The guy over at Video Games and Booze, the only blog (that I know of) that specializes in “the art of pairing video games with booze” recently took to matching an alcholic beverage to Nordic role-playing game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Here’s what he had to say: fantasy games are among the easiest
Even among the irascible and often insane candor of this campaign’s Republican presidential primaries, it was odd to hear Newt Gingrich take advantage of his short-lived frontrunner status to make an outlandish campaign promise to people the moon with American settlers in less than a decade. Gingric
The Independent Games Festival finalist Prom Week is a simulation like few others. In SimCity, you are responsible for keeping traffic flowing and decreasing smog. The Sims is as much about taking pee breaks as it is about pursuing your life dream. But Prom Week cuts through the clutter and gets to
One of the things that has always seemed to hold games back from becoming a rarified “art form,” to use that sticky term, is their long-time absence from the institutionalization of gallery and museum life. Recent developments in everything from the Louvre’s interactivity to the GDC’s own retrospect
The people over at iam8bit productions have been making beautiful artistic depictions of videogames for a while now, but this has to be one of my favorite ones: roomba covers modelled off of classic mario characters. This is probably the greatest thing that’s happened to robot-assisted housecleaning
Here’s the news for today: – Double Fine’s Tim Schafer has posted an awesome 35 minute long conversation between himself and his interviewee, adventure game guru Ron Gilbert. – Minecraft will soon be getting modding support. – Bethesda is hiring for a game for “future-generation consoles.” – Sega ha
Dubbed “mixed reality architecture,” South Korea’s Live Park has more than 60 exhibits enable by RFID, Kinect, and other motion-sensing technologies. The above is obviously a promo video, but with more than $13m in investment, it’s certainly something that modern museums could learn from to make the
Kevin Slavin points us to Balloon paperApp by French publishing house Les éditions volumiques with a fascinating spin on augmented reality games. The shadow work is really what makes the project work.
You know what can be the worst? When you’ve lost your perspective in a game and can’t maneuver you/the camera out of your weird quagmire where you’re accidentally running into a wall because you can’t figure out how to swing the camera and then all of a sudden you just get straight SHOT. Maybe that’
At Pace Digital Gallery this month, the new show Codings aims to show the computer as “an aesthetic, programmed device that computes on characters” on par with poetry. The curators explain: A three-line version of this program appeared in original 1982 _Commodore 64 User’s Guide:_ 10 PRINT “{CLR/HOM
Bully is a documentary from The Weinstein Company on bullying coming out later this year. Recently, the MPAA gave the film an R rating which was appealed by the Weinsteins and after losing, they threatened to leave the MPAA. The crux of the Weinstein’s argument, as highlighted in the article on Slas
Our friends over at Mr. Gif devised this simple illustration from a quote from the great Dr. Einstein. As a writer about games, I worry that we value encyclopedic knowledge about what games are what rather than what games are. -Jamin Warren [via Mr. Gif]
It’s never a good idea to have too many cooks in the kitchen. Just ask the Miami Heat, or the Wu-Tang Clan. Okay, admittedly, those two examples make it sound perfectly rad. In fact, so does Ridiculous Fishing. When four superstar indies came together to turn a primitive PC game about shooting fish
Trussed-up telenovela Downton Abbey, an Edwardian-set import, has captured this nation’s hearts and imaginations with its savvy combination of icy British subtlety and hot-blooded American-style romance. And much like your average everyday card-based RPG, the show often stages the fall of fiefdoms a
Matthew Davis & artist/designer Justin Ma have taken their talents to build the IGF-nominated Faster Than Light. But now they need your help to finish the project once and for all. They explain: Many games have tackled the goal of recreating the feeling of space operas, but few have focused on the
I think I might be the only person who genuinely enjoyed Lulu, last year’s Metallica/Lou Reed joint album. Lots of people were upset with how the album was basically a latter-day Lou Reed album with Metallica fucking around in the background, but once you get past your preconceived notions of what t
And with Monday winding down, here’s today’s gaming news: – Pokémon White 2 and Black 2 have both been announced as the next Pokémon games. – Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City is coming out March 20th for PS3 and Xbox 360, but PC fans will have to wait until May. – Borderlands 2 has released de
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is certainly one of the coolest, most bizarre books ever to win a Pulitzer-it seemed like you needed to take constant trips to Wikipedia to understand the whole thing if you didn’t have a working knowledge of Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons and also Latin A
Writing biography is hard. Basically, you have to learn about every single part of a person’s life and then filter out the boring stuff, which must be maddening. In a recent interview with The Millions, Scott Donaldson, who’s written biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Earnest Hemingway and Winfield
We’re sad to report that Steve Kordek, the inventor of the two-flipper pinball machine, died last Saturday at the age of 100. He will be missed. Time reports: In an interview with the New York Times, Pinball author Roger Sharpe says the two-flipper design was only part of Kordek’s revolutionary cont
Here’s the rest of today’s news: – Sega released a teaser suggesting that Jet Grind Radio is coming to Xbox Live Arcade and Sony Entertainment Network at some point. – SEN is going down for scheduled maintenance next week. – Blizzard may be working on a free-to-play game, Everquest is going free-
Good morning, sports racers. Here’s just some of the latest in the larger gaming world. -The Playstation Network will be down for a bit on March 1 due to scheduled maintenance—not because of hackers or anything ominous. -The Indie Royale Alpha Collection is now available for download. -PixelFoundry,
How will the nation’s wealth be divvied up 50 years from now? If videogames are to be believed (which, for obvious reasons, they shouldn’t, although Madden did pick the Giants to win the Super Bowl by a margin of threejust sayin’), the division will be more drastic in the future than it is today.
Think about all the terrible movies you’ve ever watched…it’s probably a pretty long list. All frustrated consumers, rejoice: a new system by UK based company Myndplay has developed a system of software and an EEG-based headset that allows movie viewers to control specially developed films. With thei
Illustrator Shilo Shiv Suleman is worried that technology is prevented the youth to dream, so she made an iPad storybook called Khoya to restore what’s been lost: “In the last 10 years, children have been locked inside their rooms, glued to their PCs. … But now with mobile technology, we can actuall
