If experimental forms of narrative intrigue you, then you will love Leviathan, the new storytelling initiative shown off by Intel at CES this week. As with all cross-media projects, Leviathan can be hard to describe, but here’s what you need to know: a giant, magnificent whale sails off the screen a
Yesterday saw the reveal of two games inspired by the Alien films, and we’d never been happier to see a hideous pair of gnarly teeth snarling at us. The first, Alien: Isolation, by Creative Assembly, carries the official license, with a plot that takes influence from the 1979 classic. The second is
The game maker Pippin Barr once wrote a fantastic article for us on his experience playing Painstation, a modification of the classic game Pong, which whips you, burns you, and/or shocks you when you miss. That should give you an idea of the type of games he makes. That’s the type of game Durations
Games have gone to the sword-and-sorcery well one too many times. Why can’t we get fantasy worlds like this? The trippy 25-minute music video by Eva Papamargariti explores the boundary between architecture and digital media using effects we still don’t have language for yet. The Greek artist name-d
EarthBound for the Super Nintendo—with its several hundred dollar price tag on eBay—is the stuff of legend, and that’s why Ken Baumann wrote a book about it. As the first in a series of paperbacks to endearingly tribute classic games (including an upcoming one on Super Mario Bros. 2 by our own very
Not all Steam Machines are created equal. As we learned at Valve’s press conference yesterday, they come in all shapes and sizes. But one thing that is universal across the board is that they aren’t pretty, as we see demonstrated by the monstrosity pictured above, the Spark by Maingear. As for the
There are literally thousands of stories about unpleasant things that happen in the harsh, brutal zombie game DayZ, but this one is pretty fascinating: Guy plays game, guy meets bandit, bandit handcuffs guy, guy begs not to be chopped with an axe. Did I mention that the guy was Sean Vanaman, the lea
One very cool gadget among a sea of very cool gadgets at CES is this pair of noise-canceling virtual-reality headphones. Yes, that is a thing. The Glyph by Avegant, as seen above, looks like a pair of ordinary headphones, until you tilt them down to wear them over your eyes and viola: virtual freaki
A series of motion-controlled vignettes about dodging jagged craters and sharp branches while gracefully free-falling through unreal dreamscapes, Skydrift for iOS is further proof that the worst nightmares make the best games. Though I’ve never suffered a dream of falling I have seen Vertigo and ded
Is it just me or are there more than a few similarities between this rolling robot and Nintendo’s shapeshifting mascot Kirby? It’s round. It’s pink. And it has transformed from a ball into a tire that spins incredibly fast, which is the best Kirby power-up, easily. This version of Sphero, the 2B,
It’s a good week to be an Elder Scrolls fan, and not just because it’s so freaking cold outside that there’s a halfway-decent chance you’ll be able to spot the Northern Lights, reliving that magic hike from Skyrim. One reason to be excited is that the fan project Skywind—a remake of Morrowind using
Bokida looks like Minecraft as envisioned by trendy European graphic artists. Just imagine the premise was tweaked from building unsightly brick buildings to building Abstract Expressionist sculptures. Another difference is that the emphasis here is just as heavily on knocking things down as it is b
At this point pretty much every square inch of Earth has been recreated in Minecraft, so the web developer Rachel Carvalho has turned to modelling alien planets in the popular game about blocky construction blocks. Her project Voxel Mars is a Minecraft mod that lets you trudge across the vacant cavi
We knew they were coming. We just didn’t know it’d be this many of them. Today we learned from a report on Engadget that there will initially be twelve, count ‘em, twelve Steam Machines. Brace yourself for a long list of manufacturers: Alienware, Falcon Northwest, iBuyPower, CyberPowerPC, Origin PC
Here’s a feel-good story to kick off your week. A teenager will be kicking off the 2014 World Cup in São Paulo. The catch? He’s paralyzed, and will be assisted by an amazing robotic bodysuit built by neuroengineers at Duke. To put this in language that everybody understands, the device is controlled
It’s generally accepted that crowd-funding services are invaluable to games, allowing creative types to get things done without the oversight of a greedy publisher, who’d typically push for safe bets. However, in a recent interview, comments by Tim Schafer of Doublefine, whose game Broken Age was fu
Christine Love—the author of ingenuous, titillating, and culture-challenging visual novels—has announced her new game. There’s not much to go on aside from the title and the fact that it’s a dating game at this point, but luckily that title says a lot. My Twin Brother Made Me Crossdress As Him And
