Fight Club belongs to that set of movies that successfully established Brad Pitt as a nutcase, along with Se7en and 12 Monkeys, that you saw and liked in high school, but never returned to because you a.) no longer trust your high school tastes b.) already know the twist ending c.) Brad Pitt is not
The first thing you notice in the announcement video for Frog Fractions 2 on Kickstarter is the Frank Zappa level of oddness about it. The second thing is that there is no footage of the proposed sequel to the Internet sensation Frog Fractions. It could be anything. But you already expect this if yo
The Oculus Rift game Modern Zombie Taxi Driver has taken top spot at Bit Summit, the indie game festival in Kyoto. Yes, there is such a thing as Japanese independent games. Not much info is out there on this zombie-bussing game so far aside from a hands-on impression by Destructoid, which says that
The virtual reality developer Red of Paw continues to make virtual reality an altogether more whimsical place, blogging that they will bring the “bus stop” scene from Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbor Totoro to the Oculus Rift next. This is the memorable moment for fans of Japanese anime where the doe-eye
With the continued popularity of games like DayZ and Rust making the survival genre officially a thing, it’s about time we’ve seen a full-blown New World settlement crossbow shooter. Betrayer: In The Spring of 1603 has actually been on Steam Early Access since August, starving through the winter but
Uh, wait. On second thought, never mind. Seems you have be terminally dying first. But this study by Swiss psychiatrist Peter Gasser was performed on 12 dying patients, many of whom reported a significant decrease in anxiety as they approached their final days. The New York Times doesn’t go into det
The subject of an artist’s work is the source of endless armchair psychoanalysis, but I’m not going to touch this one. The artist Scott Listfield has a fixation for astronauts, painting them over 130 times since the early 90s. You’ll typically find them gazing in blank-eyed wonder at pop icons like
This video of the prototype of Mike Bithell’s cyberpunk stealth game Volume looks ridiculous in a very good way. Watch as your screen rips apart into fractals and reconfigures into the glowing synapses of a database. Bithell’s games tend to be lookers: his last effort Thomas Was Alone was eye-poppin
Well, kinda. A new study by researchers at the University of Barcelona shows that some people are incapable of having emotional responses to music. But those very same people who don’t get all misty-eyed when they hear “Desperado” still found games stimulating. For the study, researchers gathered 30
Between bullying, internet strangeness, social anxiety, and navigating the labyrinth of sexual identity, junior high has high nightmare scenario potentiality. But the episodic dating game LongStory hopes to make that burgeoning period less mortifying for girls aged 10 to 16. LongStory looks like an
Virtual reality has the potential to cause the most tumultuous sea change in games, well, since virtual reality. The tech was introduced back in the ‘80s, but the thing is, it never materialized into anything, except for that mobile VR cave I played once at the mall. Now, things are different. Affo
We were unsure if this day would come. Primarily because Classroom Aquatic is a virtual reality game about a class full of dolphins cheating off each other, and the Kickstarter project was asking for $30 thousand. Dolphin-game lovers like me surely recall the cruel fate of the ECCO the Dolphin comeb
The dungeon hack Crawl, recently greenlit on Steam, is a grisly little action-RPG with very, very pretty pixel art. The new trailer is a visual symphony of small four-sided shapes—a feast of upside-down pentagrams, Carmackian floating demon heads, and plenty of blood-splatter. Like Diablo, it allow
A live-action, interactive parade into the spirit world is being hosted this weekend in Melborne as part of Pop-Up Playground’s Fresh Air Festival. Called Spirits Walk, the gist of this otherworldly street game is that participants will take to the streets for some good old-fashioned LARPing, but wi
As you can see in this amazing announcement trailer, the synth-beat game Cosmic DJ is all about the retro-future ’80s. But its funny-strange distilling of ultra-kitsch transcends the callbacks to fluorescent lasers and vocoder voices we’ve gotten so used to over the past few years, with games like H
Huh. From what we’d seen and heard, Watch Dogs‘ protagonist was to be some sort of morally indignant Edward Snowden. But the new story trailer that was “leaked” today (doesn’t a leak seem like a far-too-convenient way to go viral with a game about wide-reaching government snooping?) frames the story
Except it’s not set in Mexico. And there’s not blood splattered over everything. And it seems to lack very many disturbing caricatures of insanity, except for that strange bird-fellow with pencil legs. OK, that’s a lot of exceptions. But my point is, some new photographs of Tangiers have been relea
Game of Thrones is HBO’s much-ballyhooed high fantasy drama series, soon entering its 4th season. Big Boi is the hip hop artist best known for rapping about southernplayalisticadillacmuzik and bombs over Baghdad in the rap group OutKast. In other words, nothing in common. Except, well, Big Boi and
There is a certain school of thought that says that coding is a world of beauty. The trouble is, it’s largely an invisible world; i.e. you have to know programming language in order to appreciate it. It’s not like the average person is going to look at a page of HTML and be blown away. But after see
The shoot ‘em up has been using the same playbook for ages: fly forward, program the enemy patterns into your muscle memory, and blast away. But with Luftrausers, coming to PlayStation 3, Vita, and computers on the 18th, Vlambeer read that page and threw it away. Full of aerobatic maneuvers and enem
We kind of joke when we talk about Minecraft and say that one day the entire structure of the Earth with be plotted in coarse cubic pointillism; but maybe we’re not joking. At least Manhattan will be accounted for, as the ambition of Minecraft creator Christopher Mitchell is to model the 13-mile str
Quoth a white dude in the indie scene. In specific, this was the response that the developer of SoundSelf and Deep Sea gave to the infamous question: “What do you think of the current state of the indie scene?” Well, he thinks its doing okay, besides not living up to the facade of inclusivity: But I
Dark Souls 2 is less than a week away; that is if you’re as excited as I am and are counting down by the hour. One detail worth noting is that, according to an interview with producer Takeshi Miyazoe, the combat feels less “gamey,” and he goes on to say that they’ve been tweaking the feel due to cha
