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News: Next Professor Layton Game to Include 100-Hour Long Bonus RPG

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...

News: Amazing Solar-Powered Printer Uses Sunlight to Sculpt 3D Objects Out of Sand

No matter if you've used one or not, you've got to admit that 3D printers are pretty darn awesome, especially the self-replicating ones that extrude molten plastic and the shoebox-sized versions that use mesmerizing stereolithography to build tiny objects layer by layer. But what's even cooler? A solar-powered printer that uses the sun's energy to melt sand and make 3D objects out of glass.

News: Danes One Step Closer to DIY Suborbital Spaceflight

They've been at it for a few years now, but the crazy group of amateur rocket scientists who call themselves Copenhagen Suborbitals have triumphed over adversity, successfully launching their DIY rocket nearly 2 miles into the sky last Friday. The privately funded, non-profit aims to one day send human beings into suborbital space on the cheap, without the need of government budgets and administration.

How To: Teaching Nerds How NOT to Love with Silver Dollar Games

I am the sort of man whom game companies fall all over themselves to seduce. I'm sweaty, pale, awkward, and spend too much money on video games. There are many of us, especially among XBox 360 owners. We are the most stereotypically "gamer" group of console owners. The XBox 360 doesn't have motion control like the Wii or a blu-ray player like the Playstation 3. It just plays games really well. That's why hardcore gamers like me prefer it amongst all the consoles, and probably why Silver Dolla...

How To: Create basic animation in Photoshop CS3 Extended

For video post-production, Photoshop CS3 Extended now includes video-format and layer support to edit video files frame by frame. The resulting video can then be exported to a variety of formats including Flash. In this Photoshop CS3 video tutorial you will learn how to create a simple animation in Photoshop CS3 Extended. Make sure to hit "play tutorial" in the top left corner of the video to start the video. There is no sound, so you'll need to watch the pop-up directions. Create basic anima...

Books: Digital vs. Analog

Since the invention of the printing press, books have been a dominant and iconic paradigm in our culture and throughout the world. During my years in elementary and high school, the digital world was on the rise sparking the conversation: Are Books Obsolete. Over the last year (or 2 at the most) that the term "Book" has started to make the shift from a physical object to the concept of a written work.

News: The Other Side of Fashion

The United States is a hierarchical country where the weak ones are at the bottom and the powerful ones are at the top. Garment workers are at the bottom of the list although they are the most important. Without them there would be no fashion industry. They sew and cut the garments that people buy, the raiment that models wear on the runways. After the garments are sewn, factory owners send the garments to contractors to get make the clothing. Contractors make sure the garment workers sew the...

How To: How This Newly Discovered Amazonian Bacteria Is the Secret Key to Biodegrading Plastic

Since the rise of private property and industrial production, modern capitalism has been on a undeniable crash course with Mother Nature. It's no so much that we'll end up murdering the entire planet, but just that the planet will quietly smother us with a pillow of famine, heat, cold and hurricanes. We over-farm land and replace the nutrients in the soil with oil. To package our oil-based produce, we wrap them in synthetic oil-based plastics, soon to be discarded in a trash heap or ocean.

Scrabble Challenge #17: How Many Words Can You Find in TURKEY?

The big day may be over, but the weekend is still full of Thanksgiving spirit. And so is this week's puzzle. But let's keep it short this time, because we should all be taking this time to play a real game of Scrabble with friends and family. I was thinking of making a puzzle about edible birds in general, but practically every bird is edible, meaning there's a lot of avian-related words. Since the turkey is such a big part of Thanksgiving, let's just stick to that...

News: Moshi Monsters Rise from Indie Game to Kiddie Empire

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.

News: Life Simulates Video Games in FPS Russia – And Not in a Bad Way

It's one of the greatest fears among parents and politicians the world over—video game violence spilling out into reality. The shooting at Columbine and the more recent tragedy in Utøya, Norway have touched deep nerves in Western consciousness. And that's why there's a giant pink, juggling elephant in the corner of every production meeting and press conference for each shooter game that comes out.

News: Famous Indie Game Makers Immortalized in 'The Indie Game Legend'

The indie game scene is constantly expanding, but in 2008, Minecraft, Braid and Angry Birds had not been released, along with all of the other indie games that established the financial viability of the format. Indie games were the all-but-exclusive purview of free Flash game sites and the proud users of TIGsource.com. The Independent Gaming Source is a massive forum for indie game developers to share their projects with like-minded individuals, while seeking help and approval of their games.

News: Project Zomboid Has More Problems than the Guy in this Screenshot

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.

News: Friday Indie Game Review Roundup: An Amnesiac Retrospective

Three years ago, Double Fine productions held an in-house event called the Amnesia Fortnight. The company was split into four teams, each of which set out to spend two weeks developing an idea for a small game and present it to the other groups at the end of the duration. All of the ideas turned out to be winners, and founder/owner Tim Schafer secured publishing deals for all four games to be released on a combination of XBLA and PSN. In honor of the excellent Trenched becoming the third game...

News: Indie and Mainstream Online Games Shut Down by LulzSec

Anybody who spends most of their day on the internet should know all about lulz. Lulz are most often jokes made at the expense of web users, as popularized on 4Chan. Today, a consortium of hackers called LulzSec is attempting (and in some cases succeeding) in efforts to shut down some of the games that offer web users a giant share of their online fun. World of Warcraft, League of Legends, EVE Online, and Bethesda Softworks have all been targeted by LulzSec's hacking efforts in the last week,...

How To: Patent an Idea (Creating and Selling Your Concepts)

Want to know how to patent an idea, but you just don't know how to go about doing it? It doesn't take a lot of money to get a provisional patent. The real thing you want to know is the process of taking an idea that you have all the way up to getting it patent. I will take you through each step from the beginning when you have that great idea all the way to getting your invention marketed.You Need an Idea (Obviously)Your idea doesn't have to be earth changing. It just needs to be something pe...

How To: Advertise Efficiently on Facebook

Marketers from Facebook who design ads for advertisers can ask them to switch over to higher end product in which Facebook would be designing or hosting themes based on their products. This product theme will have a separate scroll area where advertisers (after buying rights from Facebook) can scroll latest development happening in their company or the latest offers with which company is coming out. Through above setup Facebook gets fees for hosting personalized theme as well as providing a s...

How To: Build & Hide a Campfire from Your Enemies — The Dakota Fire Pit

Fire.  It’s everywhere— always has been.  From the Ordovician Period where the first fossil record of fire appears to the present day everyday uses of the Holocene.  Today, we abundantly create flames (intentionally or unintentionally) in power plants, extractive metallurgy, incendiary bombs, combustion engines, controlled burns, wildfires, fireplaces, campfires, grills, candles, gas stoves and ovens, matches, cigarettes, and the list goes on... Yet with our societies' prodigal use of fire, t...

How To: Recognize Crowd Control - Part 3

For our final part of recognizing crowd control, we shall look at the mind. It's the most complicated thing in the universe, but also the most easily influenced. What makes us to gullible? What methods to commercials, companies and the media use to influence our position on things? These are just a few of the questions we will answer.