Where does 8-bit music come from, and where does it go? Known scientifically as monophonic square-waves, the audio synthesizers of the NES and Gameboy have been channeled into a new, custom-built instrument called Pianocade built by Canadian tinkerer Jonathan Guberman. Guberman had already created t
When I was a kid, nobody I knew actually learned anything from Mario Teaches Typing. It was the kind of lazily constructed, “edutainment” game that came pre-loaded on computers in my elementary school’s computer lab. Nobody played it to learn how to type— it wasn’t very useful in that regard, nor di
Adventure games from the 1990s have a certain aesthetic that draws on comic art. Uno Moralez’s GIFs evoke a gothic horror videogame that never existed. The floating head probably needs you to fetch her an eyeball before she’ll tell you where the secret society’s hideout is. – – –
This post is part of a content series presented in partnership with smartwater. smartwater, simplicity is delicious. Have you ever wondered how people play on the other side of the world from you? Are the attachments that drew you to games that same ones that might draw another person to theirs? Is
There are a lot of gut reactions going on when a scantily-clad lady appears in a videogame. Things like “she’s hot!” and also “she must be cold in that.” Some of us might sigh in exasperation and wonder if there will be any real ladies in the game. An essay at J. Shea’s blog urges us to reconsider
Many good multiplayer games require expensive things like four controllers for a PS3 or a high-end PC. But for those of us with old computers, there are still multiplayer, non-Facebook games available. Pixel Prospector celebrates their fourth anniversary with a video of 44 free, multiplayer indie g
Remember when the Game Boy was little more than a dot-matrix with stereo sound, and required wacky contraptions like this to be played and enjoyed under many circumstances? Perhaps that’s not the case today, but these custom speaker/amplifiers are awesome anyway.
The Havard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysicists has released the largest-ever map of space, locating millions of galaxies, quasars, and black holes. The point of all this—besides tempting us to make a Katamari out of it—is to study the past six billion years of universal growth and find out where