Three years ago, Scrabble was one of the very first 500 mobile applications to appear on the new iTunes App Store, allowing iPhone users the chance to kill their Scrabble cravings on the go. It was a smart move for Hasbro and Electronic Arts (EA), but it's been two years and eight months since the Android Market opened for business, and they've just now released an official app for Android smartphones—Scrabble Free.
In the world of developers, a "sandbox game" is video game where players are free to "roam a virtual world and change any factor at will"; these types of games demand creativity on the player's part, with no linear/"correct" way to play.
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.
In just a few days, the biggest expo in the video game industry will unleash the newest games and hardware from all of the major companies. Nintendo is set to unveil its Wii-replacing Project Café and Konami will showcase its upcoming lineup, including new Silent Hill and Metal Gear Solid games. But what will Sony be presenting at E3 in Los Angeles this year?
ARGs have taken the concept of video games to some odd and wonderful real-world places. Socks, Inc. might not be the first ARG, and LittleBigPlanet might have defined the sock-puppet-based game archetype, but it is the first game to combine ARG and sock puppet elements into one package.
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.
L.A. Noire is the newest Rockstar (GTA4, Red Dead Redemption) game created by Team Bondi ( The Getaway). The game is set in the late 1940’s in Los Angeles. The main character, Phelps, is a war veteran rising through the ranks from police officer to detective. The game is presented in mini episodes (one case per episode) and flashbacks. Once you finish a case, you go straight to the next one. Having played four cases where the character moves from police officer to detective, here are my initi...
Video games and art have somewhat of a sticky relationship. Many video games have large teams of talented artists doing amazingly creative work, and yet the art community is only just beginning to utilize video games as art (sometimes). Perhaps if video games were shown not just as a medium of expression, but as a means of creating great art as well, the art community would be forced to consider it differently. The third part in the Hacked Kinect series will focus on the artistic possibilitie...
Japanese people are into many things Americans find weird—like YouTube's beloved canine-hosted cooking show or Daito Manabe's light up LED grills or even more insane, a vending machine that distributes live crabs. In light of these cultural oddities, the Japanese phenomenon of visual novels (NVL, or bijuaru noberu), seems relatively normal. A meeting place of books and video games, visual novels are a sort of "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure" for the new generation.
Do you remember when video games came on tiny chips in plastic cartridges? When the CD and 3D graphics just meant ugly games with long load times? Before epic cinematics, spoken dialog, or cordless controllers? Do you still have all of your old games and lament that the consoles, cords, and controllers required to play them have either been stolen by exes or broken while moving apartments?
When the iPad 2 was released earlier this month, as to be expected there was a whole lotta buzz. And for good reason—while the the newest version shares the same price tag as the old, it boasts some significant new features. In case you missed it, here's a quick overview:
Before last Sunday I hadn't been to a proper game store since I was in middle school. Over ten years ago. If you decide to stop reading right now because I obviously don't care enough about MTG to be writing this thing, I don't blame you. But I tell you, friends, as someone who has denied the utter awesomeness of their hobby for too long, that going to Emerald Knights in Burbank made me feel at home. I want to tell you about it and explain why I will be back many times in the future.
Now girls need to take up gaming, seriously. According to a new research, girls who played the games with a parent got a lot of benefits.
The New Yorker profiles Shigeru Miyamoto, the father of modern video games, whose spawn includes world-changing classics such as Mario and Legend of Zelda:
Who could resist a retro SCRABBLE board game for two bucks? Suereal definitely couldn't, especially with the challenge of totally revamping a board game into something genuine and creative. Craftster's Craft Challenge #51 last June was meant to bring life back to an old board game with the following expectations:
Imagine this scenario: Late for work, you jump in the car. Going your usual 10 or maybe even 15 miles over the speed limit, suddenly a ball tumbles into the road, closely pursued by a little girl! Scared sh*tless, you slam on your brakes.
From Major Nelson, Xbox 360's spokeperson: Kinect Pricing: Existing Xbox 360 owners can purchase Kinect and Kinect Adventures for $149.99 (U.S. ERP). Remember, Kinect will work with every Xbox 360 ever made.
FarmVille added a new feature today in place of the old Mystery Boxes. This is a mystery game! It costs a bit more than the old boxes did, but you are guaranteed to get at least one of each of the mystery prizes by the time all the balloons are popped, instead of wasting tons of farm cash and perhaps opening a hundred mystery boxes and never getting that one thing you really wanted. So this is a great improvement and is much more interactive than the old 'purple sparkly poof'.
