What's your highest scoring game of Scrabble? Since starting this Scrabble World, I've been able to break 500 points on a regular basis. This year I've even managed to break the 600-point barrier a couple times. If you ask me, that's a pretty hefty sum to score in one game, but I'm not on par with the professionals yet.
Adventure gamers would love to know what was the first adventure game. Well, it was a 1970s computer game titled "Colossal Cave Adventure", also known as "Adventure". Designed by Will Crowther, the game was in FORTRAN and initially had 700 lines of code and data, which was later expanded to 3,000 lines of code and more than 1000 lines of data.
Dungeon Defenders is finally out on the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3. We've previously featured the tower defense RPG, and if you haven't had a chance to check out the PAX interview with Trendy Entertainment, now would be a good time.
Welcome to Minecraft World! Check out our advanced tutorials and come play on our free server. You may know that Minecraft is an excellent creative tool, but perhaps less well known are the fascinating array of redstone powered games that have been made by players like you.
Dungeon Defenders is the most exciting craft game on the Fall 2011 release schedule. I got a chance to play it at PAX in August and interviewed developers Trendy Entertainment last month. After more than a year of publishing difficulty and delay, the game finally came out on PSN, XBLA and Steam. I put about 20 hours into the XBLA version over the past weekend, beating all the campaign maps and racking up a huge pile of in-game money. It is not a perfect game. But it is a huge, challenging, an...
The Mark of the Assassin DLC for Dragon Age 2 has opened the door to even more achievements in the popular series by Bioware. In this Achievement Hunter segment, the hunters show you how to unlock both the "Chasing the Game" achievement, as well as "The Take" in the Xbox 360 version of the game.
Last weekend the 2011 World Scrabble Championship was held at the Hilton Hotel in Warsaw, Poland. There were 106 players competing from 44 countries for the $20,000 first place prize and title of World Scrabble Champion.
If you haven't participated in this week's Math Craft project on the platonic solids, maybe this will inspire you to do so.
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.
Hideo Kojima is one of the biggest names in Japanese game design. He's the man behind every Metal Gear game, each of which has been beautiful but divisive. He's an auteur, a rarity in AAA game design, managing business, design, and programming for Kojima Productions. Last week he made a rare public appearance at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, which contains the school's video game programs, and gave a 90-minute talk about his career, influences, and the specifics of his new Fox game design...
The Netherlands are a hotbed of indie game development, which seems appropriate for such a brilliant and eccentric little nation. Two man Dutch indie developer Vlambeer have found themselves in the news more often than most companies of their size, thanks to two great games and a third on the way.
PC Gamer represents all that was awesome about games journalism in the '90s, now sadly diminished. Brilliant, funny, full of integrity, and solid print sales were always present, and with the tragic exception of the latter, still are. Video game magazines were hit harder than nearly any other magazine vertical when the internet began its uncoordinated, but inevitable assault on print media. Magazines are now struggling to find their place in a world filled with more competitors than paying cu...
The end game is a very important aspect of playing Scrabble. If you have just a few letters left on your rack and there are none left in the draw bag, but you're currently losing the game, you still might have a chance to win if you play your cards (er… tiles) right. No matter if you're playing a casual game at home with a friend or competing against diehards in club or tournament games, the scoring process at the end provides the same results.
The Humble Indie Bundle has become like an unpredictable little gamer Christmas. It helps indie developers get their games exposure, helps gamers get cheap DRM-free games via the most user-friendly online purchasing process ever, and helps the world at large by raising money for Child's Play and EFF.
We've covered Glitch before, the oddball indie social MMO involving the minds behind Flickr, Katamari Damacy, and Game Neverending. Yesterday, the game officially left Beta and entered general release. Anyone can create an account and start playing for free, although there are freemium elements in the form of real money purchasable clothing items.
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...
For more than a decade, Interplay was arguably the best video game publisher in America. Their list of games is a who's-who of the most creative and forward thinking games of the '90s, including everything fromOut of This World to Alone in the Dark to Earthworm Jim to Descent. They've been around since 1983, but have fallen on hard times since 1997, when they became a public company. They were acquired by a French publisher who then went bankrupt. They were forced to close their internal deve...
Games have been getting shorter in length over the last decade. RPGs like The Elder Scrolls series are still tremendously long, but most single-player game experiences have gotten shorter as production values, costs, and manpower requirements to create them have gone up. It seems that elite Japanese developers Level-5 and Brownie Brown have decided to completely disregard that trend for their forthcoming collaborative effort Professor Layton and the Last Specter, which will feature what might...
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.
For this week's review round-up, we bring you two games from opposite sides of the indie world. One is a free online hybrid shooter/platformer combining elements of Team Fortress 2 and Minecraft. The other involves driving jeeps around and shooting things as fast as possible. Both are great.
Four years ago Mind Candy was a pretty small game company. They were best known for their revolutionary but short lived ARG Perplex City, and had no other successful franchises to fall back on when that ended. Their plan to save it? Start a free online social game for children ages 7-12 called Moshi Monsters, where kids can create monster pets, raise them, and socialize with one another in a controlled, safe environment.
