunt and field in softball.
Do you need to create back up XBOX 360 games? Learn to burn copies of your favorite games using your PC to ensure you always have a back up. Make backups and give them to your friends to allow the action to never stop. Make XBOX 360 backups.
Learn how to do some video game cheats for the Hitman: Blood Money game from XBox. This video takes you throught the level "A new life". Get playing and you'll soon earn your "Silent Assassin" status. Cheat at Hitman: Blood Money.
It isn't a new gadget, but the EyeClops Mini Projector still makes a great stocking stuffer for Christmas Day. It's great for kids to play with, but for techies— it's sure to be something fun to hack and mod this holiday season.
Each year on Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday, Ashbourne becomes a war zone! The majority of the ablebodied men, women and children take to the streets to play what is probally the largets football game in the world! - The two teams number in the hundreds, and the palying field is 3 miles long, 2 miles wide and has the town of Ashbourne in the middle!
After the most troubled development in gaming history, Duke is back. And it's...certainly a game that's been in development for fourteen years. Quality aside, there's still some good achievements in the game. In the latest DLC for the game, "The Doctor Who Cloned Me", released this past week. Along with new multiplayer maps, the DLC brought with it a brand new singleplayer campaign. Which means more achievements!
Look, Batman: Arkham City is a wonderful game. I mean, you really feel like Batman when you play it, and that alone makes it the best superhero game I've ever played. But you're not here for my rambling thoughts on video games! Let's talk achievements.
Time Magazine has mentioned Minecraft as the number one game of 2011. About this time every year Time releases the top best and worst lists of the year and Minecraft made the top of the gaming list.
Yes, you read the title correctly. GameStop has problems, and if you're lax in morals, you can take advantage of them for free games and cash. I'm bringing you all yet another exclusive Null Byte that falls into the fascinating category of life hacking.
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?
This is the Windows OS counterpart to my tutorial on how to burn the new XDG3 formatted games on Xbox 360. Microsoft invented a new disc format system to trump piracy, it's called XDG3. XDG3's standard is to burn a whole extra gigabyte of data to the disc, to allow more content, but more importantly for stopping piracy. This extra gigabyte of data makes it impossible to burn or rip a game the traditional way. So how on earth can we burn our fully-legal back-ups that we should rightfully be ab...
Gamers who have their Xbox 360's firmware flashed may have recently noticed an inability to play backups, or even make backups of newer games that have come out, such as Gears of War 3 and Dead Island, to name a few.
Anyone who likes shooters is going to hate me for saying this: the best game of the 2000's for me was Psychonauts by Double Fine Studios. It came out in 2005 for the original Xbox, achieving critical acclaim, but never selling very well due to its sheer kookiness and poor marketing. Over the ensuing years it has become a cult classic, with downloadable re-releases on Xbox 360 (sadly no longer available). PC has allowed gamers who missed out on the original to bask in its ageless glory.
Most kids who play video games will never become professional gamers. Those that do are part of a very select group— it's like being a professional actor or athlete. It's nice work if you can get it. For everyone else, the sad realization usually arrives sooner or later that time spent playing games might not have the practical rewards that homework or working hard at your job might deliver.
Since Angry Birds is apparently an "indie game", here's an interesting tidbit. Changsa, China's Window of the World theme park recently added an especially zeitgeisty activity to their collection of diverse attractions: a real-life Angry Birds game, which allows participants to catapult Angry Bird "balls" at targets using an actual slingshot.
He may be the oldest person to have invented an app for Apple devices, but 84-year-old George Weiss didn't originally intend on marketing his Dabble word game to the mobile crowd. He first came up Dabble back in 1958 when he was just 31. “A lot has changed since 1958, but people still love a good game,” said Weiss on his introduction into the iTunes App Store last month.
It's been five long years since Dead Island was first revealed to the public, but today the zombie game finally saw the light of day with its release on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. When the first teaser trailer came out from developer Techland, Dead Island looked nothing more than a cheap Resident Evil ripoff—on an island.
Big news from the world of game development engines. For several years, Unity3D has been the free 3D game development engine of choice for aspiring and indie game designers around the world. While it isn't as powerful as Unreal Engine 3 or CryEngine, it's free and much easier to use. Now, according to an announcement made by Unity yesterday, Unity 3D is about to unleash a huge weapon that neither of those other engines can claim: Flash compatibility.
It's been a busy week here at Indie Games Ichiban, between attending PAX and breaking news stories about Stabyourself and Playdead Studios, that there's been relatively little time for some honest, good old-fashioned game playing. But time was made and here are two excellent indie games of varying age and platform with two very different themes.
