The future has gotten even rosier for virtual reality, as the Oculus Rift headgear has just received a whopping 75 million dollars in financial backing from the investing firm Andreessen Horowitz. Oculus had previously raised just 16 million. This will undoubtedly propel us into the virtual future
The key to a well-taken selfie is to do something adorably dorky and then apply a patina. Interstellar Selfie Station, by the visual novelist Christine Love, is a snapshot app that makes this easy. This is what every high-schooler would have been doing in 1998 if the Gameboy Color Camera had an inte
Motherboard has put together a fantastic mini-documentary called The New Kings of Kong, filmed last month in Denver, Colorado, at The Kong Off 3. The heroes and villains from the 2007 feature-length Donkey Kong championship documentary are a distant memory. The diabolical Billy Mitchell and the good
The Ouya is a charming little system that hasn’t had much love. It garnered a lot of attention and excitement on Kickstarter, positioned as a console for the little guy, but it hasn’t made much of a splash since then. It’s now getting a shot in the arm, as Google has released a toolkit that makes i
Framed is a noir game in which you rearrange the panels of a comic so that a silhouetted PI in a fedora can proceed through the story. The fragmented narrative and cartoon-spy schtick sort of evokes Simogo’s triumphant Device 6, although with a slightly less sinister vibe. It’s a kitschy game, a th
Boston, they say, is the ruined locale for the next Fallout game. As with any substantial piece of news coming by way of the blogosphere, this should be taken with an iodine pill, but placing a new Fallout game in Beantown—the historical home to Sons of Liberty and the Minutemen—makes sense. It’s a
Wasteland 2, the long-awaited followup to a classic brought back to life by the miracle of Kickstarter, is now out in beta version, and the developer inXile is strongly encouraging those who have it to stream its post-apocalyptic vision of terra cotta sands. This is a sign that times are a’changing.
The Walking Dead game has this thing with vulnerable protagonists. The first season was played from the perspective of an ordinary black man—which is great. In season two, available later this month, you are cast in the role of a helpless female grade-schooler with a purple backpack—again, cool. But
YouTube has been cracking down on Let’s Play videos, sending unfriendly emails to many users who earn money from uploading videos of themselves playing games online. While I’ve never been much for people screaming in falsetto at their computer monitor, it’s sad to see the community come under fire,
In games, we face strange questions that don’t tend to come up in other mediums. Here’s one. When did The Legend of Zelda become a genre? Hack ’n’ Slash is a rather blatant homage to the series starring a stubby elf in the green tunic who’s saved the world with a bow, boomerang, and hookshot on num
Well-placed strokes are an important thing in Samurai Gunn, the new, super-fun, four-player fighter for PC that dabbles pixel art with Kurosawa. That applies not only to strategy in a game where one hit will kill you, but also to the game’s visual flair. A horizontal slash scores the arena like a ri
When I was in school, the periodic table was distinctly un-fun—a photocopied chart of elements and atomic numbers to be memorized in rote fashion. Toca Boca’s Science Lab for iPad, out tomorrow, looks like the greatest argument for the gamification of learning to date. (Putting aside how problematic
Even if you haven’t heard of it, you know how Dex goes. A police siren wails in a rainy back alley. Purple neon letters carve through an infinitesimally gray city precinct. You used to be somebody until your memory implants were fried while hacking into the firewall of a sentient AI—a setup, you cla
When a guy like John Carmack says that the first-person shooter will never die, it’s pretty much gospel. But FO/CUS by mindful xp is a prime example of how conventions of the shooter can be flipped into something non-categorizable and special. You can play it here. Made for the 7 Day FPS competition
Valve’s Gabe Newell, looking and sounding a bit like Jerry Garcia, recently fielded questions from students who are learning to code. While the Google Hangout session was fairly standard fare for those familiar with the company’s m.o.—the internet upturning traditional economic models, the unorthodo
Blackbeard’s Wrath (absolutely nothing to do with Montezuma’s revenge) is the multiplayer content for Assassin’s Creed 4 that’s out today, Dec. 10th. Among its cast of three heroic scalawags is The Orchid. Though her back story goes into Templars and the Qing dynasty and some stuff about how she bal
In an interview today with Wired, John Carmack, the programmer of Doom and grandpapa of the first-person shooter, had the following to say about the longevity of the battle-worn genre. I think that first-person shooter is a stable genre that’s going to be here forever, just like there are going to
Chances are you were too busy taking in the oceans of stars to notice the talking point of No Man’s Sky, the recently unveiled star-fighter from the studio that has brought us outstanding little gems about an Evel Knievel named Joe Danger. Maybe you were half paying attention, not knowing what you w
A fanciful new trailer for the lovely-looking Monument Valley has been released, and its about as charming as flipping through the kids’ section in the Ikea catalog, which is to say it’s pretty charming! The crux of the game seems to be rotating and revolving blocks into impossible orientations so t
The Guardian has published a document from the Edward Snowden leak that shows that the NSA has been playing a lot of WoW to fight terrorism. Yes, you read that right. They’ve been doing some elven espionage in hopes of catching international scumbags. Apparently, someone at DOJ has been reading Neal
Though we go into a swivet whenever the internet is out for over five minutes, some activities just aren’t all that great online. These include physical intimacy (see our awesome article of cybering in Second Life in issue 3), fine dining, and four-player fighting games. This is why we shouldn’t car
By now the first season of The Walking Dead in my memory is a blur of consistent bickering, uncalled for cannibalism, and mobs of white trash that I feared and despised even more than those who had been zombified. This is why I can’t wait for season two. Well, that and because it was an incredible l
Rex Crowle, the lead creative on Tearaway, had a friendly fireside chat with the good fellas at Reddit the other day, and fittingly, this piece of beard-worthy news came out of it. An awesome feature that didn’t make it into the game is beard-recognition. “The gameplay programmer used facial recogni
Virtual reality continues to show that man will go to great lengths to supplant himself inside the world of Grand Theft Auto. A batshit but impressive tech demo of one devoted man strapped into every virtual reality peripheral there is makes that evident. In the video, he’s using a locomotion device
