Welcome to Minecraft World! Check out our advanced tutorials and come play on our free server. Sometimes it's easy to get overwhelmed with the sheer scale or complexity of a build or group project on your favorite server. Too much stress from any creative endeavour can lead to mistakes, discouragement, or fighting among a community. What better way to relieve stress and entertain the troops than some old fashioned competition?
Here is the final part in Null Byte's series on mastering the skills in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. We have already covered the slick and brutal methods to raise our Spellcasting and Combative skills. Skyrim's intelligent new leveling system has trumped the former methods of spamming repeated moves to raise levels quickly. Rather than casting a spell, or jumping up and down constantly, the new system requires that we use our skills in practice to get experience for them. This causes leveling...
There are tons of mobile apps out there for the gaming logophile, but there's a new word building game taking over iPhones and iPads, and it not only wants you to have fun, it wants you to fight back in the "war against words". It's the Word Examination Laboratory for Dynamic Extraction and Reassessment. But you can just call it W.E.L.D.E.R. Since its release earlier this month, W.E.L.D.E.R. has developed quite a following with its addicting mesh of Bejeweled, Boggle and Scrabble gameplay. It...
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.
When you don't have anyone to play with in the flesh, nothing beats a round of competitive online Scrabble. If you're constantly on the move, the Scrabble app developed by Electronic Arts (EA) for Android and iOS mobile devices is probably your favorite way to play. But let's face it—if you love Scrabble, you probably love all types of word games, and if you're on the hunt for that next fun and challenging logological mobile game, I've got a few suggestions for you...
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.
Last year, Hasbro unveiled Scrabble Flash, an electronic version of the popular word game which consists of five SmartLink letter tiles that can communicate with one another using near field communication (NFC) to spell and score words. It's an interesting (and fun) way to build your Scrabble vocabulary for words ranging from two to five letters, but that's about it.
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.
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...
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...
Nope, it’s not the McDonalds menu, but close enough. Jim Blackhurst has mapped 11 million deaths onto a 3-dimensional point cloud for video game Just Cause 2. The result is an amazing virtual heat map of a world where every white dot represents a death on impact: The millions of deaths formulate a detailed outline of major structures and roads in the game, visually mapping "extractions" at every square inch. In most traditional games, this would not be possible—players more often than not sta...
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.
The aging and maturity of video games as a medium has lead to some unfortunate consequences. One of these, perhaps drawn from the film industry, is the spate of remakes that has overtaken the game market over the last few years. It hasn't been as bad as the remakeorama trend in cinema, but developers have recognized the value in releasing the same thing they already made and making more money off it. Below, a roundup of some remakes of classic games released for XBLA recently, some fantastic,...
Yesterday's installment of a Gamer's Guide to Video Game Software featured Unity 3D; today we'll be covering one of the oldest consumer game making engines, RPG Maker.
Del The Funky Homosapien ft. Khaos Unique "Proto Culture" Chorus:] Let me tell you about the Proto Culture
Are you familiar with Studio Ghibli? It's the dreamy Japanese animation studio responsible for anime classics Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, and Howl's Moving Castle. Regarded as highly inventive, serene, and spooky, Studio Ghibli puts out internationally renown films, loaded with magic, monsters and lovable creatures, such as Totoro (pictured to the right, and above).
No game is perfect. Well maybe except for Super Mario Brothers 3. In the last two posts I've been praising Tera but it's not without its shortcomings.
The Xbox 360 is America's video game system. It was designed in America, it has better market share in America than anywhere else, and it has the most overtly macho game catalog of any console. For many Xbox fanboys, gaming heaven is shooting hordes of really well-animated things in the most intuitive way possible. Trouble Witches NEO - Episode 1: Daughters of Amalgam, released last week on Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) for $10 by Japanese developer Adventure Planning Service, is a typical Xbox 360...
I was raised in the glory days of Japanese RPG's (JRPG's) on the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo. Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest were the biggest game franchises, and real gamers could debate their merits endlessly. We remained engaged in the stories of the games, even though the soldiers, princesses and schoolchildren all had spiky day-glo hair. We waded through hours of randomly triggered menu-based battles instead of playing Doom or baseball. And we loved every minute of it.
When you grab a video game off the shelves, finding love is probably not your end goal. Most games focus on letting the player shoot guys, order other guys to shoot guys, or build houses. Mass Effect 2 comes closer than most titles to offering virtual romance, but the relationships are shallow and strictly heterosexual. I found whoring my way around the Normandy much more satisfying as a gameplay option than developing an emotional connection to another character.
The classic Super Mario Bros is perhaps the most beloved video game on Earth. Almost daily, homages to Mario pop up on the web over and over and over again. Everybody loves the charming 2D world of Mario. But what would Mario look like in 3D… and moreover, what would Super Mario feel like as a First Person Shooter game?
Today, on his Tumblr, Notch shared two very odd—and, to all appearances, completely unrelated—fan-produced Minecraft ads.
Angry Birds finally hits LEGOs. It was only a matter of time before some LEGO maniac constructed Angry Birds from those popular little plastic building blocks. Stop motion brickfilms are sure to follow.
Has anyone actually used the Kinect for fitness purposes? If so, which games are the best?
Hey everyone! Welcome to Cheaters Prosper, the best place on WonderHowTo to share your tips, tricks, cheats, walkthroughs and more for the games that you love! I'll be updating this as often as I can.
These impressions are coming from a person completely new to the Final Fantasy Online world. Never played FF 11 or the FF 14 Beta. This game is not friendly to new people. The account creation is a Kafka like experience in things that don't make sense. For the game itself, the beginning tutorial is awful and does not really teach you the basics of combat. Here is a small breakdown of my opinions, with the good points first so that they don't get overshadowed by the negatives.
Final Fantasy 14 the MMO is now live. The special edition priced at $75 enables people to play eight days earlier than people getting the regular edition, which comes out on September 30th. Mine arrived yesterday and here are some pictures of what's inside the special edition version of the game:
Funny video, sort of like the Jay Leno street questions segment. IGN asks regular people in San Francisco what they think a game is about based on the box art. They showed people different games and they gave really frank answers.
If you want Star Wars, look to the games and not the movies to satisfy your hunger. The original Force Unleashed was a great game and a surprise hit. Later next year another Star Wars MMO will debut from Bioware. Maybe the Star Wars novels are also a good source for Star Wars material, but that's a realm I know nothing about.
Besides Killing Floor, I played a bit of The Witcher over the weekend. If you're curious about the game now is the perfect time. It's on sale on Steam, and the sequel is being released early next year. Though the game is three years old, it's still one of the best western rpgs on the PC. Here are some quick impressions on the game:
Sepp Blatter apologized to England and Mexico for the wrong calls, said goal line technology would be discussed in the future, but no instant replays.
Story, Characters, and Structure Note: