Joseph Bernstein

About halfway through Far Cry 3 (which I’ll review this week), you rescue a character who, we are made to understand, has been raped by his captor. The victim has been imprisoned in a dingy basement just feet from a busy road; the sequence, which ends in the murder of the rapist, is an obvious allus

Look, I’ve got a soft spot for Bill Nye. We went to the same school. He spoke there once when I was eleven or twelve and he was goofy and had a bowtie and owned it. The Science Guy years were magical, of course, and much less codedly hostile than Mr. Wizard. Since then, Bill Nye has basically been c

-Developer Jeremy Alessi in Gamasutra today, on the rise of games as revenue delivery functions. Essential reading.

Massively multiplayer games promise epic, persistent experiences, but in a very significant way they are less persistent than the copy of Tetris you have stashed in the basement: once developer and publisher support ends, you simply can’t play them anymore. So it goes for City of Heroes, the charmin

The NASA Cassini-Huygens robotic spaceship caught this thermal signature of Tethys, and it looks like, well, it could eat a cherry and mess up some ghosts. Scientists theorize that the Pac-Man thermal shape on the Saturnian moons occurs because of the way high-energy electrons bombard low latitudes

Dear god. Rock Paper Shotgun has the goods again today, this time about a Square-Enix Facebook promotional campaign for the new Hitman game, in which you can “target” friends for a “hit” and identify them by things like, I”m serious, having “small tits” or an undersized penis, or RED HAIR. It’s alre

After graduating university with a chemistry degree, Ajit Singh went to work as a graphic designer for a soccer company, designing uniforms for clubs across the United Kingdom. He dreamed of making a game, though, and he found his inspiration in The Cove, a 2009 documentary about dolphin hunting in

Today featured Kickstarter news both triumphant and tragic: the turn-based strategy game Alpha Colony missed its target funding ($50,000) by $28 and won’t be funded, while Sir, You Are Being Hunted more than doubled its target (40,000 pounds) and will be made.  So the former will start over, or die,

From the British indie Landslide, which includes developers who worked on the Grand Theft Auto series and Wipeout, comes Criminalympics, a crime-sports lark very much in the Rockstar vein. The game – which is looking for 100,000 pounds on Kickstarter – takes places in something called the “Staten Is

-Olivia Metcalf, researcher at the Australian National University, whose PHD research demonstrated that some gamers literally cannot stop thinking about games, even if they try to.

At Kill Screen, our ties to hip-hop run deep. Former KS intern Drew Millard is the genius-level head behind Rap Industry Fan Fiction. Wu-Block is currently blowing out the speakers of our MacBook Air. This is why we are so overjoye to see that Spin has done a commendable public service and compiled

If you’ve not seen it yet, the trailer for a Russian indie game called Stealer is the best game trailer I’ve seen this year, by a wide margin: So who is the man who made this utterly beguiling combination of Limbo, Hotline: Miami, and Blade Runner? The developer goes by the nom de game Winged Doom a

When Disney acquired LucasFilm in October, coverage naturally, and rightly, focused on Star Wars. It’s important to remember, though, that LucasFilm and its sundry subsidiaries have been home to an enormous amount of talent over the decades, that a lot of that talent no longer works there, and that,

Say what you will about Assassin’s Creed 3, and we said a lot, the setting was inspired. Colonial American has not gotten a lot of love over the years in games. In fact, it is only the second game I’ve ever played set in the time period. The first, 1996s Conquest of the New World, was a Civ-style st

My post earlier about competitive gaming, about pushing yourself to the limit in the name of games, brought back a memory. I’m not sure if I’m proud or ashamed of what happened in the fall of 2008, but I want to confess. I was late to the next (current) generation party. Though I first saw a 360 in

Last year we profiled the righteous Finn and game developer Petri Purho, the man behind Crayon Physics Deluxe. That delightful puzzle game, with its Kindergarten-drawing aesthetic and drawing mechanic, originally dropped in 2009 and has come out over various platforms since then, mostly recently as

Earlier this week I speculated about the reason for the rise of Twitch and the new games voyeurs, people who watch others play competitive online games, live, from far away. Shortly after I wrote the piece, a friend suggested the real reason millions of people watch League of Legends and Starcraft r

Research psychologist Konstantine Zakzanis had known for years that the convetional tests for cognitive impairment in patients with disorders ranging from depression to Alzheimer’s disesase to post-concussive syndrome were unreliable. He even wrote a book about it.  Frustrated by his inability to te

Lots of museum news today, what with our very own Jamin Warren helping to decide what video games are worthy of de Kooning and Brancusi. The other story, which might get lost in the shuffle, is that a playable replica of Spacewar!, one of the very first videogames, will be displayed at the Museum of

Last week at the London Science Museum, a new exhibition called Painless opened. It explores …pain through the stories of extraordinary people who deal with it every day – from the patient who suffers with chronic pain in his missing limb, to the man who feels no pain at all. How are scientists work

If you’ve got the time, Buzzfeed’s 4,500 word history of the early days of Atari and the development of Pong is a delight. Apart from what is clealry a still-simmering beef between Magnavox Odyssey mastermind Ralph Baer (age 90) and Atari (and Chuck-E-Cheese!) founder Nolan Bushnell (age 69), my fav

I come from a family of bargain hunters. We thrill to the discounted, the half-off, the outlet mall, the two-for-one. So I know a steal when I see one. And the Humble THQ Bundle, from the distressed publisher, is a goshdarn deal.  You get: Metro 2033, Darksiders, Red Faction Armageddon, Company of H

The drumbeat of doom for Big Games has grown louder and faster this fall, as a mediocre crop of AAA titles fails to distract from dwindling sales. No one really knows how severe the decline of the industry is, though, because there is no way for publishers and the media to tabulate and compare digit