Dead Island is known for having the most successful trailer of any game ever. It was a beautiful cinematic experience. But sadly, as details of the game itself emerged, and after it was shown at conventions around the world, doubt began to set in about whether this five-year-long project would live up to the hype.
Video games have been a purely digital medium for some decades now. They exist in the electronic nether, embedded on discs and projected on screens. Since digital distribution has gained popularity, even the physical manifestation of the game disc is going away, leaving games (especially digitally distributed indie games) more ethereal than ever before. It is unclear whether this slightly unsettling fact was on the minds of the three people who made Receipt Racer, but regardless, it stands as...
It's typically not the kind of video game you would see on WonderHowTo. Instead, you'd learn about games with gruesome zombies or beer guzzling dwarfs, even a controversial, dystopian war. But Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure deserves some serious praise.
About a decade ago, Deus Ex came out to rave reviews. Except this guy Tom Chick hated it. And said so, in a pretty blunt manner.
And other notes on video game music...
Nope, it’s not the McDonalds menu, but close enough. Jim Blackhurst has mapped 11 million deaths onto a 3-dimensional point cloud for video game Just Cause 2. The result is an amazing virtual heat map of a world where every white dot represents a death on impact: The millions of deaths formulate a detailed outline of major structures and roads in the game, visually mapping "extractions" at every square inch. In most traditional games, this would not be possible—players more often than not sta...
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.
Are you familiar with Studio Ghibli? It's the dreamy Japanese animation studio responsible for anime classics Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, and Howl's Moving Castle. Regarded as highly inventive, serene, and spooky, Studio Ghibli puts out internationally renown films, loaded with magic, monsters and lovable creatures, such as Totoro (pictured to the right, and above).
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.
If you're in LA, check out Video Game Saurday this Saturday!
All right women are you sick of playing games like GTA where you kill hookers? In Hey Baby you get to kill all the men who've been harassing you on the streets!
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 ):
The United Kingdom has long been known as an international hub of yellow tabloid journalism. The News Of The World, one of the nation's largest tabloids, is famously in court right now because of the deplorable methods it used to acquire salacious information about interesting people. It appears, given their recent string of video game related reportage, that daily newspaper Metro has also had its fair share of morally dubious reporters on staff.
The Kinect for Xbox 360 and PlayStation Move might be fun to play with, but people do not look very cool while they're doing it. Air guitar is not particularly flattering (even if done on stage), and neither is air-anything else, as pleasurable as it might be. This is why I find it strange that a group of admen somewhere in the world think these kinds of commercials would appeal to anyone.
This German video is amazing. A joyously analog interpretation and deconstruction of the digital gaming experience. Malte Jehmlich is as primitive and inspiring as the the Vanuatu natives who devoted themselves to cargo worship after World War II!
There is an abstinence game being created by the University of Central Florida with $400k+ of taxpayer money. The game is directed at middle school girls to help them handle and cope with sexual advances.
Once there was Spin the Bottle. Then there was the embarrassing adult version of Spin the Bottle—on Wii. And then there was artist Hye Yeon Nam, who decided to skip all pretenses and go straight for the spit-swapping, no foreplay necessary. Hye Yeon Nam devised a method for controlling a bowling video game by French kissing. It works like this: "One person has a magnet on his/her tongue and the other person wears the headset. While they kiss, the person who has the magnet on his/her tongue, c...
An iPhone-controlled drone unveiled at the recently held CES is expected to revolutionize the world of video gaming. Called the AR.Drone (AR stands for augmented reality), this new product will literally bring video games to the streets.
While it's unlikely you'll encounter this caliber of insane pixelated madness in real-life, everyday New York City, you might be lucky enough to walk past a tangible "portal" of sorts. Below, images from Pixel Pour 2.0, an installation on Mercer Street in Soho.
Lol. Coming soon for your Super Nintendo!
So you can get your "Thriller" dance on - right in your living room.
