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The upcoming PS3 game Puppetter looks a little like LittleBigPlanet, with its bright style and paper-like visuals. But the game has more than a little Tim Burton in it. Game director Gavin Moore tells Wired his inspiration for the game: Basically, I’m making this game for my [eight-year-old] son. I
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Steam’s Greenlight system, where users vote on the games they’d like to see sold on Steam, has stopped listing the most popular games. Hiding this information suggests that Valve wants users to vote for games not based on how popular they are, but if they look cool. It also means that developers can
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Anyone who plays college sports videogames will know the absurd experience of playing as athletes modeled faithfully in appearance and ability after current college players, who are referred in the game to only by number. This, of course, is a consequence of the NCAA’s prohibition against amateur at
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1UP has a great take on the prurient Western conversation about Japanese sex games. This thoughtful piece both examines what our obsession with “perverted” Japan says about us, and the actual place of these games in Japanese culture. For the interested, a great companion piece is Richard Bernstein’s
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Over at Wired, a really good look at the pared-down Tokyo Games Show, which Microsoft did not attend for the first time in god knows how long, which featured a lot more “social and smartphone games” (read: NURT REEL GMEZ d00d) and a which ended in a well-attended rearranging-the-deck-chairs-contest.
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Remember yesterday when I wrote “this is an industry in which creating a new story and a new set of characters is now considered a flamboyant risk”? Neither do I. But Yuji Naka, in this illuminating interview with the Verge, voices much the same sentiment. Imagine how sad it would be if great direct
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Chewie here tells me you’re lookin’ for passage to the Alderaan system?
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“While the world record is mine for now, I am not completely satisfied after falling short of a million points,” he added. “I am taking a break for the moment but will continue toward that goal soon.”
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Fanfiction is easier to write than regular fiction, because the characters and world are already invented. For the Adventure Time Game Jam last weekend, having a ready-made universe let jammers focus on making games! Here are three of my favorites: Noire Time There’s not much to do, but the pixel ar
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Budget cuts threaten to take chess away from the poor urban kids who have mastered it. If I was a studio executive, which I’m not, I’m getting on the phone right now for the big-budget Hollywood fictionalization. Just saying is all! You can watch the trailer for Brooklyn Castle at Vulture.
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Big publishers have their eyes on Kickstarter, the crowdsourcing phenomenon, and want a piece of the action. Obsidian Entertainment’s CEO Feargus Urquhart, whose Project Eternity has been immensely successful, tells one such story on the project’s Kickstarter forum: We were actually contacted by som
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Speaking of gamification, which can help motivate people to do boring things, it’s a useful way to learn a language. Learning Japanese kanji, especially, requires a lot of memorization. Koichi and Viet, who are associated with the Japanese culture blog Tofugu, are developing a kanji-learning website