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If a horror move gets too scary, you can always close your eyes. You can close your eyes during a videogame too, but it will probably end with your character dead. On his blog Ruminatron 5000, Peter Shafer describes how much he didn’t want to play Silent Hill. Games like Silent Hill create an intens
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In the past few weeks, we’ve told you about some pretty heady political games: the Redistricting Game and Randy Chase’s forgotten but classic Doonesbury Election Simulator. But maybe you want a political game that is a little simpler, one that features less thinking and more smashing. Well, Bam Bam,
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I played Amnesia: The Dark Descent alone, on a couch in my old studio apartment in lower Manhattan. Some fish live there now, but nevermind. Anyhow, the apartment was basically a room with no insulation from the city, so I felt like I lived in the middle of Second Avenue. It was not a particularly p
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Borderlands 2 is a shooter where you can collect loot and level up. It’s similar to many RPGs in that you can decide to find every single chest/loot holder or bypass some. Ethan Gatch on Medium Difficulty found that he couldn’t ignore loot. I was a loot fiend in the worst kind of way: grabbing usele
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A very earlier Kickstarter project, James Kochalka and Pixeljam’s collaborative Glorkbot’s Mini Adventure is going on its third year of development. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — we’re all busy people and the team has been eeking out details along the way. James sent me a note about new foota
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When games get edgy, it usually means they are gory or contain erotica. Too often we conflate pushing the envelope with meaning. Soldier of Fortune let you blow people to pieces, literally. Mass Effect treats sex and romance as though it were written by a salacious 13 year old (I will give credit to
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Disney owns Lucasarts; a hurricane nearly drowned humble Kill Screen; a robot may be president in a week. These are times of frightening and great change, but, dear reader, as I just remembered, the greatest changes present the greatest opportunities. I would never do something as crass as to sugge
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Why does Mrs. Pac-Man need a bow, lipstick, and eye makeup to show that she’s a woman? Well, she’s the female version of a male character, so she has to be somehow different, right? And how else can we signify femininity, if not with lipstick and bows and breasts? Anjin Anhut at How Not to Suck at G
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Reviews of the new Assassin’s Creed game are out, and they are mixed (we’ll have our take as soon as we get off of the ark. The goats and the zebras are trying to mate and we keep shouting at them, FERTILE offspring. Cabin fever? Cabin fever.) It’s still another blockbuster game this fall – after Re
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With electronics getting cheaper and more mod-able, (like when Entertainment Weekly embedded a phone in an advertisement), there’s more of an opportunity for books and screens to collide. While this Myst book is basically a fancy skin for a single-purpose electronic device, it speaks of media to com
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Multiplayer is often considered to be a shtick. When BioShock Infinite had its multiplayer cut, fans rejoiced that the game wouldn’t be polluted with marketing contrivance. To the ire of fans, Mass Effect 3 hid parts of its ending if you did not play its multiplayer. There are, of course, games that
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Every year, The Guardian makes a list of 100 most powerful people in British media. This year, only one of them was involved in games. Could this be accurate? Tadhg Kelly doesn’t think so. We have much more power than we realise. Although the British game industry has dropped to sixth place in the w