Kill Screen Staff

“Necessity may be the mother of invention, but play is certainly the father.” — inventor Roger von Oech

It can be tough to keep up with videogame news, so we’re helping out. Here’s what you need to know. –Mass Effect 3 is delayed. -Naughty Dog’s Amy Henning dishes on writing Uncharted 3. -EA preps for the worst with the NFL lockout. –StarCraft II gets the papercraft treatment. -More than 100 million R

This first aired during The Carol Burnett Show.

A Japanese lab has created a device (above) that can simulate the feeling of kiss — transmitted digitally: “This device is for communications within the mouth, in other words, the goal is to obtain the feeling of kissing.” “If you take one device in your mouth and turn it with your tongue, the other

This is the future — wherein the greatest minds of our generation use natural language processing to create a program that adds “That’s What She Said” as a punchline. Michael Scott would be proud: Automating this process means identifying sentences that contain potential euphemisms and follow a part

Mainstream videogame news is hard to keep pace with so we do the heavy lifting for you.  Here’s your cheat sheet: –Soccer videogames cause more aggression than first-person shooters do. -Wii drops in price to $150 including Mario Kart Wii and steering wheel. -Sony hires security consultants to track

I’ve been to Marshfield. It is a quaint seaside, South Shore town in Massachusetts with lobster and golden retrievers. It does not, however, have videogames in public. That’s why after 29 years, they’re voting to see if they’d like to reinstate them in restaurants and other public places. Here’s a c

Basement dwellers? Hardly!  A new study from UT-Dallas looked at server logs and player interactions in EverQuest II and found that the game was making people more social, not less.  But you probably knew that… [via, img]

A new fundraising website allows donors to make their own artwork from 120 different artists.  [via]

A team of Golden Axe fans have created a new version of the game available for download for PC. You should probably grab it now as it’s likely to get the ol’ cease and desist any minute now. [via]

The military has seen is future and it is smartphone: In addition, the Army recently held a contest for soldiers to determine who could develop the best smartphone app. Among the apps now available on an Army Web site: bugle calls, body fat calculator, Army creeds, sniper awareness and capture avoid

Usually when a new piece of technology enters our existence, we don’t think “Hey, how can I remember this forever.”  But I guess we’re weird.   Above is a 3DS augmented reality tattoo that this young man will have to explain for the rest of his life when the handheld console becomes obselete, as all

From Wikipedia: Captain Richard Koll, left, and Airman 1st Class Mike Eulo perform function checks after launching an MQ-1 Predator unmanned aerial vehicle August 7 at Balad Air Base, Iraq. Captain Koll, the pilot, and Airman Eulo, the sensor operator, will handle the Predator in a radius of approxi

We know mainstream videogame news can be a lot. We did the heavy lifting. Here’s the haps: –Nintendo’s Satoru Iwata orates on the emergence of tablets, social games, and the weaknesses of the Wii. –US Congress is questioning Sony about the PlayStation Network hack. Also, Sony Online Entertainment re

A team from Michigan State University has built a game to help kids in Cambodia avoid land mines. More than 4 million land mines still litter the SE Asian country. From the LA Times: “I think it’s fun, and it teaches me to be more careful,” said Chob Sopheak, 14, a tester in Phnom Penh whose neighbo

Skynet was days ago, but that doesn’t mean the future of machines has halted. This is pretty cool — a “code-bending” instrument that allows for novel manipulation: Video games can play other video games. Music synthesizers can control word processors. Feedback loops turn everyday software tropes int

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We forget sometimes that videogames are part of a larger rubric of play, but these observations on how baseball “evolved” from Tim Carmody over at Snarkmarket are dead-on. You could probably make a similar argument about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare: And every difference between early baseball and t

PAUSE: Mario loses his head. [via]

Five very angry avians. David Boni made this graphic for us and we popped it in the store!

A new study about fish speciation suggests that human brain stimulation can have evolutionary consequences. Brain stimulation, eh? You mean like Portal 2. From io9: The elephantfish, like a few other creatures who live in cloudy water, communicates via weak electrical signals. Using a special organ

“The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.” — writer G.K. Chesterton

We know that mainstream videogame news can be tough to keep up with, so here’s your cheat sheet for the day. 1. PlayStation Network is to return this week after compromising more than 70 million users’ credit card numbers. 2. A new look at Goichi Suda & Shinji Mikami’s upcoming Shadows of the Damned

One of the hacker’s more elusive skills is to turn random key mashing into beautiful streams of code at a mile a minute. Hacker Typer makes it easy as kung-fu (for Neo).