J.K. Rowling was remarkably creative when coming up with Wizard’s Chess. A favorite pastime of Ron and Harry’s in the early Harry Potter books, wizarding chess is exactly like regular chess, except the pieces move by themselves and smash one another when taking opposing squares. “That’s totally barb
In Remedy Entertainment’s Max Payne (2001) and Alan Wake (2010), the player can approach television sets and watch short, surprisingly detailed videos. In Max Payne, these include soapy melodrama Lords and Ladies and the paranoiac, Lynch-riffing Address Unknown. Alan Wake sticks to a Twilight Zone-i
Commissioned for the No Quarter exhibition at the NYU Game Center, Loren Schmidt’s Beads of Orange Glass is now available for download on itch.io. The game is not interested in holding players’ hands through a guided narrative; instead, players shape their experience themselves as they explore the g
Over the past three decades, 3D printing has expanded from modest origins—a stereolithographic prototype designed by Chuck Hull of 3D Systems Corp. in 1984—to being hailed, in 2012, as the vehicle of a third industrial revolution. In the past few years alone, we’ve 3D-printed Van Gogh’s ear, a hi-te
Nostalgia for the 1990s seems to have become the stock in trade for videogames over the past few years. I’m thinking of the tongue-in-cheek revisit to MS-DOS’s glory days of Vlambeer’s GUN GODZ (2012) and the brutal, tasteful modern reconfiguration of the 90s shooter in this year’s Devil Daggers. Bu