We love you. Yes, you, esteemed reader. Your attention is what keeps Indie Games Ichiban World going, and we'd like to thank you for that, every single week. How? With $10!
Dead Island is known for having the most successful trailer of any game ever. It was a beautiful cinematic experience. But sadly, as details of the game itself emerged, and after it was shown at conventions around the world, doubt began to set in about whether this five-year-long project would live up to the hype.
Studio Ghibli is the most well known anime feature film studio in the world. For over 26 years, their films have represented the peak of mainstream anime, and since Disney began distributing their films in America back in 1997, they've become a household name here in the States—not just in Japan. In 2001, they even bested Disney and Pixar, taking home a Best Animated Feature Film Academy Award for Spirited Away. Eight years later, Ghibli and Fukuoka-based developer Level-5 announced that they...
Danish developer Playdead has made only one game, a little indie, side-scrolling, puzzle platformer called Limbo. It just happens to be far and away the best video game of that prominent genre (and perhaps the best indie game period) on the Xbox 360, and quite possibly for PlayStation 3 and PC, too. Critical and financial success has followed in droves, and today... Playdead has taken advantage of that success and indie-fied themselves even further by purchasing back the portion of the compan...
The small size of most indie game development teams is a strength, but also a weakness. It allows them to take risks and explore revolutionary ideas that a larger company could never justify to its shareholders, but also means they must navigate the game development labyrinth with minimal help, taking much longer than those with big development teams. Some of the most exciting indie games currently in development have been so for years, or look like they will be.
Every year at the big video game trade shows around the world, like E3 and gamescon, the big three console makers each do a hot-ticket exclusive press conference to let the media know what's coming for their system. Computer games have no such press conference. Who would give it if they did?
Two Worlds was known as a promising but ultimately terribly buggy open world RPG game. Here are two players trying their best to make due with the game's horse.
Video games are one of the best non-medical things that have ever happened to sick children. They are stimulating, entertaining and require very little physical strength to play, which makes them perfect for those suffering physical maladies.
Crysis 2 is the current standard for high-quality graphics in video games. No other game looks so smooth, so colorful, so... ultra-real. German developer Crytek has built their reputation on PC game technology to the limit, and the CryENGINE 3 graphics engine they used to make Crysis 2 might be the most powerful tool for creating 3D video game graphics on Earth. As of yesterday, it's also free for anyone, yourself included, to download from Crytek's website here.
The last week has been a trying one for me. On Sunday, there were four computers in my office, three of which were broken. The fourth was not really a computer, but more of a collection of parts that were cobbled together for the purpose of constructing a PC that would sneer derisively at the mere mention of turning down any game's ambient occlusion settings.
This week, we saw the implementation of collapsed comments, Google+ games were rolled out to everyone, and yesterday, there were several more announcements of enhanced features and tweaks.
Most indie game developers will never see a million dollars in their bank accounts, and I certainly doubt that Eul, the anonymous developer responsible for the original version of Defense of the Ancients (DotA), expected to. But now even the fans can earn a little green. Some lucky and talented DotA players are about to win $1,000,000 for playing the unreleased sequel to the free unsupported Warcraft III mod from 2003.
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...
Yes, I'm one of those annoying people who sign up just to promote their own game. I'll be brief. I turn famous novels into games. The latest is the Count of Monte Cristo, the classic story of revenge. Visit EnterTheStory.com for video, demo, screenshots, all the usual stuff.
Shadows of the Dammed (360/PS3) is a polarizing game. It's not shy of being crass and crude. Go ahead and judge the game by the following examples (click to enlarge):
After a decent amount of downtime, one of the best indie game sites on the internet has finally relaunched! PixelProspector is a one-man gaming blog and YouTube channel devoted to the weird and beautiful world of indie games. In the first half of 2010, it received a huge boost in popularity from its video 235 Free Indie Games in 10 Minutes, a hypnotic montage of the best indie games the site had to offer at that point. And to celebrate the relaunch of the blog, which now has an improved desig...
The UK print media has been yellower than the middle traffic light for a long time now. The News of the World scandal has cast that into particularly sharp relief of late. The Sun, one of the biggest newspapers in the United Kingdom, demonstrated it again last week when they ran the front-page headline "DEATH BY XBOX".
Since the beginning of last year, every six months or so the fine folks at Wolfire Games have gathered indie developers together to release a combo gaming pack called Humble Indie Bundle. Not only are the included games good, but the way one buys them is what makes Humble Indie Bundle one of the coolest products in games. Even better, Humble Indie Bundle #3 just came out last Tuesday and is available here for two weeks only.
Most stateside gamers have probably never heard of Level-5. If they have, it's more than likely due to the charming and maddening line of Nintendo DS puzzle games, Professor Layton. Some might even remember Dark Cloud and its sequel from the early days of the PlayStation 2, and all eight of you PSP owners in the U.S. might recognize the epic Jeanne d'Arc. These games alone make Level-5 a noteworthy company, but they've quietly surpassed "noteworthy" status to become one of the largest and gre...
