Is there any bigger indicator that a person or product has made it than getting featured in a Simpsons intro? Well, Minecraft has crossed that threshold and joined the upper echelon of pop culture. Last night, during the opening credits, the familiar logo was, uh, somewhat cleverly replaced with the
It’s been a long ride with a dead body in the trunk and half-a-million euros stuffed under the seat since Monaco won the Independent Game Festival in 2010. “The money I’ve made from Monaco is kinda gross, when taken in one big chunk. But it’s really only about what I would have made had I been worki
You can find the artist Diego Leclery at a makeshift desk outside the Whitney Museum, staring at a monitor displaying Civilization, hand clutching a mouse. He has previously dressed up as a polar bear and allowed people to be photographed with him as art. His new piece is called Me Playing Civilizat
Seriously, who doesn’t loves gifs? But gaming gifs are worthy of affection in particular because they capture those one-in-a-million moments that your friends, much less your Internet-friends, would never believe. And there are just so many great ones. On this week’s episode of PBS Game/Show, Jamin
Ah, the 80s; when teenage smoking was still glamourous, punk was holding on by tooth and nail, and it was culturally viable for a yearbook to be themed around the concept of arcade games. When I came across this nostalgic album from a Florida high school on IDEA Books of London’s classy Instagram fe
Mobiles have been a boon for staying connected. Your phone can help you track down your friends, join a conversation with people you never met, and quickly find a stranger looking for a one-night stand. Or so I hear! But what if you want to avoid people at all costs, like an ex-husband, your money-b
Tentacles in games and game culture have a bad rap due to some unsavory things I’d rather not spill words about. But they’re not always morally reprehensible. Tentacles: Enter the Mind shows the potential for fun with tentacles in a totally wholesome way. While the blobby protagonist with an evil ey
These crisp and meticulously-rendered screenshots of the train station from Half-Life 2 titillate and tease. Just how gorgeous would Half-Life 3 look on modern hardware? Not like that’s going to happen, but from time to time its good to rub fresh salt in old wounds. The shots come to us courtesy of
The electronic artist Cex’s new record is a soundtrack for a PlayStation 2 game that doesn’t exist, and the music seems similarly outside of physical space. Shamaneater is sample-heavy, low-key electronica filed under the sub-genre of vaporware—hyperreal, beat-bumping tunes as imagined by purveyors
The new viral advertisement game for Frog Fractions 2‘s Kickstarter campaign cannot—will not be topped. Kickstarter Simulator 2015 is both a satire of all the cheesy, terrible, and maudlin pitches we’re accustomed to, and also the finest example of one yet. It is a terrible idea of terrible ideas, a
Gravity—the multi-Oscar winning movie, not the physical force—was a visual showcase that engaged your senses in the way only the absoluteness of space could. A film like that in virtual reality, where you could turn your head to see in 360 degrees, could be downright panic-attack-inducing. At least
We don’t know how a 3-way lovechild works but just trust us on that. The idea is that this strange, beautiful creature inhabits the shell of an old-school shooter in the time-tested tradition of Gradius and R-Type, two games you can see shades of here. But, then there comes the part where time free
This is not my face. I am at least as handsome, but far less demented-looking than that. As for this guy, he’s just some highly creepy head model rendered in filmic tonemapping, a graphic technique we see in games like the Uncharted series, which explaining could get complicated. What you really nee
The buzz around The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is all about its camerawork, and rightly so. It’s gorgeous. But in an in-depth interview with Edge, the devs talked about how important non-obtrusive storytelling is. After all, if you’re going to create an environment that is indistinguishable from life
These hyper-exotic plastic firearms by Mattel aren’t just kids’ toys. They’re also toys for grown-up kids, thank you very much. As anyone who plays a fair amount of videogames can vouch, it’s only natural to develop a fetish for wickedly exaggerated weapons of destruction that are far too impractica
Somehow the fact that the Amazon TV Fire is a game console didn’t come up until nearly 40 minutes into the press conference, which may be telling of where their priorities lie. As suggested by the “TV” part of the name, they want you to buy this device because Amazon Instant Video is more and more o
Among the qualities I look for in a candidate, live action role-playing as a vampire straight out of a White Wolf game doesn’t make the list. But maybe it should. On second thought, it probably shouldn’t. But that’s the hobby of a conservative GOP candidate in Florida. Jake Rush’s political oppositi
“This is a game we give a shit about,” was the note I got from my editor. The name, The Long Dark, sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it. After checking up, this was indeed a game we give a shit about. That’s because it’s a game of vivid Canadian wilderness, stippled with salmon sunsets
Imitone is at the home stretch of a highly successful Kickstarter campaign, but it’s worth taking a look because it’s a very cool project that allows you to compose digital music simply by humming into a microphone, and because I ran into its creator Evan Balster at GDC and I told him I’d post about
You say gamers don’t read. I say there aren’t nearly enough well-written books about videogames. OK, that’s a flawed argument. But it’s a half-decent introduction to Chrono Trigger, the book, a classy, white paperback that was released today and should prove to be an enlightening look at what is pro
Time to start thinking about some custom firmware to guard the content of that brain of yours, presuming you are not a futurist who already thinks about that daily. Researchers at Yale have found a way to read people’s minds with an MRI machine. Before, they could read nonspecific things, like wheth
Cave Story was kind of like Mega Man, but artistic and free-roaming and free. It was released as freeware on the net before being HD-fied and deified by plenty of players who thought it was pretty much perfect. We’ve been waiting awhile for how the enigmatic Japanese game figure Pixel would follow i
There are many obvious problems with the failed “GAME_JAM” Iron Chef-style reality show that imploded after just a day of filming. To start with, a show based on a contest that involves participants tweaking code on their computer for hours on end doesn’t exactly make for riveting TV. And that’s bef
