Electronic Arts is the biggest game publisher in the world, and have been for years. And yet, their only successful internally developed games nowadays are the EA Sports mega-franchises like Madden. Most of their success has stemmed from their ability to buy other companies on their way up, squeeze the creativity out of them, and then sell them to someone else or just let them go. This week they made their largest acquisition ever when they purchased PopCap Games for $750 million upfront—as m...
Although circles are Google+'s answer to the problem of social network relationship management, that's not the only thing it's good for. People on Google+ are using circles for all sorts of creative activities, some of which aren't obvious as first glance.
You've finally got an invite into Google+. Now what? At first glance, things can be a bit overwhelming. We've got some great tips to help you get started.
As advanced gaming systems continue to evolve, older classics like the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) are one step closer to extinction. They're rotting in the basements of gamers. They're gathering dust at the local pawn shop. Or worse... being thrown out in the trash like a used up condom. But not everybody is getting rid of their NES—or more specifically, their NES controllers.
There is a difference between what is possible, what should be done and what an owner manager may want to do. Decide how you want to handle payroll then determine if your desires and best practices are in agreement. Before I point out the decisions that need to be made, let me make two points. First, all personnel for your business do not have to be employees. Some entities can be run with all non-employee personnel or a combination of both. This is one of the reasons why doing a business pla...
Making a video game requires an incredible amount of work. It requires people skilled in many disciplines to work together for thousands of hours merging visual art, computer programming, game design, sound design, and music composition into a fun game. The Indie Stone is a Scottish indie development studio started, like so many others, by industry vets who were tired of corporate restrictions and wanted to make the crazy games they had always imagined.
UPDATE: Winner announced. See the winning photo here. This week's Giveaway Tuesday is all about macro photography. The prize is a combo lens for your camera phone that can shoot BOTH macro and wide angle—but as far as the entries go, we only want to see your extra close-up shots.
If bourbon is a man's drink, what better flavor to infuse it with than bacon? The combination tastes just as delicious as it sounds—a smokey, salty aftertaste lingering after each sip of deep, rich bourbon.
One of my biggest frustrations with Google+ right now is the inability to search my stream, as well as the lack of any bookmarking features. To find posts I want to refer to, I either have to type in the name of the person who posted the status, or I have to keep hitting the "More" button to find what I need. Both ways are inefficient.
The Dragon is a really neat Model by Robert ("Bob") Neal. It starts with the traditional birdbase and just adds a few creases for a really cool dragon. The model is intermediate, so if you are new to folding maybe you want to try something simpler like the crane first.
Introduction Halo: Reach is Bungie's latest and final addition to the franchise. Microsoft has claimed the title and from now on 343 Industries will be working on the Halo franchise. In my opinion, Bungie's last game is the best out of all of them. These are some tactics and bits of advice that I've picked up.
Localizing a game is a task many do not fully understand. Not only do localizers have to translate the games they work on into a different language, but they have to translate it into a different culture as well. Oftentimes art assets, plot elements, and menu systems are changed to suit regional sensitivities. Japanese media tends to have their common drunkard characters removed or censored in American versions, for example.
It's called a Quick Response code, but most know it simply as QR code, a matrix barcode dedicated to the world of smartphones. The information contained within the square black modules could be text, a URL, vCard, or some other kind of data. And even though mobile tagging has been around for eight years, it's just now spreading like wildfire across the globe, being incorporated into artistic portraits and wall art. And most recently... "social clothing".
Stewart Butterfileld is one of the last great old-fashioned tech billionaires. He founded Flickr, and then sold the company to Yahoo! for a stupendous amount of money in 2005. Like Mark Cuban and others before him, he was left wondering what to do with the rest of his long and fabulously wealthy life. Cuban bought the Dallas Mavericks and turned them from unabashed losers into beloved champions. Butterfield decided to try his hand at game design (something he had attempted with the ambitious ...
Google started culling Google+ accounts. There are two main targets: businesses and those who are using pseudonyms. For businesses, Google is promising to provide their own version of Facebook Pages, which will be released later this year. For those who use pseudonyms, they aren't so lucky. According to Google+'s community standards, users must "use the name your friends, family, or co-workers usually call you". The purpose of this rule is ostensibly to discourage spammers and people from set...
Everybody has them. You can say you don't, but it's probably a lie. There's at least one person on your mobile phone that you never, ever want to pick up the phone for. When they call, you cringe and immediately hit the silent button. They're annoying. Overbearing. You hate them, but yet you love them enough to not delete them entirely from your contact list. Maybe if they called just once a week, but once a day is just too much for you to handle. What do you do?
With Microsoft's release of the Kinect SDK, things seem to have slowed down a bit in the world of Kinect development. Have developers exhausted the uses of Kinect already? No way! Four researchers at Cornell University have created an AI-based system on the Kinect that can recognize what you're doing, and maybe even who is doing it.
