The label on this bottle of beer strikes me as curious and whimsical and unlike anything I’ve seen in my lustrous beer-drinking career, which has been the downfall of many-a-beers. That’s because it comes from the hot-dog stand at the Studio Ghibli Museum in Tokyo, as snapped by a blogger over at Bo
Whoa Dave! is one of those modern-retro games that makes you wonder if videogames weren’t close to perfect like 30 years ago. Deep down, all they really need is a setup mirroring Mario Bros., some pixel-y beasts hatching from eggs a la Joust, and a couple of players lapping up coins and trying to sa
When Sony announced their online zombie game H1Z1 last week, everyone’s first thought was that it sounded exactly like Day Z. But it’s refreshing to hear Sony being so upfront about how the game wears its influence on it sleeve, instead of the typical PR newspeak we usually hear. When pestered with
Say you gravitate to surreal exploratory adventures, but avoid survivor horror games like the plague. The tactical wargame is your jam, but JRPGs are not your cup of tea. Do the types of fun we enjoy tell us a deeper truth about our meat space selves, aside from that we should never ever attempt han
Imogen Heap is a kinda folky, kinda electronic, almost shoegaze-y pop artist who has developed a pair of futuristic musical gloves. Watching her play with her Mi.Mu gloves reminds me of someone playing a theremin, sans the theremin, of course. In a way they remind me of Imitone, Evan Balster’s music
Just in time for Easter, these regal fresco paintings inspired by the videogames of yore are now showing at Kim Foster Gallery on 529 W 20th Street in New York. The show, called Genesis, is the artistic outpouring of Dan Hernandez, a man whose love for classic arcade games is only equaled by his lov
There is a sequel on the distant horizon for Forget-Me-Not, coming to PS Vita, where it can take advantage of that pristine little screen. In case you haven’t been introduced, the first was an iOS favorite from a few years ago—a grind-heavy roguelike disguised as a broken arcade game crawling with t
Touch-screens are pretty great for mobile phones, except when you’re typing, and cutting-and-pasting, and, well, a bunch of other stuff, but using a touch-screen at a museum takes the ritual out of running your fingers through those old archives. So The Museum of The History of Polish Jews in Warsaw
Before Simogo brought us games that charmed our pants off, games like Bumpy Road and Year Walk and Beat Sneak Bandit, they were just two guys working at a studio in Malmö. While there, one of them was prototyping a wonderful-looking solo project called Brisby & Donnovan. It was never finished. Post
Trials Fusion is a mindlessly fun game about doing tricks on dirt bikes, in which you repeatedly and tirelessly crash to your death—the type of game you’d never expect to feature a morose, creepy plot about an unethical corporation cloning human bodies. But according to this theory on YouTube, all t
With a name like Technolust, this VR game, now on Kickstarter, could have only be a sleek cyberpunk noir, or some sleezy VR sex game. Luckily it’s the former, because up till now we haven’t really seen a full-blown cyberpunk game in virtual reality with neon cities and mega-corps and cybernetic Asia
As this 22-story-tall Frogger clone in São Paulo proves, major metropolitan areas are quickly becoming skyscraper arcades. Street Crosser, a game with a social cause, joins that giant game of Tetris played over Philly a few weeks ago as the two latest examples of god-sized videogames. But this inst
Horror games are currently in a rut with their slasher film mentality says Thomas Grip, designer of games that chickens like me stay far, far away from. Speaking with Rock, Paper, Shotgun about his upcoming title SOMA, he explained that scary games have yet to evolve from gory, cheap scares into a m
The dark fantasy esport Dota 2 is undeniably Steam’s killer app, according to the number-crunching-smiths at Ars Technica, who found that over 25 million copies have been downloaded and played on Valve’s popular digital download service. We shouldn’t be shocked that such a hardcore, complex game—eve
A musician has built from Lego an old-school analogue synthesizer that plays smooth and hypnotic Chicago acid house, totally one-upping both that Lego city I built when I was 7 and my unimpressive foray into DJing. Simply called Play House, the Goldberg-esque mechanical sculpture was assembled from
When I heard that the guys behind Natural Selection 2—the fantastically strange esport about adaptive alien alligators ripping military men to shreds—were doing a diving game, I thought no way can this be a warm-hearted, Flipper-loving, scuba diving game. That’s far too normal, as these gorgeous new
You know the ones. No, not those of Cindy Crawford and the cast of Baywatch, but the ones you’d eventually get to if you kept on flipping, which portrayed wilderness scenes with vaguely new age or pagan imagery. That pretty much describes the look of the surreal exploration game Cylne, currently on
Mac DeMarco writes jangly, bluesy indie rock songs. As far as I know he has no songs about burning insects with cigarettes, though I could be mistaken. He does however have a game about it. His label has just released Squish’Em, which you can play here. Armed with a half-smoked cigarette from your c
The promise of MIT’s Transform project, currently showing at Milan’s Design Week, is that your living room suite of the future will be a lot different. Furniture will be able to transform itself to accommodate you, or your girlfriend, or your kid. This rigid wooden swivel stood that I’m currently si
Cult of the Wind is a game on Steam Greenlight that imagines people competing in multiplayer WW2-style dogfights. The thing is they do it without airplanes. According its webpage, there are pretend machine guns, pretend explosions, and pretend sputtering noises of airplane propellers made with chara
A VR mask seems like the furthest thing from the wild. After all, you’re strapped into isolating goggles that would probably get you killed if you wore them to the park, much less in the woods. But a production studio who is shooting a documentary called Conquest of the Skies thinks that VR is the b
Okay, so you’ve beaten Half-Life like 15 years ago and felt pretty good about yourself. But these guys just beat it in 20 minutes 41 seconds. Well, the word “just” is a bit of an exaggeration. The speedrun, posted on YouTube recently, was the result of four years of “painstaking theorycrafting, exec
For us children of the ‘80s who had our young and naive brains dazzled by Disney’s Tron, it doesn’t get much better than a sit-down, light cycle-riding arcade game. Oh, wait. Yes, it does. That’s because this light-cycle racer is VR-enabled, played while sitting on a scrap of wood and welded metal w
