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Games have gone from short to long to short again, says math
Shout out to all the short games out there.
Minecraft
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New PBS/Game Show asks if indie games are bigger than indie
Indie games are huge. I don’t know the exact percentage of games we cover nowadays but I’d wager if you ran some analytics the indies would outnumber the big boys by 10 to 1. They’re so predominant, so diverse, and so businesslike that the idea of indie games is quite nebulous. Sometimes we talk aro
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I’ve got 99 problems but Notch’s new game about existential dread isn’t one
The bowler-hat-wearing, dubstep-bash-throwing Minecraft creator created a quick little game about exploring the squirmy mental content of a nihilist. Coded for the latest Ludum Dare game jam, Drowning in Problems is sort of an existential take on the Cookie Clicker genre. This text-based, choice-lad
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In Grave, the only thing scarier than your imagination is what comes out at night
Grave is a game that understands there are multiple kinds of fear. One is more a feeling of anxiety, which you will find in games with eerie surreal landscapes but without much action, or upon entering a Wal-Mart. Then, there is a much more nocuous, immediate kind of fear, where you feel your life i
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This colossal Lego sculpture plays head-nodding Chicago house
A musician has built from Lego an old-school analogue synthesizer that plays smooth and hypnotic Chicago acid house, totally one-upping both that Lego city I built when I was 7 and my unimpressive foray into DJing. Simply called Play House, the Goldberg-esque mechanical sculpture was assembled from
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This voxel editor envisions an alternate history in which all games look like Minecraft
There was a very brief window of time, way back in the early 90s, when the future of 3D graphics was up for grabs and the voxel was a contender. Obviously, polygons blew them out of the water. But CubeTeam—the multiplayer, browser-based voxel editor—lets you build and print via a 3D printer the cub
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Minecraft, No Man’s Sky, and the hunt for a true archaeology sim
Procedural generation is all the rage. But it’s missing something: life.
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Minecraft gets a Simpsons intro. What’s next, Notch on MTV Spring Break?
Is there any bigger indicator that a person or product has made it than getting featured in a Simpsons intro? Well, Minecraft has crossed that threshold and joined the upper echelon of pop culture. Last night, during the opening credits, the familiar logo was, uh, somewhat cleverly replaced with the
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Passively shrug with us at Amazon’s new game console that isn’t a game console
Somehow the fact that the Amazon TV Fire is a game console didn’t come up until nearly 40 minutes into the press conference, which may be telling of where their priorities lie. As suggested by the “TV” part of the name, they want you to buy this device because Amazon Instant Video is more and more o
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New PBS Game/Show looks at the 5 biggest faults of game reviews
There are plenty of valid reasons to throw our hands up and abandon game reviews. For starters, we’re living in a day and age of early access and perpetual updates where games like Minecraft exist in unfinished states. On top of that, it is practically guaranteed that no two players will ever have t
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Are gamers ready to share the Oculus Rift?
I sure hope so.
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Modern folk hero Notch continues to walk lonely road of truth
Markus Persson, Minecraft creator and final incorruptible soul of our degraded age, has walked tall against the corporation men once again. After learning of the purchase of Oculus Rift by Facebook—perhaps by listening to the mournful cries of prairie coyotes—the man called Notch spoke out in the ca