Creamy beautiful whipped soaps made from scratch to use instead of bar soaps. A creamy dreamy texture will make you never want to use bar soap again. Your can check them out HERE
Deep in their heart of hearts, most Americans dream of having their car festooned with missile launchers and machine guns. Anyone who cuts them off or looks at them funny in traffic could be dispensed with quick and extreme justice, leaving a real-life James Bond and his passengers free to pursue their American dreams faster than everyone else. Racing games and shooting games are among the two most popular types of video games. So why aren't there more games where one can race cars and shoot ...
There's no doubt about it—the most elite military force in the United States is hands down, the Navy SEALs. They can operate at sea, in the air and on land, and their ability to conduct missions underwater separates them from most other military units in the world. They've fought in World War II, Vietnam, Granada, Afghanistan and Iraq, but have gained some serious hype in recent years thanks to SEAL Team Six, aka DEVGRU, aka NSWDG, who saved Captain Richard Phillips from Somali Pirates in 200...
In this article, you will learn how to move your Minecraft save files. This knowledge is very useful if you want to give your friends a copy of your offline world, or play on one of theirs. You can also make backups, or move your offline world to your server folder to play online.
Much of the press around the launch of Google+ has pitted it squarely against Facebook. This was highlighted painfully for Facebook with their (misguidedly dubbed) "awesome" announcements yesterday. Their launch of a new design, video calling, and group chat might have been exciting, had not Google announced its Hangout feature for Google+ a week earlier (and by the way, introduced their own 1-on-1 video calling inside of Gmail way back in 2008). Hangouts took video calling a step further and...
After the media outcry of Google Buzz's privacy issues, Google has set its goals on making the privacy parameters of Google+ simple to learn and as explicitly manageable as possible. No small feat.
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...
How much money do you think you're worth? Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? Think again. In the world of shopping centers and barcodes, you may only be worth a few bucks.
Mediocre free Flash game websites are all too common. Many of them thrive off peddling the same few popular games to fans who have slim cause to pick one over the other. They thrive off the indifference of casual gamers and an environment that does not have to stand out to survive, only appeal to the lowest common gaming denominator with tower defense clones and brightly colored Peggle knockoffs. In that context, what Nitrome is doing seems downright commendable.
A couple months ago, the world was supposed to end. It didn't. But that didn't stop the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from warning citizens of one global possibility besides complete destruction—ZOMBIES. They used the farcical flesh-eating living dead as an excuse to teach you about the necessity of real-life emergency planning.
+Randall Munroe, the man behind the web's most popular web comic, XKCD, has always had a knack for getting to the heart of the larger social issues on the web. During the 1st 48 hours after Google+ started letting non-Googlers in, one of the most shared posts within its private walls was his latest comic about Google+:
Which one do you prefer? Via +Vic Gondotra.
One of the things I consistently notice amongst fellow internet users is that many people don't know how to properly search for stuff. Google may have served you well in the past, but I'm going to share a few little tricks with you to help make your search results even spiffier.
Carpe Fulgur translates to something along the lines of "Seize the Lightning" in Latin. Sometimes that is enacted with golf clubs by idiots. But the three intrepid indie video game localizers who work under that name are trying to do it the right way: metaphorically. They are translating and publishing Japanese games for the Americans market—games that have seldom been seen before because every other company thinks it's mad to release them here.
As Google+ is still in its Limited Field Trial phase, joining can feel quite lonely. You can't exactly get all your friends and family in during the brief periods when the invitation system opens up. You can, however, add several interesting people to your "Following" Circle to keep up with developments as they happen.
+Tom Anderson of MySpace has been very active on Google+ over the first week, and he's not shy with his thoughts on the evolution of the industry he once owned. Here's his take on this morning's Facebook announcement and Mark Zuckerberg's response when asked about Google+.
It's no secret. Professional video editors everywhere are irate at the newest edition to Apple's popular non-linear video editing software, Final Cut Pro X. As of right now, Final Cut Pro X has 503 five-star ratings in the Mac App Store. Not bad. But it also has 671 one-star ratings and 414 users who aren't sure what they think. It's such a bad update that it even earned itself a skit on Conan.
Circle = List Share = Post
With the Google+ team members being generous and free-flowing with advice on some of the more advanced features of Google+, we'll be publishing a weekly summary of the latest pro tips. Chances are, if you've been following the Google+ team members, you've seen some of these already but you don't have them all in one handy place.
Google+ is the most exciting new social network to come around this decade, and the only product with a chance of challenging the monopolies we know as Facebook and Twitter. As an Internet addict, I've joined every major social network there is - from Friendster (who?) to MySpace (so ugly) to LinkedIn (yawn) to Twitter (irritating) and Facebook (annoying to manage). Competition is delicious, especially between well-financed monopolies. Google+ really seems to have identified an Achille's heel...
Glasses-free 3D is devouring the United States, one mobile device at a time. First, gamers experienced autostereoscopic play with the Nintendo 3DS, then smartphone users got the HTC EVO 3D, and now laptops users can enjoy glasses-free 3D technology with Toshiba's upcoming Qosmio F750, available this August.
Have you ever wanted to make your own Minecraft server on Windows? This tutorial will teach you how, without having to download Hamachi.
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.
