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...
Every Friday here at Indie Games Ichiban, I will feature a sampling of reviews from the mountains of indie and vintage games that have crossed my internet connection in the past week. Each week will have some sort of theme, this week being old school turn-based strategy games available on Steam.
Finally, summer is just around the corner! And while there are delicious fruits and vegetables available nearly every season, summer yields some of the very best picks. Equip yourself with one or more of the tools below before your next trip to the farmers market.
Over the past few months I've written up several helpful How-To guides to help you with various FarmVille related issues. It's about time I put them all in one place so they are easy to find, learn from and share! It has been a pleasure writing for you all and I do hope I have helped you find ways to meet your personal gaming goals!
Nope, this isn't a flash game version of SCRABBLE. There's already one of those (and a multitude of imitations) for the Apple iPhone, iPod, and Facebook. This is an electronic game, and it's not a "handheld" game like the SCRABBLE Pocket Pogo Touch Screen Game (pictured right). It's an entirely new way to play everybody's favorite word game, and it's called SCRABBLE Flash (BOGGLE Flash outside of the U.S. and Canada).
Review: Marmaduke I liked the part where the fake dogs danced.
Review: Get Him to the Greek So much puke
I love books. I've loved books before I could even read them. I remember spending any free moments poring over the pictures, trying to pick out the words. I can recall the first triumphant moments when words began to make sense to me. I grew up in a house filled with books and with parents who read me The Hobbit, Little House in the Big Woods, The Chronicles of Narnia and so many others. I brought stacks home from the library, browsed through my dad's office shelves, used up the batteries in ...
Politics(the Government) is built to accomplish a few things: maintaining order, providing necessities, operating businesses (stimulating the economy, trade), maintaining public relations and the most important of all, protecting the rights of the individuals it governs. It has a broad role, and as such, an array of bills, laws and rules to regulate itself and the country.
Hey guys, remember the 'booms' in Clintonville, IN? Well, they were back the previous night. And they were louder than before. What's going on? The mayor and police would love to dismiss it as geological activity, but results show otherwise:
Hello, nubile young Photoshop explorers! As we all know, besides design, Photoshop is best used for revenge, as will be demonstrated below. This is my ex-girlfriend, Cassandra. She dumped me because I had "poor bone structure." I'll bone her structure! Well, not anymore, I guess.
Submit The Rattling Wall is accepting sophisticated short fiction, travel essays, and poetry submissions for Issue 4 until April 1, 2012. The literary journal accepts simultaneous submissions, but asks to be contacted immediately if work that a writer has submitted for review has been accepted for publication elsewhere.
Being from the south I am partial to cobbler, especially peach cobbler. However I had some cherries on hand that needed to be used before they went bad so decided to give this a try. The end result was a sweet decadent dessert with just the right amount of tartness. Was great served warm with vanilla ice cream but just as good the next day cold.
Representative Henry A. Waxman is in charge of California’s 30th Congressional district. He is part of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Ever since he began his career in the government business, he has been involved with health and environmental issues. He represents cities such as Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Agoura Hills, Calabasas, Hidden Hills, Malibu, Westlake Village and West Hollywood, as well as such areas of Los Angeles as Beverly-Fairfax, Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, Beverl...
During our final week here at Edit on a Dime, I looked at two different ways of making those cool photo-motion cinemagraphs, and tried editing on an iPhone for free:
It's been a Consumer Electronics Show bonanza at Edit on a Dime this week. Here's the stories we looked at over the last seven days.
Cinemagraphs are those incredible video-photo-mashups that isolate movement in a moving frame. Don't know what I'm talking about? Then check out these fantastic examples on If We Don't Remember Me.
Today I'll be detailing how to use the two YouTube Video Editors to enhance the quality of your work, as well as going over a simple workaround to save time uploading the variety of clips you'll need to assemble a more complicated piece of filmmaking.
As a kid I fell in love with stop-motion animation while watching the superb mastery of Ray Harryhausen (who didn’t? I mean, skeletons! Fighting!).