For as much money as they've made from North American video game audiences over the years, Japanese game developers don't seem to have very much faith in them. Dozens of great titles from their 40 years in the industry have appeared in Japan and across Europe, oftentimes even in English. But they never make it over to America, like Mother 3, Last Window: Midnight Promise, Dragon Force 2, and Tobal No. 2 (that one didn't even hit Europe).
It's only been ten years? Where has all of the time gone? When RuneScape came out in January of 2001, the world was a different place. There were no such thing as Xboxes, normal gamers didn't care about the number of cores on a processor, and the World Trade Center Towers dominated the Lower Manhattan skyline.
Angry Birds and FarmVille have become two of the biggest game franchises in the world. And recently their creators, Rovio and Zynga, have hit the news again, but not because of anymore major game announcements.
Minecraft might still be in development, but that doesn't mean a creative guy like Notch doesn't have time for other projects. A few months ago he and his company Mojang announced their second game, a digital collectible trading card affair called Scrolls. A simple title (perhaps too generic if anything), but it's not the name of an extant game, and it's appropriate given the visual style and card-based gameplay of the game itself.
If you follow indie games at all, you've probably heard of Bastion. During its development, it took home numerous Best in Show prizes from E3 and other game conventions while building up an incredible amount of buzz in the games press. Part of what is intriguing about Bastion is its cool art design, which in the last couple months, peaked my interest more so than the gameplay or the much-ballyhooed narration.
The developing team Techland gets a free pass. Having thoroughly enjoyed their previous title, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, this sequel was bought on day one by good ol' fashion blind faith. After playing for most of today, it's still to early to tell if the game is a mess or a fun romp. Here are some first impressions.
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.
Grand Theft Auto 4 was a landmark game. It gave yet another reboot to the already rebooted Grand Theft Auto series, arguably the most prestigious video game in the West. It has a 98 on Metacritic, making it by that measure the best game of modern times. Whatever your stance on the gameplay may be—which has received its fair share of flak in the three years since its release—the graphical steps that the team at Rockstar North took to create their fantasy replica of New York were a major step f...
In the world of developers, a "sandbox game" is video game where players are free to "roam a virtual world and change any factor at will"; these types of games demand creativity on the player's part, with no linear/"correct" way to play.
Different genres of social media have changed the world, but they are not omnipotent. In most cases this is a good thing, but not in the case of Operation Rainfall. It has been a purely well meaning social media movement that should have led to a great boon for the North American gamer public, but instead has served as a reminder of how stone aged Nintendo of America's (NOA) corporate thinking remains.
World of Warcraft has been on top of the world for seven years. No other MMO has come close to challenging its dominance of the genre, and it has generated billions of dollars for Blizzard. They have spent a lot of money adding more and more content, to the extent where the full game with all the expansion packs takes up 65 GB of hard drive space. It is a beautiful game; well balanced, and a milestone in the history of the medium.
Team Fortress 2 (TF2) is one of the best multiplayer games of all time. It took nine years to make, and the developers have supported it with more post-release free updates than any other game ever. Four years after its release in 2007, it is still immensely popular, and although its price has gone down, Valve has managed to continue making a massive profit by introducing the first successful microtransaction model in a mainstream American shooter. That model has been so successful that it lo...
Advancements in technology usually lead to the miniaturization of old technologies, and video games are no exception. Since at least 1990, game hardware manufacturers and enterprising DIY electronics enthusiasts have poured their efforts into making full-size video game consoles smaller, even handheld. And for good reason—who would have ever played a black and white Game Boy if they could have had an actual NES in their pocket?
Minecraft was first released just a few years ago, but when a paradigm-shifting piece of media comes along the rest of the world is quick to take inspiration from it. The absolutely terrible XBLA knock-off FortressCraft was the first, and last month a much more interesting game called Terraria came out on Steam for $9.99. It is clearly inspired by Minecraft, and there is a long checklist of identical features. It is, nonetheless, a very different product, and just might be called the first in...
Video game makers have never had great name recognition amongst the American public. Shigeru Miyamoto, Cliff Bleszinski, and Will Wright are names most Americans can't be bothered to remember, whatever their contribution to games have been. Most people are familiar with their work, but fail to recognize them by name or appearance.
ARGs have taken the concept of video games to some odd and wonderful real-world places. Socks, Inc. might not be the first ARG, and LittleBigPlanet might have defined the sock-puppet-based game archetype, but it is the first game to combine ARG and sock puppet elements into one package.
Gamers who haven't already gotten tickets to PAX Prime, there is sad news. Three-day passes for the event are officially sold out, three full months before it starts. That is a Coachella-like ticket sale speed for such a large event.