The Square Enix Collective, the Final Fantasy maker’s, uh, crowd-something platform—launched yesterday, but it’s actually just a screening process for games that will appear on Square’s official Indiegogo page. Confusing, I know, but I can explain. The way it works is that if a game garners enough i
A few weeks ago, after yet another bad quarter, Nintendo announced that it was finally considering experimenting with bringing their games to mobile devices. Last night, we found out what they meant, and it’s less than anyone thought. The dojo of Mario will be releasing demos of their games in an at
Back in the 50s, before people had any idea that space was lifeless and blank, sci-fi was marked by fascinating illustrations of exotic alien planets and clunky metal spaceships. That is what I’m reminded of when looking at No Man Sky’s beautiful, utopian, retro-future concept art, which Edge was ki
How Do You Do It? is a quick game about one of those precious formative moments, when as a child, you realized that there was such a thing called sex that people did to each other, and though you were uncertain about the specifics, you undressed two dolls and tried to get them to do it. (Full disccl
The biggest and best rumor of this young year materialized in the blogosphere today, as it’s being reported that Neill Blomkamp of District 9 and Elysium fame is directing the pilot episode of the upcoming Halo TV show. If true, Microsoft’s doing something very, very right. Until we get confirmation
The Witness—Jonathan Blow’s Myst-like puzzler that set on a deserted island that is, yes, professionally landscaped—will be playable in virtual reality, the Braid-creator posted on his blog. But it wouldn’t be a Blow post without a dash of vitriol: Last year I was pessimistic about VR systems in the
Microsoft has snapped up the rights to Gears of War from Epic Games and will be continuing the series, the tech goliath made known today. It sounds like we can expect an indefinite amount of masculine men built like slabs of concrete snapping to cover behind, um, slabs of concrete. This is good news
In our feature today we posed it as a question, but the new trailer pretty much verifies that Jazzpunk is the funniest game ever, or at least it will give Octodad a run for its money. When I saw it at an indie game party a year ago, the guys at Necrophone Games told me how they developed it through
Understandably, wargame fans among our readership might still be bummed out if they didn’t make it to Paradox Con 2014 in Miami last week. But the trailer for Runemaster—the (likely strategic) RPG with incredible storytelling potentiality that Paradox Interactive announced at the party (and by party
That is according to an AMA with Dean Hall, creator of the ruthless survival zombie game DayZ, who said the team had been contacted about the name-change by the lawyers of Jay-Z, arguably the biggest figure in pop music so far in this young century, who’s worth something like $500 million and who is
Sports are an institution. Esports, eh, not so much. With the exception of maybe Starcraft, esport players hop around to the hot new thing as technology advances and games start to show their age. But League of Legends developer Riot Games is determined not to let that happen to their popular MOBA e
The Guardian recently ran a piece by Laura Kate Dale, who, after playing as a female in World of Warcraft, gained the confidence to come out and tell her friends and family that she was transgender. It’s a fascinating piece about the transformative power of online personas, and worth a read in its e
After watching the new trailers for Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy 13 and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2, I’m cautiously optimistic for both of these big sequels. But, holy hell, do they have some melodramatic dialogue. Which one’s worse? Be the judge for yourself, but it’s a mighty close contest,
If Grand Theft Auto 5 says one thing about games, it’s that guns and cars still rule. But if it says something else, it’s that virtual worlds are beautiful, lifelike, and huge. Take a scenic cruise past the Vinewood sign through the hills and into the countryside and the immensity will soon dawn on
I’m having trouble looking away from this YouTube video of every single NES start screen (and Famicom game?) played back-to-back from The 3D Battles of World Runner to Zombie Nation. Why am I still watching it, twenty minutes in? I don’t know, but it has the same strange appeal as watching the movie
There are multiple reasons to pay attention to musical artist EMA. She writes intense, noisy, industrial ballads. Her previous album Past Life Martyred Saints was one of the best albums of 2011. And in the video for Satellites, the first single on her upcoming album, she travels to a desensitized an
We all believe the Internet is great. But according to Pope Francis, it may be divine. In a statement released today, the outspoken Pope called the internet a “gift from God,” continuing to prove his mettle as a progressive thinker. The pontiff has previously expressed openminded views towards homo
It’s been pretty widely covered that, between now and the 27th, Jason Rohrer is giving away free money, $3000 to be exact, to players of The Castle Doctrine, his MMO about stealing from others while protecting your own home from burglary. This is a lot of money for Rohrer, who once practiced simple
The ongoing saga of Capcom’s fickle business model continues, as the giant Japanese publisher plans to bulk its in-house talent by hiring a staggering extra 100 people in software development a year, at least until they come up with a likely far-worse idea. This should give them a sizable army to m
I once went rappelling with my uncle. OK, that’s a lie. But if I had it would make a good conversation starter for A Story About My Uncle, which was announced for Steam yesterday. The game about first-person jumping through a forest with the assistance a glowing, mystical grappling device started ou
Is this thing even funny? Is that the point? Since when is my phone capable of eyeball detection? Is there something wrong with my left eyeball, since the left eyeball reticle isn’t moving? Has my Bell’s palsy came back? Why afterwards am I shown a clandestine photo taken of me while I was looking s
The word around the Internet is that there have been some seedy deals going down on YouTube channels, with major players directly or indirectly paying content providers to promote their gaming products. Specifically, Microsoft paid one of their partners, Machinima, who in turn paid YouTubers a lousy
Daniel Benmergui has been working on Storyteller—his critically acclaimed, experimental, narrative-generating puzzle game (phew!)—for a long time. As we detailed in an in-depth feature on him at the end of last year, it’s his passion project, and a rallying cry for videogame developers in Latin Amer
When it comes to big open-world games, size matters. That’s why we typically don’t see on Kickstarter games with the span of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, the medieval open-world RPG that will feature around thirty hours and 3.5 square miles of horseback riding, crusades, smithing, and historical slaug
Do you find yourself refreshing your blog posts at traffic lights? Feel itchy and irritable when the Internet is out? Wake up in the middle of the night to change your Facebook status? That’s OK, we all do. But keep it to yourself when in the People’s Republic, or you might wake up groggy from slee
