All ye lamenting the death of fart simulators, lament no more. Project Spark for the Xbox One, the formerly PC-only game-maker project aimed at amateur developers, looks to remedy the problem of the walled garden Microsoft created when they got rid of Xbox LIVE Indie Games. As you may recall, the I
SoundSelf is a game like none other: a tantric, psychedelic, Zen-like, trancelike, hypnotic, and hyperreal experience of being one with algorithms, and, yeah, the universe. When I played it, or rather chanted to it, a year ago in San Francisco, I found it a completely engrossing and soothing experie
This could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your opinion of Bay’s growling, baroque renditions of your childhood heroes, but the upcoming Transformers MMO is opting for the visual style of the Universe toy line rather than the movies. I’m personally a little underwhelmed with the trailer
Persona 5 may seem like an eternity or two away, but Atlus feels your pain. So they’re bringing a port of the original Shin Megami Tensei to iOS on March 18th, which kinda makes up for things. You can think of SMT as Persona’s cigarette-smoking older sister. The difference between the two franchises
Ai Wei Whoops is a game about the culture of art vandalism, where an attack on art by megalomaniacs and furious postmodern art haters often absurdly increases the value of the artwork. This apparently is not the case for Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s painted urn, which was valued at a million dollars a
The Internet has great potential to do good stuff, like spreading freedom of speech around the globe, but according to this info-graphic map by an advocacy group for freedom of the press, it turns out that in many places it’s just another form of censorship. The color code shows where governments ra
Even if you managed to sleep your way through your sophomore year, you know the story of Macbeth. The Thane of Glamis meets some witches, hallucinates about seeing a bloody dagger, kills his boss, and develops obsessive compulsive disorder. Well, Kill Shakespeare has nothing to do with any of that.
With its second-and-a-half sequel, N—the original keyboard-smashing, nuts-and-bolts jumper—has added another + to its belt, indicating that it’s bigger, badder, and probably harder. But also that + means it’s still the same beautifully designed platforming that you loved when avoiding trigonometry h
Teletext the World is a photo-editing website and tool that can transform any photo into primary, abrasive teletext imagery. It kinda looks like an Anna Anthropy game. But what’s a teletext anyway? A brief history lesson: teletext predated the World Wide Web by transmitting info like news and weath
Fantasy football has the natural ability to turn even the most casual of pigskin fans into rabid stat-obsessed fanatics, and soon that tenacity will be rubbing off on DOTA 2. With the newest patch, fantasy DOTA leagues are now a thing. They work pretty much like their somewhat-distant football cousi
From Ellie, to Clementine, to, yeah, even Claptrap, the advent of believable non-playable characters, or NPCs, is one of the biggest developments in games in recent years, and also one of the strangest. Unlike the occasional actor and television personality that we form unrealistic attachments too,
I believe it is. You can scope it on a dry erase board at From Software’s studio at the 4:23 mark of the mini-documentary Namco Bandai released yesterday. It’s hard to make out much—some castle ruins scribbled chaotically in red and blue marker, possibly a shrine with a Japanese symbol I can’t read
The New Aesthetic continues its synthetic, eye-catching overgrowth into the natural world with these striking statues by Ben Foster. They may have a low poly count, but that just makes his sculptures of PS1-era dogs, horses, and marine mammals stand out all the more from rustic, snowcapped backdrops
Ready yourself for a influx of games about hacker cowboys getting ethereal in the psychedelic constructs of digital space, because there is a Cyberpunk Game Jam happening on March 1st – 10th. This sounds like a mighty long time to stay jacked into the matrix. Let’s hope things stay safe and no one’s
Nova-111 looks like a valiant stab at solving the dilemma RPGs have faced ever since D&D hit the computer screen 30-some years ago: turn-based or real-time? Turn-based systems allow players sufficient time to strategize, but real-time just feels more alive. But it turns out you don’t have to commit
Wasteland 2, the sequel to the fabled postapocalyptic strategy classic, is now well into development, as a major beta update has just been released on Steam. And series founder Brian Fargo has loosened his tool belt and hardhat to talk shop. In a blue-collar interview with Edge Online on the state o
As pointed out by Hyperallergic, the hypnotic holographic system called the Voxiebox was shown off a week ago at Indiecade East. This marvelous volumetric display has been around since Maker Faire 2013, but has recently made mucho headway in terms of people actually programming games for it—classic-
The Last of Us has been getting a lot of buzz lately, with the Left Behind DLC and whispers of a sequel whetting our appetites for a second helping of what may be the grimmest buddy film/game. Luckily, you can sink your teeth into this nearly two-hour documentary on the making of it. There’s a lot
Time to start eating right. Seriously. After Atlus announced yesterday that Persona 5 was coming to North America for PS3, yes PS3, in 2015, I just hope I’m still alive and kicking when it gets here. I could suffer a drawn-out terminal illness and be long gone by the time it appears. Or more likely
The singularity is that beautiful, hypothetical moment in the future when technology becomes so advanced that our phones gain autonomy, start building robots, and the trajectory of machinery rockets into a supernova, the repercussions of which we can hardly begin to imagine. Well, you best return to
If not for ASCII art, we wouldn’t have ASCII games like Candy box and Dwarf Fortress. And that would be terrible. So the way I look at it, we are greatly indebted to “ARTYPING,” which was invented in the early 20th century and done on typewriters. Some early examples of this forgotten art-form recen
Over at re/code, the artist for Threes! has revealed some design prototypes for the elegant and minimal mobile game. It turns out it wasn’t always so minimal and elegant. The game went through numerous iterations before coming to the simple, clean look we know and play daily. But that doesn’t mean i
On Reddit, the narrative designer of The Last of Us has said there’s a “50/50” chance of a sequel being made, which continues a proud tradition of ambiguity on the issue. At one point, a sequel was deemed a remote possibility, with no chance of the lead characters of the story returning. He told the
