Jason Johnson

How NBA 2K14’s cuss-monitoring could clean up trolling

Admit it. If you’ve played a sports game, you’ve cussed at the ref. But with the new cuss-monitoring feature in NBA 2K14, you’d be wise to keep the potty language under your breath. The game uses voice recognition to listen out for profanity, and will call a technical foul when you go into a mini-ta

Pippin Barr calls Hotline Miami infuriating, makes a game about it

As rap feuds have taught us, the extracurricular jawing between artists can be just as entertaining as the music. But unless Phil Fish is involved, smack talk doesn’t happen very often in gaming. Until yesterday. That’s when Pippin Barr called out Cactus’s hit Hotline Miami for being irrationally br

With Black Mesa going retail, videogames get their first cover version

In the music industry, artists copy other artists’ work all the time. It’s called a cover song. But with games, any sign of infringement is hit with a cease-and-desist order. That is, unless your reinvention is nice and shiny, and was previously made by Valve. Today, the fan-driven community respons

Here comes a bunch of buttons you don’t need for your iPhone

A new shell converts your iPhone into a more traditional gaming handheld, giving it all the buttons you’d ever need. This is by our count seven or eight too many.  Persuaded by a vocal minority who resist change, Apple recently added controller support to their phones. The PowerShell by LogiTech is