Queen's Domain
Freshly Baked Games serves its King's Field revival crunchy
The dev jokes that teeth would wear down chewing on this game—Dark Souls's first-person ancestor finally gets an heir, and the demo is out.
retro
Installation
Paizley Lee filled DEAD INTERNET THEORY's second LA night with a rainbow of iMac G3s
The response to an internet run by bots turns out to be a room: a Y2K LAN night where salvaged hardware does what the feed no longer can.
game aesthetics
Why P.T. Anderson Gets Away With "Retro" But Games Don't
Why do filmmakers using vintage VistaVision get praised for aesthetic choice while pixel-art games get labeled "retro"? The difference reveals everything.
News
DUSK is the grubby circus act a ’90s-style shooter should be
DUSK is an intentional throwback. It’s a game that deliberately, lovingly evokes the running, gunning, and no-reload bullet-dispensing of ‘90s shooters like Quake (1996), Blood (1997), and DOOM (1993). As with most exercises in nostalgia, it’s also pretty off-putting at first. Why make another Quake
News
New frantic game is basically Devil Daggers in space
There are particular games that can only exist within the confines of the technological limitations of the time they were created. Missile Command (1980) feels anxious in its simplicity: the silence of surrounding the explosions of the missiles reminds you that, eventually, no matter how hard you tr
News
Duke Nukem 3D is back (again) like an old uncle telling 20-year-old jokes
Like uncovering a spiral-bound notebook full of junior high poetry, Duke Nukem 3D (1996) is back once again to remind you of what passed for “edgy” in the late 90s. After a half-dozen repackaged versions over the past few years, a sizable anniversary is enough for Gearbox Software, the current stewa
News
1930s-style animation game Cuphead won’t arrive until 2017 now
Cuphead creator Studio MDHR was trying to get its game out exactly 80 years from 1936—the year when a Japanese cup-headed character in a short propaganda film turned into a tank to defeat a bunch of evil Mickeys. Now, however, Cuphead will be released 81 years after Cuphead’s grandpa was introduced
News
Dusk is how you make a ’90s shooter for today
Living in the Northeast of the United States, David Szymanski grew up surrounded by the eerie woods and old buildings that dot the landscape in that part of the country. This is an area of the U.S. where you can find what Lovecraftian scholar S.T. Joshi calls “The Miskatonic Region,” the setting for
News
A new retro-style platformer lets other players control the monsters
Game jams are filled with sleepless nights. Designers and artists gather for a short period of time, like a weekend, then work non-stop to create something playable in that limited time frame. A game jam is an intense and challenging way to create a game. And yet, it’s how many fantastic videogames
Feature
The Southern Fried Gameroom Expo is a reminder of what we’ve lost
Long cast as the home of hospitality, green tomatoes, and civil war memorials, the South is pushing back against a more current War of Northern Aggression. Gaming expos born north of Mason-Dixon line have prospered: Penny Arcade Expo began in 2004 outside of Bellevue, Washington before expanding to
News
The greatest Famicom-based game jam returns this week
What do you get when you combine the world of fake Famicom case cover art and game jams? The “A Game By Its Cover” jam, actually, which is making its triumphant return on June 30th. Being the Japanese precursor to the NES, the distinctive red-and-white Famicom has a great deal of nostalgic power ove
News
The Witness swaps polygons for pixels in its NES demake
For all its naturalistic beauty, one of the more interesting lines to come out of reviews for The Witness when it dropped earlier this year was that it didn’t actually need to be in 3D. Creator Jonathan Blow and his team may have spent eight years crafting the game world’s intricate details, but con