Christian Bale has off today, but the newsies are still grinding out the news. -Epic president claims to have won lawsuit against Silicon Knights. -Sony rejected idea of online-only PlayStation 4. -Nintendo teases Wii U launch games on Facebook page. –Mensa Academy lets players flounder with their o
video Norwegian developer Krilbite Studio announced their next project will be Among the Sleep, a first person horror game played from the view of a two year-old baby. The game is set on a spooky night when a toddler climbs out of its crib and crawls around a house observing spooky supernatural phen
A 4 year-old girl in Florida was watching television at home when her father led her into the kitchen and tied her up with a rope so he could play videogames, the Daily Mail reports. The girl claims her father was playing “bad guy” videogames, and has tied her up before for the same purpose. She was
Dead Space 3 is coming sometime. After several months of anonymous rumors about the game featuring co-op play and being set on an ice planet, EA released a screenshot and started a countdown timer on the game’s official website. The image shows a lone space person–armored in metal and carrying a gun
video We live in an age of riot porn. Slogans like Occupy or the 99% only tickle a long-growing dissatisfaction with the socio-political apparatus that can change labels from election to election but never seems to better the circumstances of anyone’s lives. Raw depictions of violence in times like
It’s easy to think of videogame “generations” as those defined by the changes in console hardware. In truth, real generations only loosely correlate to new advances in microprocessors and are better defined by major new design paradigms. iD Software helped define one of the last major generational s
video THQ has been in a extended public struggle to keep the company out of bankruptcy after over-investing in PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of its uDraw tablet peripheral. Yesterday, the company announced Jason Rubin would take over as president, while Danny Bilson, the Executive Vice-Preside
In less than a year, Spotify has popularized the idea of free access to music all the time, gaining more than 19.9 million monthly users and exciting a new round of fundraising, led by a $100 investment from Goldman Sachs. This week Swedish company GamersGate launched its own version of Spotify for
A group of researchers at the University of Surrey and Surry Satellite Technology have announced a new project to build satellites out of spare cell phone parts and a Kinect camera. The STRaND project will build two shoebox-sized satellites powered with the processors from Google Nexus phones. Each
Today the world seemed like a never-ending Twitter feed of revealed secrets: -New Castlevania game coming for 3DS. –Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning 2 almost had a greenlight until Lincoln Chafee started talking. Or at least so says Curt Schilling. -Resistance: Burning Skies–first dual analog shooter o
video It’s hard to really make fun of videogame culture. For every Cow Clicker there are dozens of noobz, the attempted comedy from writer and director Blake Freeman about a group of friends that travel to Los Angeles to compete in a Gears of War tournament. Rather than make fun of the particulariti
Flying in the face of Phil Zimbardo’s assertion that videogames are turning boys into “arousal” addicts,” a new survey of clinical literature published in the June issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found there is “potential promise for videogames to improve health outcomes, partic
Trip Hawkins has announced he will step down as CEO of Digital Chocolate, the social and mobile games company he founded eight years ago. The news comes along with still unconfirmed reports that the company laid off 180 employees and closed offices in Mexicali, St. Petersburg, Armenia, and Bothell,
video In a report on the United Nations’ struggle to address the on-going violence in Syria, the BBC used a logo from Halo to introduce the story. The logo is taken from the Halo‘s fictional United Nations Space Command, the military group tasked with exploring and defending Earth’s interests throug
video The University of Maryland’s Gamer Symphony Orchestra is a volunteer group of mostly non-music major fans of videogames who’ve decided to translate their favorite scores into full-blown symphonic pieces. The group was invited to play at the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of its contin
Everything new is obviously better, except when it’s not. The new iPad’s “retina” screen, which displays bright and detail-packed 264-ppi images, is obviously better. All the numbers on its spec sheet are bigger, and its new graphics processor is four times more capable than last year’s. Sam Byford
What are characters? What is the point of telling a story? These questions are timely indictments of the struggle many videogames have had reconciling storytelling with interactive mechanism. Yet, these struggles are not new nor are they unique to videogames. What is the worth of a character in an e
It’s become commonplace to describe videogames as escapism. Before they are about winning and learning new skills Dark Souls, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and World of Warcraft are about the creation of summary alternatives to the real world. They create an advanced version of the kind of escape movies
The University of Manchester has had amputees healing their pain by controlling avatars with Microsoft’s Kinect motion interface. Michael Thomsen argues this has implications for the creative potential of videogames, which might one day privilege physical pain over competitive challenge.
In anticipation of a long holiday weekend, the videogame world let us in on some of its many secrets today. -A new Star Wars game set to be announced next week, Geoff Keighley figuratively “blown away” by it. -Jason West and Vince Zampella talk about the history of their Call of Duty lawsuit against
video It’s heartbreaking to recall the circumstances of Harry Potter’s creation. Unemployed, divorced, and overwhelmed with the task of trying to raise a daughter, J. K. Rowling decided to write a sprawling cock-and-bull fable about a magical boy who gets sent away to wizard school, and learns the p
After beginning life in 2010 as a humble Kickstarter project with a goal of $15,000, James Swirsky and Kisanne Pajot’s Indie Game: The Movie has finally secured a worldwide release on June 12. The movie will be “powered” by VHX, the very same company behind Kill Screen TV. For $9.95 you can watch it
All good internet comments begin with some variation of, “I shouldn’t even be commenting here.” Fortunately, prolific fantasy novelist and writer of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, R. A. Salvatore, resisted his better instincts and made a series of lengthy posts about the state of 38 Studios in the w
video A Christian company based in California has announced its plans to retell the gospel of Jesus as an episodic Facebook game, Journey of Jesus. Each week the company will release new chapters, pulled straight from the Bible, allowing players to relive the life of Jesus. The company claims the ga
What’s to become of sensitive children who watch naked people having sex on TV? In Hideo Kojima’s case, fame, fortune, and a life-long obsession with moviemaking. In an interview in The Guardian the Metal Gear Solid creator recalls his parents nightly tradition of gathering around the family televis
