The worker-placement board game The New Science lets you play as one of five legendary scientists. Each turn requires dividing three action tokens between research, experimentation, or publishing. Players can learn about scientists’ conflicting motivations, and pretending to be Issac Newton sounds p
You know the game. It’s kind of arty, and it does one thing really well, and it presents itself as some kind of metaphor for life. Games like Passage or The Marriage. A recent game in this vein, Lim, has you blending in to pass by other people. I got stuck fairly early on, and felt like the message
Tengami for iPad, by Nyamyam, is an adventure game set in the world of Japanese fairy tales. I’m loving the paper cutout art style and soundtrack. The game will release in 2013.
There are so many indie games out there that it’s hard to know which ones are worth your time. Conveniently, IndieCade has collected some of the year’s best indie games on their website. Some of the games, like Zombie Yoga, are still in development, while others, like Cart Life, have been out for a
By default, Google keeps track of user browsing histories. Many game players are also Google users, so they can follow your game-playing habits from the time you searched “XCOM release date” to “XCOM walkthrough.” Some interesting tidbits: -27% of tip-seekers browse from a mobile device. -84% of gam
Over at Gamasutra, a remembrance of game composer Ryu Umemoto by his friend Audun Sorlie. Umemoto died last year at the age of 37, much to the dismay of his many fans in Japan. He worked for Cave, known for their shoot ’em ups. In Japan, the name Ryu Umemoto resonates in the hearts in thousands upo
Nintendo wants you to get Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask for 3DS. They’ve even put two puzzles on their website for you to try out.
Videogames can make excellent babysitters, since they keep children occupied and entertained for long stretches of time. Of course, not every videogame is appropriate for chidren. Samuel Sattin at The Weeklings writes about trying to let a visiting 7-year-old play Uncharted 2. The child’s mother pro
Beneath a Steel Sky was a beloved and barely-played 1994 cyberpunk adventure game with an opening sequence drawn by Dave Gibbons of Watchmen fame. The team at Revolution Software had planned on making Beneath a Steel Sky 2 if it rasied a million dollars on Kickstarter, but co-founder Tony Warriner t
The free indie game First Draft puts you in the role of a banished wife of a magic-using noble. The story, told through letters you revise, recalls ye olde epistolatory novels of yore.
Jason Rohrer’s Diamond Trust of London requires you to bribe opposing diamond agents, all while your opponent bribes yours. It feels like a German board game, but playing on the DS makes secret decisions possible. Gus Mastrapa at Paste magazine discusses the game’s possible commentary on business t
An ambitious Kickstarter project called Brainworth wants to make a set of games that will teach principles of computer science. Games in development have players developing an AI to play Snake for them and making behavior trees. You could just play RoboZZle if you like ordering commands, but a frien
The upcoming PS3 game Puppetter looks a little like LittleBigPlanet, with its bright style and paper-like visuals. But the game has more than a little Tim Burton in it. Game director Gavin Moore tells Wired his inspiration for the game: Basically, I’m making this game for my [eight-year-old] son. I
Steam’s Greenlight system, where users vote on the games they’d like to see sold on Steam, has stopped listing the most popular games. Hiding this information suggests that Valve wants users to vote for games not based on how popular they are, but if they look cool. It also means that developers can
Fanfiction is easier to write than regular fiction, because the characters and world are already invented. For the Adventure Time Game Jam last weekend, having a ready-made universe let jammers focus on making games! Here are three of my favorites: Noire Time There’s not much to do, but the pixel ar
Big publishers have their eyes on Kickstarter, the crowdsourcing phenomenon, and want a piece of the action. Obsidian Entertainment’s CEO Feargus Urquhart, whose Project Eternity has been immensely successful, tells one such story on the project’s Kickstarter forum: We were actually contacted by som
Speaking of gamification, which can help motivate people to do boring things, it’s a useful way to learn a language. Learning Japanese kanji, especially, requires a lot of memorization. Koichi and Viet, who are associated with the Japanese culture blog Tofugu, are developing a kanji-learning website
Gamification can help motivate us to do boring things, whether it’s working out or engaging in social media. Over at Bit Creature, Lana Polansky explains how gamification is great for motivating us, but can detach us from emotions and feelings that make life interesting. We simply can’t have experie
Anna the Red makes ridiculously detailed bento boxes. She’s done bentos of Calvin and Hobbes, Totoro, and now, Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. The making-of video shows all the tweezing and exacto-knifing that went into this meal.
Roller Coaster Tycoon is a fun simulation about building and managing theme parks, but if you carry its gameplay into real life, as in this fan video, it gets a little disturbing.
BioWare co-founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk announced their retirement today on the BioWare blog. The studio’s first big success was the Baldur’s Gate franchise, followed by Neverwinter Nights, and, later, the Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises. Muzyka plans to invest and mentor other entrep
Disney’s upcoming film Wreck-It Ralph has a lot of trademarked characters in it. In his interview with Total Film, producer Clark Spencer gives a behind-the-scenes look at the process of getting the necessary permissions. Rich [Moore, director] and I went to E3, and pitched the movie to all the dif
While we’re on the subject: Graphic designer Christian Swinehart has created a remarkable website about Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) books, or “game books.” His graphical representations of the branching storylines are beautiful in their own right, and teach lessons about how “branched” a storyl
Remember Choose Your Own Adventure novels? They were great. But flipping to the exact right page was hard to do without spoiling some other part of the story. Thanks to hyperlinked texts, these stories no longer suffer from that problem. If you’ve ever thought of writing a choose-your-own-adventure
BioWare, creators of the beloved Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, is known perhaps more than anything for the quality of its writing. The Border House interviewed BioWare writer Ann Lemay. We work in an open-floor office, each in four-desk units with semi-clear dividers that afford some privacy, b
