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The Jixi labor camp in the Heilongjiang province in China uses the repetition of Communist propaganda, trench digging and other forms of manual labor to “rehabilitate” it’s prisoners. But Liu Dali, a 54-year-old man imprisoned for “illegally petitioning” the central government for corruption, spent
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Here’s your daily dose of (mostly) mainstream videogame news. Minus the hassle. -Sony is being coy about its next platform. –Terraria hits 200 000 sales in 9 days thanks to word-of-mouth. –Minecraft for Android will come to Xperia Play first. -New download service “Little Indie” caters to indie game
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A computer game has gotten the chief of a right-wing Austrian party, the Styrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), into some serious legal trouble. Party leader Gerhard Kurzmann could face up to two years in prison for posting Moschee ba ba (Bye, Bye Mosque), which features questionable and offensive treatment o
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NHPR’s Jon Lynch speaks with educator Joel Levin about how the block-building indie Minecraft lets him design a wide-open curriculum. It’s a constructive game instead of a destructive game, you know. [The students] aren’t just blasting aliens, and I think that appeals to a lot of people, especially
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Now this is retro gaming. This “Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device”, invented by Thomas T. Goldsmith and Estle Ray Mann in 1947, is one of the earliest examples of a videogame: Described it as a game of skill where a player sits or lies in front of a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) mounted in a closet, the a
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Erik Wolpaw spoke with 1UP’s Mike Nelson recently about some of the creative decisions that went into making Portal 2, how GLaDOS came into existence, how Aperture Science is designed to evoke a certain tone, and how Chell’s gender was based on a coin toss: For Chell, it was almost literally a coin
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Unlike many first-person shooters, Bulletstorm doesn’t ask players to plod through a human meat-grinder with awkward mechanics. Rather, it allows them to swish easily through a cascade of gore and flailing body parts. Brian Howe talks about how this game is more fun than any action movie: Bulletsto
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No one yet knows who made this Pip-Boy 3000, the trusty wrist-worn HUD from the Fallout series. But whomever it was has mounted it with an iPhone. And has won our respect. See more images here. –Lana Polansky
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How many gamers learned of the Great PSN Crisis of 2011 when they vainly tried signing into their PSN accounts? Now that can all be avoided, because the PSN Status app has made it to the App Store: If you are amongst the millions of iPhone owners who also happen to have PS3’s, I’ve got the perfect
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Alien Trap’s Capsized wants to let you soar freely. It wants to give you the giddy joy of flinging your mini space marine into the despair of a gaseous hole. But Dennis Kogel reveals why Capsized, despite promising freedom of movement, is still too claustrophobic: For a short time, Capsized allows
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Here’s your mainstream videogame news for the day, made easy. –Australians who pre-order LoZ: Ocarina of Time for 3DS can get an actual ocarina and sheet music. -Developer Hothead Games announced a game based on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy book series. -The last remaining founder of the
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In theory, this sounds kind of interesting. NBC Universal’s SyFy Channel and game developer and publisher Trion Worlds will be bringing a new kind of T.V. show to the summer of 2012. The show, entitled Defiance, will follow the general plot of a future Earth populated both by humans and by aliens. B