Students at the Miami Ad School have developed a genius idea for the holidays. Called Donation Box, this app would sit on your iDevice home screen and allow you to turn in unused apps in exchange for charity. It’s just a concept and of course, would require Apple’s full cooperation, but it does poin
A couple years ago, journalist Leigh Alexander gave an impassioned speech at the annual rants portion of the Game Developers Conference. Her point was very simple — if game designers don’t more openly talk about process and kept the workings of their engine and development cycle tighter than Apple’s
If you look around in Portal, you can see the graffiti from previous “test subjects” warning you not to trust GLaDOS. While Portal‘s treatment of environmental storytelling is pretty simple, the upcoming game Gone Home takes these aspects of narrative design and zeros in on it. The first-person expl
I love Star Wars. I work in an office with a lot of people, all of whom are cooler than me. So earlier today when my boss asked what the wooly-white denizens of Hoth are called, I blurted out “Wampa!” a little too eagerly. In an attempt to dampen my extremely apparent nerdiness, I appended the the i
For Wii U launch day, the fine folks at Broken Rules (maker of one of my favorite spinning paper pastiche platformer And Yet It Moves) posted a mini-trailer for their new title Chasing Aurora. We’ve discussed this before, but the Wii U’s tablet opens up new local multiplayer opportunities and a fasc
The best thing about the Paper Mario series is its bizarre sense of humor. Sure you’re saving the world, but the boss fights are against characters with weaknesses other than fire or ice. The newest game in the series, Paper Mario: Stick Star for 3DS, goes back to its turn-based combat roots. Jason
Glued is a hilarious short about one mother’s quest to free her son from the clutches of his Super Nintendo. It was created by four students (Alon Tako, Guy Elnathan, Daniel Lichter and Sivan Kotek) at the Bezalel Academy of the Arts and Design in Israel for their 3rd year of animation studies. If y
A good free-to-play game is a little like a religion. The gameplay has you coming back every day to perform rituals for an abstract goal, and sometimes a little money can help you reach that goal faster. Wait, that last one only counts for influencing mortals. Buying or selling positions of influenc