First, we'd like to congratulate Marek Antozi, the winner of our very last Giveaway Tuesdays! Photo Challenge. Thankful for Dialogue is a concept most family members can relate to—the occasional stressful Thanksgiving bickering and inevitable resolution is not uncommon, after all. ;)
Hello, my fellow cell phonographers! In today’s day and age, cell phone photography is growing rapidly with the advancement of smartphones and the constant stream of new multi-featured camera phone and photo editing apps.
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...
More password cracking action from Null Byte! Today we aren't going to be cracking passwords per se, rather, we are going to learn the basics of generating rainbow tables and how to use them. First, let's go over how passwords are stored and recovered.
From The Day of the Tentacle to Syberia, adventure games have come a long way. We now have games developed exclusively for the Google Android platform and iPhone. The newest game is the episodic Fragment 3D, a point and click adventure game focusing on the adventures of a robot who is left to rust in the underworld. You will have to help him escape and help him unearth secrets and conspiracies.
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.
If you haven't had a pile of pipe and fittings to play with before, it's hard to see what is so cool about a plain, plastic pipe. All it does in the house is carry the poop away. Really, who cares?
Thanks to all who participated in our inaugural IGI Contest. Our goal was to come up with a new word for medium-priced downloadable games, and we have done just that. After reviewing the flurry of last-minute submissions, a winner has emerged. Congratulations, Mike Grimaldi! We will contact you to determine how you would like to receive your $10.
Luckily for Los Angeles residents, Southern California's most populated county is chock full of amazing Chinese food. Granted it's a far drive for many—the best restaurants are in Alhambra and Monterey Park, which fall within the far eastern realm of the county—but regardless, I've found more amazing Chinese restaurants in L.A. than New York City.
There are a lot of fantastic video games out there. Indie Games Ichiban's bread and butter is making sure that you steer clear of the bad ones and embrace the good. But really, the biggest goal here is to help everyone have more fun. To that end, today a game is not recommended, but an event. If you like games—not just video games—but tabletop, board and even hopscotch, then PAX Prime is one of the best events you could possibly go to.
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?
If you're the proud owner of a Canon EOS DSLR, then you'll be glad to know that you no longer have to use EOS Utility on your computer to enable remote live view shooting with your camera. Now, all you need is your Android equipped smartphone (sorry iPhone users) and a new mobile app called DSLR Controller from Chainfire.
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".
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 ...
For a long time, video games manuals were serious business. Especially for strategy games and RPGs on the PC, the manuals would often run to a hundred or more full-color pages in length. They explained in vivid and well-written detail the history of the game world and every facet of the gameplay system. There were pages upon pages of appendices explaining the statistics of every unit, faction, and terrain type. They were majestic, and I would spend an hour or more poring over each one before ...
Death is tough for the living, and those who mourn do all sorts of odd things to cope with it. Some keep mementos, some build towering statues, others create memorial paintings or write sad songs, all of which are healthy in moderation. Honoring the dead has been around for so long, it's part of what makes us human. Recently, the practice of memorializing the dead has spread from the arts, religion, and ceremonial burial to video games.
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.
Oktoberfest is the world's largest annual beer festival located in Munich, Germany! The festival starts in late September and lasts until early October -approx 16-18 days. Oktoberfest is an important part of the Bavarian Culture and has been going on for over 200 years. Each year the festival is held in an area called Theresienwiese, but often referred to as Wiesen for short. Wisen is located near the center of Munich. Oktoberfest is held as one of the world's largest fairs with over 5 millio...
Yesterday, Electronic Arts had a nice sale on Steam for 40-60 percent off some of their Sims titles, which included The Sims 3 (along with its DLCs) and SimCity 4. I've never been a big Sims fan, especially with the slew of virtual people games in the last decade, so I didn't realize until now that Maxis had stopped making their SimCity games; They haven't released any city building Sim games since SimCity 4 eight years ago. There was SimCity Societies in 2007, but it was made by a different ...
Here is an interesting use of AR for a librarian. Anybody read Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge? The book does a great job exploring Augmented Reality in a future thriller & it actually has a moving library! Highly Recommended!
Fads, Fiascoes and Good Stuff in FrontierVille This Week The second in a series of weekly columns.
