It's time to think about waffles. I know this is something we all go through on a Friday afternoon, the perfect time for waffles, but the way we've been making waffles has been all wrong and we didn't even know it. The waffle itself is characterized by the pits that cover its surface; this is one how keeps the butter,…
Monthly Archives October 2013
I have a confession to make. I played a few different games last week. I finished this year's season of The Walking Dead. It wasn't great. I also checked out Infamous: First Light. That one is pretty good. But the vast majority of my free time gaming has gone to something unexpected: mobile-centered, microtransaction-heavy free-to-play games. I'm also having a…
Earlier this week, you might have seen the hilarious Kickstarter commercial for Strafe (below). If not, you really ought to take a look, especially if you played video games in the 1990s. When the commercial hit on Tuesday, designed to launch a retro-style first-person shooter campaign on Kickstarter, it became an immediate hit. We called it "the best trailer ever."…
I joked about investing in Oculus after my first demo of the hardware at QuakeCon in 2012. John Carmack was showing the prototype to the press in a private suite. He explained that the creator of the hardware was at the show and then I found myself at dinner with founder Palmer Luckey and Nate Mitchell, VP of product. We…
Capcom will release a limited collector's edition version of fighting game Street Fighter 5 next year, the company announced today, a package that includes a Ryu statue, an artbook and a handful of other goodies. Street Fighter 5's collector's edition will include the game, a 10-inch Ryu statue, a 48-page artbook that features sketches and behind-the-scenes materials and digital bonuses,…
Content warning: This post contains graphic language, slurs and triggering content "Women are the niggers of gender," the email said. "If you killed yourself, I wouldn’t even fuck the corpse." I blinked at my phone, fighting simultaneous urges to hurl my phone across the room in anger and cry. Later that day, someone texted me my address — telling me…
When the developers at the Montreal-based Spearhead Games start talking about Tiny Brains, it's hard to get them to stop. Led by the former design director of Assassin's Creed 3, Simon Darveau, the game designer on Assassin's Creed 2 and later Dead Space 3, Malik Boukhira, and the development director of Army of Two, Atul Mehra, Spearhead Games is a…
Members of the Speed Demos Archive made history last week by raising over one million dollars in support of the Prevent Cancer Foundation. They did this by playing games quickly, and organizing the results in an event called Awesome Games Done Quick. The event was streamed live, and the gaming ability and ingenuity on display was often amazing; the players…
The beta for Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 highlighted the past seven days, especially when it opened up to everyone who owns a PS4. If you haven't downloaded it yet, there may not be much time left, as it closes down at the end of the day before moving on to other platforms at midweek. Other highlights and oddities:…
What is this console generation really about? Is Xbox One and PlayStation 4, as many have predicted, the last hurrah of dedicated gaming boxes? Or do they represent the ambitious dreams of their architects, the binding of their brands to the now-established living room experience of playing games? Phil Spencer is head of Microsoft Game Studios and a key player…