This dynamite column from John Brindle at Nightmare Mode compares the years of socialziation and knowledge-accumulation necessary to become a serious modern gamer to the tiny subset of people who make it through the most prestigious colleges at Oxford, and analyzes the ingroup-outgroup dynamics that
From Mech Warrior to Xenogears, from Zone of the Enders to Armored Core, gaming has always been a safe space for giant pilotable robots, so often stigmatized elsewhere as “dorky” or “big-boned” (sigh, sizeism). What gamers have known all along is that giant pilotable robots are typically fun-loving
The people have voted, and Double Fine is now developing the four games chosen during the Amnesia Fortnight Festival (sadly, the office fart sim Silent But Deadly was not chosen). The bros and broettes at Tim Schaefer’s studio have set up a live stream around their office to cover the development of
Did you see Moon? It was a little sci-fi thriller directed by Duncan Jones (David Bowie’s kid!) and it starred Sam Rockwell as a guy on a mine on the moon in the near future and Kevin Spacey as his robot frenemy. It paid tender tribute to the greats of heady 70s and 80s scifi, but was very much its
Beating Dark Souls took me a month and a half. The opportunity cost was… high. The personal cost was… high. The emotional cost was… high. Speed Demos Archive has released a video of some person, nay, some champion, defeating From Software’s magnum opus in less time than it takes me to commute to wo
-Greg Richardson, CEO of Rumble Entertainment, at the Game Monetization Summit. It’s a common argument that doomsaying about the state of the game industry fails to take into account digital games, the total sales of which are pretty much unknown. If casual experiences only represent 10 percent of a
Sometimes I want pizza and sometimes I want donuts; the brain is a mystery. Thankfully there are some scientists out there who are tired of our animistic scratchings and Freudian guesswork and are actually trying to figure out how the old brain box does its job. Right now some of the very best are f
Today, Russia makes atmospheric and weird games like Metro 2033, still available for free by liking THQ’s page on Facebook. Back in the wine-stain birthmark days, when playing American games was niche-niche, they played an arcade submarine-battle game called Morskoi Boy, which was not made in a game