Back from the weekend! I heard something about a giant bowl of cereal? Anyway, let’s hear about some news. – Remember how Valve had a secret TF2 project? Looks like that wasn’t all they were hiding. Here’s some concept art for what may be a new game. – Check your inboxes! 100,000 more Diablo 3 beta
Every year when February rolls around, Oscar buzz dominates in the realm of the press- try looking for a major news site that doesn’t have predictions and ruminations on the most prestigious of all Hollywood awards shows. In this vein, the Chicago Tribune has a curious piece on what exactly this ye
EyeAsteroids, on view at London’s Trocadero for another two weeks, is $15,000 to build and the first eye-controlled arcade machine. There’s some other vision pun I could make but I’m coming up short……sighted. -Jamin Warren [via Eurogamer]
Big is the new small apparently with big directors turning to “personal films.” George Lucas recently had Red Tails and Francis Ford Coppola has Twixt. Now, Joe Johnston, director of Captain America, has announced that he’s going low-budget for his next film. Eric Vespe from Aintitcoolnews asks why
Last weekend’s Global Game Jam tasked several thousand people across the world with making an entirely new game from start to finish in forty eight hours. This year’s theme was simply a picture of Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail. From that, the participants managed to make incredibly differ
Hooray! It’s friday! So let’s check in with today’s gaming news and get back to gaming! – Valve has some mystery project and we may be meeting the Pyro soon! – Metro: Last Light has been delayed until 2013. – Bioware Associate Producer Mike Gamble has said that it would be a good idea to hold on to
In an interview about the upcoming film Resident Evil: Retribution, Milla Jovovich summed up the mentality of Hollywood action flicks. In short, it is an awful lot like the mentality of blockbuster games: The whole point is that we want to make every film better than the last one. So we definitely h
It is as inevitable a part of growing up as broccoli or homework, and has been for years in our social circles. Psychologists call it “socioemotional selectivity theory.” Today, we call it “defriending.” While the pruning of our social branches has always gone on, the recent explosion of social ne
Feel good story of the day. Okay. Of a few days ago, when it surfaced on Reddit that a developer of Legend of Grimrock, an upcoming role-playing game similar to Wizardry and Etrian Odyssey, had modified the game per the request of a disabled fan. Here’s the chat from the game’s site: What a kind ges
As any diehard PC gamer will tell you, a game’s mods and modding community is often just as important to enjoyment of the game as the game itself. Bethesda’s latest shameless timesink, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, will soon make itself exponentially more accessible to would-be modders with the upcom
“Monster Guru” has some lofty ambitions. According to Gimo Games: Monster Guru enables players to capture and train monsters in a beautiful, expansive environment all the while discovering the secrets hidden behind the game’s complex and engaging story. With a smart geolocation feature, some pretty
Even though Ben Shaw “suffered multiple shrapnel wounds and had to have both of his eyes surgically removed” while serving in Iraq, he is still an active World of Warcraft player, thanks to his own determination and the constant assistance of his fellow guild member. An interview at WoW Insider told
Q: What’s 1 divided by 998,001? A:… Turns out that it’s every number from 000 to 999 in sequential order… except 998. Except 998!! If you were a computer, you’d find this HILARIOUS. Trust me. -Jason Johnson [via It’s Okay to be Smart]
A recent study by Linda Jackson says that gaming is actually positively linked to creativity. A study of nearly 500 12-year-olds found that the more kids played video games, the more creative they were in tasks such as drawing pictures and writing stories. So go buy your kid sister Scribblenauts, ok
Zynga is taking advantage of their platform to do more than promote themselves. They have announced a new Bingo game going in to beta soon that will draw players from throughout Facebook, allowing everyone to play together in massive games. The company has made a lot of money through leveraging the
I stopped by Eyebeam last night for the closing party for Lumarca, the new digital work and “volumetric display) by outgoing Eyebeam fellow Matt Parker. (We’ve got more from him in the news department so stayed tuned!) Working more than six years with partner with Albert Hwang, Lumarca is an interac
When did the image of the chessplayer become synonymous with Machiavellian scheming and cunning? We don’t bestow the same reverence to talented Risk players, or to Bridge champions, even those are (arguably) more intricate games. Scientists have even shown that the only thing that being good at ches
The ongoing exhibition, “Contemporary Galleries: 1980-Now,” at the Museum of Modern Art features several artworks that relate to videogames because they invite participation. Rirkrit Tiravanija‘s Untitled 1992/1995 (free/still), in particular allows visitors to eat Thai food in a fabricated kitchen
The common refrain is that Hideo Kojima needs an editor. The famed designer, creator of the action-adventure stealth series Metal Gear, is renowned for his keen instincts as a game developer, and his tone-deaf approach to story. His games play like Michael Bay directing a Charlie Kaufman script: one
It’s Thursday! You know what that means?! That it’s time for today’s cheat sheet! – A Finnish site is claiming that Halo 4 will be revealed later this month at Microsoft’s Spring Showcase. – Fans are planning on using everyone’s favorite game, Half-Life 2, in an effort to get some answers out of Val
In a recent story about war veteran and burn victim Sam Brown’s long and painful road to recovery, Jay Kirk sheds light on a new aspect of videogames designed for military use. Unsure how to proceed with a treatment that was causing Brown constant agony, his doctors finally summoned Hunter Hoffman,
According to an interview in V Magazine, the alt-pop singer/songwriter Ariel Pink announced that he was working on a werewolf movie that he plans to produce, score, and act in, tentatively titled Bad Vibes. “Set in the 1960s, the film is centered on “a band called the Sunrise Majesty, which is a mi
The newest Final Fantasy game has a few different endings depending on how you play the game out. Thankfully, none of the endings are as harrowing as the speech Richard Nixon had an assistant prepare for him to give the nation had the moon landing failed: Fate has ordained that the men who went to t
A new book compiling the letters of William S. Burroughs, the drug-addled satirist who wrote Naked Lunch, and my personal favorite author when I was a kid, will be released in February. A sample of the letters, ran by The Paris Review, shows a personable side of Burroughs rarely seen in his fiction.
A longtime supportive of innovative tech alternative, Pearson is now partnering with the tech startup Alleyoop to retool interactive education. The idea basically comes down to “structuring existing content like a Facebook game”: students search for help with their homework via the Alleyoop website,