I have no idea what this group is, other than I saw it in my Facebook feed. Sasha?
Mario in Tetris! Pixel art-style! While the two blocky Nintendo properties are obviously a natural fit, it's hard not to boggle at the audacity of it all. The time lapse below condenses an hour and a half of playing—1,112 lines—into roughly 2 minutes. The cap doesn't quite come off, which is to say it never really goes on, but, just the same, it's a remarkable feat. SOURCE YouTube.
The used video game market represents a huge portion of retail game sales. It's the only avenue in which most people can afford to buy AAA games. But game publishers aren't exactly big fans of used game sales, since they only benefit from gamers buying new ones. GameStop and Best Buy are huge corporate interests, so EA and the rest of the big publishers out there have not been able to push them around on the issue of used game sales... so far.
Game Developer Magazine is a prominent periodical for game industry folk to read up on their craft. For those who don't work in games, it can be a little dry, but every year they release a Game Career Guide devoted to welcoming other people into their world. Best of all, it's free! You can view the newest issue just released here in your browser, or download the PDF version.
Well, I know JD wasn't too enamored with the game, but the GIFs available here are kind of adorable, in a nostalgic OMG 16-bit characters type way!
Joseph Ford's photography series couldn't have a more befitting name: If I Were President...
The Australian government has a dysfunctional history with video games. Any regular Yahtzee Croshaw follower can attest to that. The Parliament has established a series of unfortuante regulations that make games both highly taxed and overregulated in price. Bringing any goods all the way to an island in the bottom of the world is expensive to begin with, and new games in Australia can tip the scales at $80 or more.
Hi Fellow hardcore Gamers within the UK Gaming Community. Please be kind enough to add us to your google plus circles and we will return the favour and add google +1 button likes for you and you can do likewise for our site.
Video games are the newest major expressive media. As such, their role in society is still being defined continuously. A monumentally important example of this took place yesterday at the US Supreme Court. After a long deliberation, the highest court in the land handed down a decision invalidating a California law banning the sale of violent video games to minors on the grounds that video games are protected speech under the First Amendment, like movies and books.
Today we pay homage to a phenomenon. One as diffuse and amusing as the internet itself, and as pointless as dog Halloween costumes. I'm speaking, of course, of giant games.
Alex Lewis imagines what the world would look like infiltrated by video game characters in his digital montage series “Video Games vs. Real Life”. (P.S. If you like what you see, check out Lewis' t-shirt designs at Threadless).
It's been a great year for video games, kind of. Sure, the AAA release lineup has been a trainwreck and hacking has been a bigger problem than ever. But two things have happened involving the federal government that have made video games more legitimate in the United States than ever before. The Supreme Court ruling establishing that video games were the equivalent of movies and books, not porn, was the more significant decision. But in May, the National Endowment for the Arts made another si...
Most of the indie and vintage games discussed in Indie Games Ichiban are pretty cheap to purchase. They rarely top twenty bucks, which is one of the major advantages independent games have against their sixty-buck, major league counterparts. But if you think $60 for a game and $300 for a PS3 or Xbox 360 seems like a lot, then you haven't played Steel Battalion or seen the TurboExpress. They go above and beyond what normal gamers are willing to spend for questionably entertaining products. Her...
Team Fortress 2 (TF2) is one of the best multiplayer games of all time. It took nine years to make, and the developers have supported it with more post-release free updates than any other game ever. Four years after its release in 2007, it is still immensely popular, and although its price has gone down, Valve has managed to continue making a massive profit by introducing the first successful microtransaction model in a mainstream American shooter. That model has been so successful that it lo...
Instagram Challenge: Here is a pic from my vintage PC game collection!
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.
When a person sits motionless for hours on end in front of a television screen, it's sloth; when a camera does the same, it's art! Case in point, these beautiful long-exposure photographs of old Atari games by Rosemarie Fiore:
