Everyone wishes their parents were this cool. The above screenshot is taken from the start menu of what has got to be the most adorable game of the year so far. Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure is the result of 5-year-old Cassie’s imagination, and her father Ryan Henson Creighton’s technical assis
?Here’s your daily dose of mainstream videogame news. – First details on FIFA 12 available here. – Party this fall on Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville for Facebook and iOS. – Sony might be teasing us with a new game. – Microsoft takes an alternative approach to dealing with a hacker. ?That was easy e
Pitchfork came up with the 5-10-15-20 idea over two years ago to ask musicians about the music in their lives at five-year intervals. Our recent partnership with Pitchfork lets us do many things, one of which is apply that idea to videogame people. Today, creator of the Scott Pilgrim series, Bryan L
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Do you own a cat? Do you also own a tablet? Now you can bring these two parts of your life together, because Friskies has released three new games designed exclusively for cats. The three games, Cat Fishing, Tasty Treasures Hunt and Party Mix-Up are the product of some serious feline research: “To
Ever been told not to sit too close to a screen because it might damage your eyes? Researchers and the University of Manchester have found a way around that. Sort of. They have developed a new game that allows kids as young as four to sit still long enough for them to check for things like glaucoma
The human brain is an elusive, enigmatic thing. It can produce stunning intellectual achievement or irredeemable inanity. It loves a good puzzle almost as much as it loves shiny objects. Dan Gould’s detailing of the psychological goldmine that are videogames shows how game designers know how to woo
California’s Michael Ford likes to breathe life into dusty old arcade machines. But Ford decided to rummage through some of America’s older, dirtier forms of cabinet entertainment and make a good old-fashioned peep-show, spiffy and shiny and as dirty as it should be. He explains why he made it: “I b
Jason Johnson sees James Silva’s The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile as a gory dance that toys with our expectations: We call it play, but our options in a videogame are generally so narrow that it feels more like being dominated. A cold and mechanical algorithm looms over us, and all we can do is push l
Those familiar with the cinematic work of Takashi Miike may recall his gruesome productions Audition and Ichi the Killer. His work isn’t exactly known for being family friendly. But Miike, while presenting his new film, Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, suggested his up
Renaissance man and GIRP creator Bennett Foddy spoke to us about making games, making music and being a philosopher at Oxford: I used to keep it a secret that I made games. I was worried that people would not take me seriously, but it’s gradually becoming a bit harder to keep it a secret … and I’ve
When most people see a chatbot, they tend to ignore it. Clive Thompson, on the other hand, has a fruitful conversation with one that tries relentlessly to get his credit card number. Thompson has a very one-sided discussion with the bot, pondering the tests of Alan Turing and what it means to be hum
Here’s a bite-size list of some mainstream videogame news from the past day or so. -Pick yourself up a Gears of War 3 replica retro lancer this September. -“Master” Toshiyuki Takahashi parts with Hudson Soft. -Activision release footage from Modern Warfare 3. –L.A. Noire is the fastest selling new v
Atari founder Nolan Bushnell has kept on the cutting edge. This weekend he’ll be speaking at the 2011 Maker Faire, a wild showcase of avant-garde contraptions by inventors and designers. And he wants Forbes writer Brian Caulfield, and the rest of us, to put down the controller and find unusual kinds
