Pokémon GO is a videogame that—get this—sees Pokémon invading “the real world.” Yep, you don’t have to sit in a stuffy room by yourself staring at a grey and green screen of mere inches in size to play Pokémon any longer, as I did for hours as a child. You can go outside and find a Pikachu poking it
Despite being about “the experience and aftermath of getting hit by a car,” you’ll probably expect Anna Anthropy’s latest autobiographical game, titled Ohmygod Are You Alright?, to take the subject lightly at first. Get a little further into it, however, and you may understand why Anna says that “yo
When the reality show Survivor first aired on May 31, 2000, it almost immediately become a national phenomenon. Viewers tuned in to watch the drama of a group of supposedly average people trying to compete and survive in the harsh wilderness. Like loyal sports fans, they rooted for their favorites,
“Japan just created a Google Street View for cats,” reports Vox’s Margarita Noriega, which sounds like a pretty good deal. A series of maps and visualizations created by Hiroshima prefecture’s tourism board, show a number of popular routes from the just-above-ground POV of a feline. As you stroll th
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Slam City Oracles (PC, Mac, Linux) BY Jane Friedhoff You know that feeling you get when you’re around your bestie? It’s like you’re invincible and could destroy or save the world together (de
Richard D. James (better known as Aphex Twin) has often seen his songs associated with disturbing, warped bodies. In the early ’90s, the label he co-founded and that produced his music, Rephlex Records, described his style as “braindance.” Pitchfork‘s Paul Cooper wrote about this terminology in 2002
Tale of Tales, the creative duo behind The Path, Luxuria Superbia, and most recently, Sunset, announced in June that they would stop making games—commercial ones, at least. Sunset, despite earning good reviews, was a financial failure according to their blog post on the subject, and at that point, i
The Candidate, director Michael Ritchie’s 1972 political satire, depicted an exaggerated political milieu in which even the most earnest of candidates is shallow and ultimately believes in nothing more than getting elected. Ritchie’s exaggerated world, in other words, is the world we now live in. Th
It’s hard for me to say no to new survival games, but only because I haven’t found the perfect one yet. The Long Dark, with its lovely low-poly snowscapes and focus on enduring the harsh wilderness rather than zombies or other creatures, is the closest I’ve come to a favorite. But now there’s a new
Replace Mad Max’s Fury Road with the post-apocalyptic wasteland of the American Midwest and you might get something like The Rust Belt, a dusty looking truck combat game by Galvanic Games. The Rust Belt puts you in control of a tow truck driver trying to get by in rural America after pollution has l
Back when the first SimCity was released in 1989, the editor of Computer Gaming World magazine, Johnny L. Wilson, was commissioned to write a guide for the city management sim called The SimCity Planning Commission Handbook. In a manner befitting the complexity of the original SimCity, Wilson didn’t
There isn’t much Jurassic World gets right about normal human behavior, but the desire to feel connected to the planet’s prehistoric past is one of them. “Jurassic World exists to show us how very small we are,” says the dinosaur park owner to the dinosaur park director. Of course, the desire for th
Every new film that is at least tangentially about digital technology should open with a title card proclaiming: “At least it’s not yet another Steve Jobs movie.” So, here is the trailer for The Gamechangers, BBC Two’s film about the development of Grand Theft Auto and its accompanying moral panic.
EDIT: Keep an eye out for Play/Off in 2016. We have decided to postpone it until then in order to do the best job possible on this event series. Games have been inherently social for most of our history, from basketball to chess. Why should videogames be any different? In our new event series, broug
Sharing is largely incidental to what has come to be known as the “sharing economy.” It is simply a solution to the larger problem of allocating resources. Let’s say you have a possession—it doesn’t have to be a car or a domicile. Let’s call it a widget. You use it some, but definitely not all of th
Using a programming gun to solve environmental puzzles is one of those ideas that works great in theory more than it does in practice. That’s what Space Budgie discovered upon releasing the first alpha build of Glitchspace last year, at least. Yes, despite the positive reception from early critics a