What separates Metro 2033 from other FPS games? Life. There are underground towns, markets, children, music, and so much background chatter than sometimes you can't single out a particular conversation.
Picked up Metro 2033 from the Steam Sale. Wow is it pretty. At 1080p with DX11 and gorgeously detailed, it's hard to not stop and stare at every single thing! I wish there was a way to somehow convey this feeling..
A demonstration of Ubisoft's Your Shape: Fitness Evolved for the Xbox 360's Kinect. This was probably the best demonstration for Kinect out of the whole conference. The game will come out around the same time of the launch of Kinect in November.
A cartoony, "Trials HD"-type game being released today. It's multiplayer so you can take on people at home or online. Looks like a lot of fun. You can also create your own levels. Here is an excerpt from the Game Informer review:
These are great times. It is about time advertisers invaded our video games in the same way they do our driving (billboards), walking (fliyers, posters), and our private home (emails, bulk mail, text messages).
There are no spoilers in this writing, read without worry. Finished Episode 3 of Alan Wake yesterday, impressed by different reasons. I originally bought the game for the possibility of great story, dialogue, and voice acting. That part of the game has been disappointing. What has stood out from playing episodes 1 to 3 is the level design and game play.
April NPD Video Game Sales Every month around the second thursday the sales chart for video games and consoles are released for the previous month. They are released by the NPD group, the main company tracking video games sales in the US. Here are the top twenty games in the month of april (courtesy of Gamasutra http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=28566 ):
3D Dot Heroes Preview Release Date: May 11th, 2010 for the PS3
Progression, isn't it great? It used to be that video games only rewarded you with game scores. The satisfaction was always at the end, and all that mattered was getting there.
If there's one thing that iPhone and Android users can agree on, it's that playing mobile games can drain your battery like nothing else. But it doesn't always have to be this way. If the game you're currently addicted to is Super Mario Run, there are two settings you can change to greatly reduce battery drain on any phone.
Graffiti even Grandma would approve of (ok, for some of you maybe that's a turn off...). How about... graffiti that is good for the environment and you (non-toxic), as well as preservative of the past (architecture, etc).
Crysis was an amazing game. And Crysis Warhead was great, too. If you haven't played them, you sure missed a great ride on the action train. But don't worry, you can get your feet wet with the newest edition to Crytek's Crysis series—Crysis 2—available from Electronic Arts. A demo of the multiplayer mode became available earlier this month for the Xbox 360 on Xbox Live, and now the multiplayer taster is slated for March 1st on PCs (sorry PS3 gamers). The PC demo will feature two new maps call...
If you've played the addicting game Angry Birds on your iPhone, chances are you've heard of a newer game called Cut the Rope. Chances are you're playing it right now.
Despite the recent problems with the 1.04 update for PlayStation 3 gamers, Call of Duty: Black Ops remains a juggernaut for Activision in the gaming community, and its sales alone prove it.
When returning a serve requires some decision making, eg take the ball high in the air, let the ball drop, let the ball hit the side wall before volleying, or maybe volley boast.
Learning to "dig" squash shots out of the corners can be puzzling for beginners. This video shows you how to approach the ball, and how important it is to keep away from the walls when playing shots close to the wall and corner.
Squash is a racquet sports game, seemingly similar to tennis, but played on a small indoor court with hollow rubber ball, much small than a tennis ball. Squash is an intense, high impact sport. This squash tutorial demonstrates a squash forehand horizontal and vertical swing.
Squash is a racquet sports game, seemingly similar to tennis, but played on a small indoor court with hollow rubber ball, much small than a tennis ball. Squash is an intense, high impact sport. This squash tutorial demonstrates a squash solo drill: backhand drive.
Squash is a racquet sports game, seemingly similar to tennis, but played on a small indoor court with hollow rubber ball, much small than a tennis ball. Squash is an intense, high impact sport. This squash tutorial demonstrates a Squash backhand volley, boast, drive off.
The G3 in Call of Duty would be so much nastier if it was just fully automatic right? There are lots of semi-automatic things in video games that really would be more fun if they shot faster, and now they will no matter what XBox 360 game you're playing. This video will show you how to put a rapid fire button mod on an XBox 360 wireless controller. Fire away. Put a rapid fire button mod on an XBox 360 controller.
