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The first thing you see in the newest trailer for SOMA are tentacles stretched across a foreboding catwalk under flickering lighting. The obvious point of comparison is to the horror author H.P. Lovecraft, innovator of all tendrils long and slimy. Frictional Games, who are sort of the O.G.’s of the
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The future has gotten even rosier for virtual reality, as the Oculus Rift headgear has just received a whopping 75 million dollars in financial backing from the investing firm Andreessen Horowitz. Oculus had previously raised just 16 million. This will undoubtedly propel us into the virtual future
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The key to a well-taken selfie is to do something adorably dorky and then apply a patina. Interstellar Selfie Station, by the visual novelist Christine Love, is a snapshot app that makes this easy. This is what every high-schooler would have been doing in 1998 if the Gameboy Color Camera had an inte
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Motherboard has put together a fantastic mini-documentary called The New Kings of Kong, filmed last month in Denver, Colorado, at The Kong Off 3. The heroes and villains from the 2007 feature-length Donkey Kong championship documentary are a distant memory. The diabolical Billy Mitchell and the good
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The Ouya is a charming little system that hasn’t had much love. It garnered a lot of attention and excitement on Kickstarter, positioned as a console for the little guy, but it hasn’t made much of a splash since then. It’s now getting a shot in the arm, as Google has released a toolkit that makes i
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Framed is a noir game in which you rearrange the panels of a comic so that a silhouetted PI in a fedora can proceed through the story. The fragmented narrative and cartoon-spy schtick sort of evokes Simogo’s triumphant Device 6, although with a slightly less sinister vibe. It’s a kitschy game, a th
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Boston, they say, is the ruined locale for the next Fallout game. As with any substantial piece of news coming by way of the blogosphere, this should be taken with an iodine pill, but placing a new Fallout game in Beantown—the historical home to Sons of Liberty and the Minutemen—makes sense. It’s a
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Wasteland 2, the long-awaited followup to a classic brought back to life by the miracle of Kickstarter, is now out in beta version, and the developer inXile is strongly encouraging those who have it to stream its post-apocalyptic vision of terra cotta sands. This is a sign that times are a’changing.
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The Walking Dead game has this thing with vulnerable protagonists. The first season was played from the perspective of an ordinary black man—which is great. In season two, available later this month, you are cast in the role of a helpless female grade-schooler with a purple backpack—again, cool. But
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YouTube has been cracking down on Let’s Play videos, sending unfriendly emails to many users who earn money from uploading videos of themselves playing games online. While I’ve never been much for people screaming in falsetto at their computer monitor, it’s sad to see the community come under fire,
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In games, we face strange questions that don’t tend to come up in other mediums. Here’s one. When did The Legend of Zelda become a genre? Hack ’n’ Slash is a rather blatant homage to the series starring a stubby elf in the green tunic who’s saved the world with a bow, boomerang, and hookshot on num
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Dark Souls: Prepare to Dine Edition