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The people have voted, and Double Fine is now developing the four games chosen during the Amnesia Fortnight Festival (sadly, the office fart sim Silent But Deadly was not chosen). The bros and broettes at Tim Schaefer’s studio have set up a live stream around their office to cover the development of
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IGF entrants are trickling out over the web; you can start the hype machine ‘a-rolling. (Hype machines have wheels btw.) Anyway, Apparatus is a new platformer tjat pulls from the high art of Scandinavian attic design. You’re a jumble of cubes that falls apart and reassembles at your command. Accordi
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Did you see Moon? It was a little sci-fi thriller directed by Duncan Jones (David Bowie’s kid!) and it starred Sam Rockwell as a guy on a mine on the moon in the near future and Kevin Spacey as his robot frenemy. It paid tender tribute to the greats of heady 70s and 80s scifi, but was very much its
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Beating Dark Souls took me a month and a half. The opportunity cost was… high. The personal cost was… high. The emotional cost was… high. Speed Demos Archive has released a video of some person, nay, some champion, defeating From Software’s magnum opus in less time than it takes me to commute to wo
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The sword has a special allure. Who hasn’t imagined being an expert duelist or grabbed a friend and sparred with a couple of sticks? Videogames are often the manifestations of our fantasies, an attempt to fulfill our dreams in a virtual version of a reality we wished we were capable of. They allow
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So what do you do if you’re Capcom and somebody makes a Mega Man–Street Fighter homage? You could: A) Do what other big companies do and leverage lawsuits to squash the release and dissemination of the game. or B) Release the game for the creator. Generate a ton of buzz (positive instead of the neg
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-Greg Richardson, CEO of Rumble Entertainment, at the Game Monetization Summit. It’s a common argument that doomsaying about the state of the game industry fails to take into account digital games, the total sales of which are pretty much unknown. If casual experiences only represent 10 percent of a
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Last month, I travelled to Redmond to visit the offices of Turn 10, the home of the Forza franchise. I’ve never been a big racing games fan (outside of karts, of course), but much like sports games, I’m interested in the design challenges involved in making games like those. With racing games, espec
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Sometimes I want pizza and sometimes I want donuts; the brain is a mystery. Thankfully there are some scientists out there who are tired of our animistic scratchings and Freudian guesswork and are actually trying to figure out how the old brain box does its job. Right now some of the very best are f
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Today, Russia makes atmospheric and weird games like Metro 2033, still available for free by liking THQ’s page on Facebook. Back in the wine-stain birthmark days, when playing American games was niche-niche, they played an arcade submarine-battle game called Morskoi Boy, which was not made in a game
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This video, from Extra Credits, does a terrific job assembling the case against cutscenes: they’re never as good as real movies, they take the player out of the game, they frequently violate the rules of the game, etc. The author’s point that it’s wrong to tell a designer to never use cutscenes is w
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There are the kind of games like Call of Duty, which do little to spark serious contemplation about morality or violence. This is the norm. Text games, however, may have a little more insight than your standard AAA fare. Take 2007’s Rendition, whose title would not exist without the war on terror.