Hotline Miami doesn’t seem like an easy sell. True, the first postmodern game is my favorite of the year, and its Drive-meets-Scarface-meets-Smash TV aesthetic scratches an itch for a lot of weird dudes like me. But come on: it’s a top-down, grotesque kill fest with a meta-meta plot and it’s only av
Despite an ambivalent intial reception, Metro 2033, the cult-favorite Russian shooter set in a postapocalyptic Moscow subway system, received 2010 game of the year discussion from no less an authority than Tom Bissell. THQ’s financial misfortune – which has already led to that publisher’s great humb
Though many games develop themes of environmental preservation (and in fact, in one of the most beloved games of all time, Final Fantasy VII, you actually begin the game as an environmental terrorist. How weird is that??? Ok.), the crossover between gaming and the environmental movmenet isn’t notabl
Photo: Agence France-Presse The Syrian rebels, deep into the second year of their struggle against the repressive Assad regime, don’t have the resources of a national armed forces; they have to improvise. This AFP piece gives the layout of the homemmade Shams II armored vehicle, which is a: fully-en
-Brad Bushman, professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University, whose new study found that college students played violent games for three days in a row demonstrated increased aggressive behavior, while those who played nonviolent games did not.
My older sister and I didn’t have a particularly competitive relationship, and that’s not just because I’m better at everything than her (Hi Sara!). There was one area in which we were at each other’s throats, however, and it had nothing to do with school or sports or parental affection. That area w
Here’s a fascinating read this morning in Gamasutra: business advice for Western publishers looking to break into the booming Middle Eastern gaming market. In particular, games that emphasize social meeting space have been doing extremely well in the region, with its extremely young population and
Good news! Sportsfriends, the collection of excellent, offbeat local mulitplayer sports titles – from headliner JS Joust to Bennett Foddy’s awesome and cheekily-named Super Pole Riders, has hit its $150,000 Kickstarter funding target. We told you about the collection last month, in a conversation wi
There were much better games for the PlayStation than Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, but perhaps none I remember more vividly or more fondly. From the opening cinematic on, this game owned my life. Oh, yes, that cinematic, to my mind the best one of the 32-bit era, by a wide margin: Dear lord. Ok, so,
It’s called Teleglitch and it looks like this: The plot sounds like the best movie never made: See the future where humanity is controlled by cold, dark mega-corporations. One of them is Miliary Technology Incorporated (aka Militech), one of the world’s largest military research organizations, speci
It’s almost as hard to get Rockstar head honcho Sam Houser to talk at length as it is to get a picture of him – only a handful are floating around the internet. That’s why Edge’s quasi-oral history of GTA: Vice City with Houser is such a coup. This thing is full of gems, but my favorite is the story
Everyone thinks gamers are lazy, but we’re the only people on the couch moving: our fingers, and what with this newfangled motion sensing technology sometimes even our arms and entire bodies. Sony aims to fix that. They’ve filed a patent for eye tracking contact lenses using magnets and mirrors and
Thirteen years ago [ed: !!!], the beloved and tragically short-lived NBC dramedy, Freaks and Geeks, had its magical run. Thanks to its availability on Netflix instant and a truly terrific Vanity Fair oral history, the show is having a real moment right now, and justifiably so. Gallery 1988 in LA is
That blue sliver about a third of the way from the top? First-Person shooters. It would be fascinating to overlay that graph, which is a proportional breakdown of all games released by genre, with a proportional breakdown of total revenues by genre. My major takeaway from the second graph is just ho
-The British journalist Steven Poole, writing for Edge, on the dominance of the corridor in games, from the “jungly corridor” to the “war-torn city corridor.” A great read.
That’s the question asked in a long, fascinating, complex post on the Frictional Games (Amnesia, Penumbra) blog today. The problem according to the writer, is that modern adventure games have fallen into two categories – the Puzzle Approach and the Linear Plot approach – and each presents nagging li
Journey, Thatgamecompany’s lovely co-op adventure (which certain segments of our office sitting to my right did not particularly enjoy) was nominated for a Grammy today in the Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media category. Its competition – the Dark Knight Rises, Hugo, Tintin, The Girl with the Dr
A recently published study in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking found that people who use multiple media, like playing a video game while surfing the internet, are predisposed to depression and anxiety. The researchers, from Michigan State university, aren’t sure which way
As we told you last week, MoMA is adding 14 games to their permanent collection, with a little help from us. CCP Games, the Icelandic company that publishes EVE Online, one of the selections, has asked the game’s players to help them in the creation of the video that explains their beloved space-far
Wii U has a nice elevator pitch – console plus tablet – but it doesn’t have a piece of software that effortlessly demonstrates the potential of that pitch. This morning in Japan, Nintendo unveiled the best and most intuitive example of the power of their dual screens that I’ve seen: a Google Maps ap
The Streets of Rage games were good for a lot of reasons, from the insanely great music to the weird red-light-district ambience, to the fact that there was a playable boxing Kanagaroo named Roo. Anyroo, this Joey got his tail in a twist when he saw the following righteous footage from a SoR downloa
We’ve written recently about the rise of spectator eSports, and they’re more popular than ever, but most people would be hard pressed to name an eSports star. The lack of powerful personalities in compeitive online games may be about to change. Riot Games yesterday decided to ban a professional pla
AJ Dembroski, a designer who worked on the past two iterations of the colossal Madden franchise, went on the Twitter warpath this week after leaving Electronic Arts. Among his contentions: the game’s extremely talented designers are chronically stifled by a pervasive focus on metrics/statistics/numb
