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“Pixel Sand” is on Kickstarter right now, and it looks promising. Pixel Sand is both a game and a fantasy-physics simulation where you can take tons of different elements and mix them together to make your own ridiculous concoctions. With a strong emphasis on player creation, the game is vaguely re
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For reviewers, assigning a game a score can be a sticky situation. The very act assumes that games are quantitative objects whose qualities can be cut into pieces and weighed, like a pig before a butcher. Start looking at a game too closely and the reasons you like it fall apart. Converting feelings
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Dear Esther is a surreal Victorian ghost story originally conceived as a Half Life 2 mod. The game has been in development for two years, and it looks gorgeous. You might have seen it at the Independent Games Festival. The focus here is on exploration. It’s released February 14 on Steam. –Josiah Ha
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Continuing our look into the Sundance Film Festival, we are excited to see what comes from Sundance’s New Frontiers, a part of the festival dedicated to new ways to present narratives. Even the ubiquitous James Franco has had his hand in it. One of such projects comes from Italian-based Molleindust
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In a move to get youth off the couch and into a war zone, the U.S. Army has officially licensed a fairly realistic toy assault rifle. The camouflage plastic gun can be used in tandem with a Playstation Move motion controller to play first-person shooters such as Resistance 3 and Battlefield 3. Next
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Recently, the Village Voice caused a stir when they fired the long-time, reputable film critic, J. Hoberman. The NY Times today has a piece out in which their own big name critics, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott (you’ve seen their write-ups on Rotten Tomatoes, surely), speak with the now decommission
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In our Public Play issue, Jon Irwin wondered if the short-lived career of Nintendo’s Virtual Boy was “just a hint of what is now being fully realized.” 3D technology is certainly seeing a resurgence today, but a new device showcased at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show seems closer to the headge
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Shandy from San Francisco has made a woodcut board of “Settlers of Catan”. His project has already been funded via Kickstarter, but you can appreciate his handiwork here and here. It’s a shame you can’t still pledge; for $1,000 dollars he promised to hand deliver the set in a “super embarrassing Cat
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So, you fight with your roommates over dirty dishes but your guild in WoW could not be getting along better. Ever wonder how it does so well? Recently, researches at the Medical University of Vienna in Austria have looked at the behaviors of more than 400,000 people who play the online MMO Pardus t
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As the specter of the Stop Online Piracy Act looms on the horizon, threatening our internet sovereignty, many sites are trying to get the message out. Wikipedia had their black out and many tech sites shut down for the day. Ludum Dare, a community devoted to creating games in a limited time frame, l
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A firsthand account of John Madden’s “man cave.” A rumination on the intricacies of sports A.I.. The question, “Are Sports Games Art?” It might be easier to tell you what isn’t in writer Tom Bissell’s investigation into EA’s Madden franchise. But the part that struck a chord with me is that John Mad
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DICE is a games conference in Las Vegas. It is expensive and exclusive, but has yielded some classic talks such as Jesse Schell’s now-legendary future of gamification/points for brushing your teeth talk. I’ll be there to grapple with Adam Sessler of G4 on what writing and talking about games actual