Looks like television producers are finally figuring out what videogame companies have known for decades: If you can make something yourself, why buy it from somebody else? – – – House of Cards is a 13-episode drama directed by David Fincher and starring Kevin Spacey. Twenty years ago, the star powe
Blizzard “Nemo” battered the east coast overnight on Friday. The governor of Massachusetts enforced an official ban on driving, the first since 1978, with penalties upwards of a year in prison if caught on the roads. Public transit shut down indefinitely. Most schools, stores and businesses shut dow
Sony’s successor to the Playstation 3 is rumored to have a ‘Share Button,’ the exact purpose of which has yet to be disclosed. The assumption is that this will be a seamless way to post screenshots or even video with others online. The growing library of playthroughs on YouTube and the surging popul
New mediums spend their early years as platforms for what hasn’t yet been possible, gathering material from the unsatisfied impulses of their creator’s brains. Eventually, with enough time and accumulation, the material echoes its very creation. Arcadecraft, a new indie game on Xbox Live where you m
Sometimes the world needs to know what brand sweatpants you’re wearing. It is for these moments that Twitter was invented. Okay, maybe narcisstic prattle isn’t the only reason. If only there was a way to sift through the endless chatter and reshape it into art… Enter the Pentametron. – – – Developed
As games crossed over from niche pasttime to mainstream success, more and more world-class artists have lent their vision to the pursuit of digital leisure. Stephen Spielberg has put his fingers in many a game-pie, from 1995’s PC adventure The Dig to the unrealised project for EA, codenamed LMNO [ht
It took a long time, but videogames are finally being placed in museums as artistic objects to appreciate. The Smithsonian exhibit, “The Art of Video Games” ran from last March until September, giving fans and laymen alike a chance to view and play pivotal games from the nascent industry’s first fou
Despite the very strange power outage at the start of the second half, last night’s Super Bowl was a nail-biter and continued the trend of close match-ups at the highest level. But all that pageantry does seem to distract from what is becoming a core issue — brain injuries. Yes, the NFL has announce
It’s 2:24PM and I’m playing 3:15AM, an experimental game made by Martin Fasterholdt and Tim Garbos at the Nordic Game Jam held two weeks ago in Copenhagen. I have no idea what to do. My lo-poly man sits in an office chair. His posture reminds me of the Thinking Man statue; my own thoughts are simila
If you live in some bustling metropolis like New York City or Stockholm or Tokyo, you know that getting to work can be as fraught with danger or excitement as escaping the outstretched clutches of any final boss. Sidewalker: Late to Work is an iOS endless runner where your goal is just that: To be o
I make a point to watch Groundhog Day on the titular holiday, and I bet I’m not alone. This year, accentuate your viewing experience with the knowledge that Bill Murray was trying to level up all along. – – – The wiki tvtropes.org features a persuasive argument for Groundhog Day as a videogame. The
Between August 2003 and July 2004, I spent a year living in northern France as an au pair. (Think “The Manny.”) My charges, explosive as C4, were six- and eight-year-old boys born to an American mother and a French father. They enjoyed the usual distractions of youth: bike-riding, judo, threatened d
The story of Gridlee is a kind of dream deferred. Originally programmed for the arcades during the early 1980s heyday of pellet-gobbling and starship-shooting, the game was never officially released. Until now. Available on iOS for free since last week, it’s both a compelling amalgam of classic mech
Jennifer Egan’s book A Visit From the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Literature. Too bad Egan thinks it could have been better. In a chapter from the upcoming book Why We Write, excerpted on Salon.com, she explains how the public and widespread praise has affected her creative output, go
As far as slogans for industry-conquering multinational corporations go, Google’s “Don’t be evil” ranks pretty high on the list. It’s concise, impactful, unselfish. The informal motta may be withering some, with suggestions that sharing users’ private data is within a stone’s throw of evil-ish behav
THQ’s auctioning off of its many properties was a bittersweet moment. With renewed energy and a fresh outlook, the hope is that Company of Heroes can thrive under the SEGA company banner, while franchises like Homefront will continue to evolve under the creative direction of Crytek. Then Ubisoft swe
Monster Hunter lords over Japanese gamers like Black Diablos over a herd of cats. The influence and popularity of Capcom’s team-oriented giant-killing simulation in the east is hard to overstate. The game single-handedly kept Sony’s PSP handheld afloat against the Nintendo DS juggernaut. And its mov
You can play Ikachan for free right now. And you should play it; originally released on PC in 2000, you control a squid through a vast series of underwater caverns, exploring each dimly-lit crevice for food, battling enemies and helping out friends made along the way. It’s the work of Daisuke Amaya,
We are an impatient lot. To paraphrase Christian Slater in Kuffs, we have places to see, people to do. And 21st century entertainment is all too happy to bend to our ADD whims. Whereas a Henry James novel might take 100 pages to establish the central conflict, a modern thriller starts with a 2-page
Disney’s new venture into game/toy synergy a la Skylanders, Disney Infinity, is coming to every single dedicated game platform this summer. Andy Robertson of Family Gamer TV recently interviewed John Blackburn, Studio Head for the new Infinity project, and came away with the pricing for the stand-al
Thirty years ago, Nintendo released their Famicom in Japan, two years before it would come out in the west as the NES. President of Nintendo Corporate Ltd., Satoru Iwata announced that to celebrate the small system’s big anniversary, Wii U owners would be able to download one classic game a month fo
Uberflip is a Toronto-based creator of PDF editing software that enables more flexible and robust info-distribution. Their very business model depends on using the screens in our hands, and in front of our eyes, effectively. They recently compiled a report on how we use these screens; according to s
The worlds of fiction are inherently malleable. Since they exist solely in the minds of their creators, rules bend to the slightest of whims; what begins as flight of fancy can take hold and not let go. Before we know it the undead have invaded Longbourn. Dear reader, our classics are being spoiled,
With all of the hoopla over Nintendo’s generous heaping of announcements earlier this week, an upcoming game’s arrival on western shores has been shoved aside for more pressing matters, like whether Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker‘s original toon-shading looks better than the upcoming HD remake (answer:
Michael Johansson is a Swedish artist concerned with putting the pieces back together. His show Still Lifes, presented at The Flat in Milan, Italy until February 23rd, consists of numerous cubes all made of suitcases, safety-deposit boxes, and giant legos. Stockholm-based online magazine designboom
