Scott Jon Siegel made the rounds of the social games bubble at Zynga and Playdom, so he’s no stranger to some strange or terrible ideas. Over the weekend, he started the Bad Games tumblr in an attempt to design the worst games ever. “I’d rather make bad games now than good games eventuall,” he expla
About halfway through Far Cry 3 (which I’ll review this week), you rescue a character who, we are made to understand, has been raped by his captor. The victim has been imprisoned in a dingy basement just feet from a busy road; the sequence, which ends in the murder of the rapist, is an obvious allus
Look, I’ve got a soft spot for Bill Nye. We went to the same school. He spoke there once when I was eleven or twelve and he was goofy and had a bowtie and owned it. The Science Guy years were magical, of course, and much less codedly hostile than Mr. Wizard. Since then, Bill Nye has basically been c
-Developer Jeremy Alessi in Gamasutra today, on the rise of games as revenue delivery functions. Essential reading.
Massively multiplayer games promise epic, persistent experiences, but in a very significant way they are less persistent than the copy of Tetris you have stashed in the basement: once developer and publisher support ends, you simply can’t play them anymore. So it goes for City of Heroes, the charmin
The NASA Cassini-Huygens robotic spaceship caught this thermal signature of Tethys, and it looks like, well, it could eat a cherry and mess up some ghosts. Scientists theorize that the Pac-Man thermal shape on the Saturnian moons occurs because of the way high-energy electrons bombard low latitudes
Media takes on a whole new dimension when you share it with other people. Discussing or analyzing it is one thing, but experiencing something as a group can make it so much more enjoyable. Caitlan Oram writes about the pleasures of playing videogames with an audience: A person’s reaction to somethin
Dear god. Rock Paper Shotgun has the goods again today, this time about a Square-Enix Facebook promotional campaign for the new Hitman game, in which you can “target” friends for a “hit” and identify them by things like, I”m serious, having “small tits” or an undersized penis, or RED HAIR. It’s alre