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.
Leather Goddesses of Phobos
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.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution (DX:HR) was the biggest AAA release two weeks ago, which has drawn rave reviews and sold well across the entire world. But if you've actually played the game, then you've seen something annoying that it and many other games share. It happens at the beginning of the game—every time you turn it on.
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?
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.
Digital distribution games are already firmly established on the PC, and they've infiltrated every present and next-gen console to some degree. Whether you like to play DOS, AAA, PC or indie games, there's a way to purchase most of them without leaving the comfort and warmth of your couch or desk.
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...
The Toronto International Film Festival is but a distant memory, though we are still getting compliments on all the awesome footage we shot, both for our Midnight Madness coverage and interviews with directors like Don Coscarelli and Rob Stewart. But here's the thing - we had big, large help. Even though we've been at it for 5 years, shooting an event like TIFF is never easy! It's hectic and unpredictable and as a result, getting good looking footage can be difficult if you don't have the rig...
Water purifiers are already portable, but not as portable as this crazy invention. Created by Marcus Triest and Ryan Lynch, the Solar Bag can be worn like a shoulder bag and holds up to 2.5 gallons of water. In a feat of ingenuity, the bag is designed to use sunlight to purify the stored water, allowing you to filter drinking water on the go. The bag is made from two layers of polyethylene—a clear, high-clarity layer on the outside and a black layer on the inside. The top layer allows the max...
New software technology allows cell phone and PDA users to download their medical records, making them quickly accessible in case of emergency. The new software, to be available in a year, can even display animated 3D scans. Computer scientists say the technology will also enable students to do research using their portable devices. The software will be available in 2007. Download medical records on a cell phone.
The NPD Group is a market research firm that issues the most trusted sales numbers for video games. They just released their second quarter 2011 report, and the trends it reveals confirm much of what we here have been speculating here at Indie Games Ichiban (and what we've been hoping for): downloadable games have risen, while full-box retail games have fallen—that is in the US, at least.
Minecraft may seem like a game for just hardcore gamers and computer nerds, but it's totally not. It can hook anyone and everyone, from casual gamers to online addicts to total newbies—it can even turn its users into serial killers. And now, Notch and his Mojang crew have made it possible for more people in the world to become Minecraft addicts who'll never leave their servers. A console version for the Xbox 360 will be available this winter, but for now you can all enjoy the cubed sandbox wo...
Most employed in the game industry have two-word job titles that start with “game”—game designer, game producer, game critic, game tester, etc. Usually, they’re one or the other, even though some can be both a game designer and a game tester or game critic and game tester. And rarely does one person get to call themselves a “game everything”. Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw is the exception.
Today concludes our Gamer's Guide to Video Game Software (see Part 1 & Part 2). In our final installment, we will shift away from engines toward video games that allow you to make your own games within them.
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.
Apple remains shrouded in mystery while continuing to sweep up small companies ahead of a rumored augmented reality headset launch.
Congratulations to Bryan Rowland for his entry, "Childhood", which has been chosen as the winner for this week's Phone Snap Silhouette Challenge!
The idea of lasagna mixed with cupcakes may sound gnarly, but you can relax, the phrase "cupcake" simply refers to how these individually-sized lasagna bites are portioned. As cute as our favorite pizza cups, this clever recipe makes for a great portable lunch. The secret ingredient? Wonton wrappers.
PDF's are handy ways to send and receive documents so that you never lose formatting. But, did you know that you can view these files in places other than your computer or smartphone? In this tutorial, learn how to check out PDF documents using your PlayStation Portable! Your PSP is like a mini computer in your hand and can do a lot more than support video games.
Says Metafilter, "YouTube has launched Disco. From TestTube - the GoogleLabs of YouTube - it's like Pandora lite with videos. Create and share playlists, or just search for an artist and see what it comes up with."
Other than providing a convenient vessel for your carbonated beverages so that they don't go completely flat, aluminum soda cans are also quite useful for a number of other things once they're completely empty.
Film canisters, remember those? Those black containers with the grey lids that used to contain... camera film?
Step 1: VLC Media Player Can Do More Than Most People Know, and It's Free and It's Portable. This is from one of my old how to posts. I thought some of you might find it useful.
Back in the days of NES and 8-bit gaming, I used to be a huge Castlevania fan. And it looks like I wasn't the only one. However, unlike me, gamer Nick "Nario" Hagman just couldn't let go of his Simon Belmont fascination that easy. Nario recently spent over 100 hours in Minecraft over 37 consecutive days recreating the original Castlevania game—in its entirety!
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.
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...
Epic Games announced today that the free version of Unreal Engine 3, Unreal Development Kit or UDK, is now compatible with Mac OS X. Apple users will now have access to arguably the most powerful piece of free game development software available in almost exactly the same way as their PC counterparts, minus some small tweaks.
This infographic from SingleGrain aptly and succinctly describes the primary differences between Facebook and Google+. Which social network will reign supreme?
Japanese game shows are legendary for being more extreme (and absurd) than their American counterparts. Chris Farley immortalized the concept in a classic SNL sketch, and MXC and Ninja Warrior have both achieved great success dubbed and subtitled on American television. A big part of their appeal is how demanding they are compared to U.S. game shows. Only a few people have actually won Ninja Warrior in its 23 seasons on the air, and MXC is a constant comedy of failure and pain.
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.
Video games consoles have long wanted to be more than just consoles. Nintendo Japan called the NES the Famicom because they wanted to make it the sole family computer. Obviously that didn't work out, and most efforts to make consoles into all-in-one entertainment systems have had similar fates. Sony has done the best job with the Playstation consoles, probably because they have experience with other types of electronics that most video game companies do not.
Dual nurses? Random transformer shirt guy? White collar fighter? Fatso macho man? Super Mario? Ah, you must be playing Dong Dong Never Die!
In 2008, Audiosurf came out on Steam, creating the psychedelic music game genre. If you haven't played it in the intervening three years, you're missing out on one of the coolest things in video games. The player selects any MP3 on their computer, then the game builds a unique level based on that song, which the player must then navigate whilst playing a block-matching, Tetris-like puzzle game. It's an incredibly compelling audiovisual experience, one with immense replay value and surprisingl...
Some may say riding tandem is reserved for girly girls, seniors and little kids, but anybody would be hard pressed to call brotherly X-Gamer duo Colton and Caleb Moore sissies. At first thought, executing a two-men-clutching-each-other-on-a-snowmobile-backflip might be construed as somewhat odd, but the risk of two dudes potentially falling to their death is two times more thrilling than just one.
The results are in! Here is the list of contests Wizard101 was nominated for. Here are the ones it won (It's constantly being updated!):
It's that time of year again! Time to vote for that special best game of the year! But this time, it's the best game of the decade! Let's all give a woot to WIZARD101!!!
A November release week in May It used to be that games marked to be blockbusters (expected to sell more than a million in their first month) would always be released during the holiday September to December season. November was always the month companies chose to release their best game. This release model worked fine until the last few years, when too many games were being released in November and companies started to see diminishing returns on their titles because of the release rush.
Red Dead Redemption LA Times Article http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-reddead-20100425,0,3266497.story
