If you look around in Portal, you can see the graffiti from previous “test subjects” warning you not to trust GLaDOS. While Portal‘s treatment of environmental storytelling is pretty simple, the upcoming game Gone Home takes these aspects of narrative design and zeros in on it. The first-person expl
The best thing about the Paper Mario series is its bizarre sense of humor. Sure you’re saving the world, but the boss fights are against characters with weaknesses other than fire or ice. The newest game in the series, Paper Mario: Stick Star for 3DS, goes back to its turn-based combat roots. Jason
A good free-to-play game is a little like a religion. The gameplay has you coming back every day to perform rituals for an abstract goal, and sometimes a little money can help you reach that goal faster. Wait, that last one only counts for influencing mortals. Buying or selling positions of influenc
It’s the start of flu season, and in my book, that means lots of pain medication for sinus inflammation. In an effort to teach the masses about pain management, London’s Science Museum made a game about what makes pain go away. Use too many painkillers and you’ll develop a tolerance, but spam those
The board game Guess Who? only has five girls to choose from. If you’re a little girl playing against your older brother, you’ll probably always choose a girl and always lose. Jennifer O’Connell’s six-year-old daughter wrote to Hasbro to find out why such unfairness exists in the world: I think it’
With all the Kickstarters and new projects coming out, it can be easy to overlook how an experiment actually turned out. Not all projects are completed or make lots of money. Sadly, the imaginative flash-based MMO Glitch is nearing its end. Last year, the browser-based MMO Glitch launched, boasting
Part of what makes losing a game acceptable to me is that I haven’t lost any money losing. The only thing to lose is my pride, and even then, most games have an element of chance to blame losses on. But for some people, a game is only exciting if the stakes are high. With Virgin gaming’s multiplayer
With all this videogame shooting going on let’s not forget that some games are doing an excellent job of being cute. LittleBigPlanet Karting has the racing style of a generic karting game, but the minigames and unique visual style we’ve come to expect from the series. Ryan Smith at Gameological does