How do you introduce a game and tell everyone everything they should know about it without saying a word or showing them a moment of gameplay? How do you make the coy interesting? Those are the questions that the creators of ReCore faced in the weeks leading into June 2015. On the day before E3 2015 began, we got the answer…
In video games, captured women are generally deposited in tower-tops, there to await some Gothic wedding with a leering villain. In real life, captured women are put to work as field hands, factory drones, domestics and prostitutes. Slavery is the subject of Thralled. It's an iOS sideways scroller with heavy puzzle elements, but the vibe of the game is a…
Games4Life looks back at some of the people who made gaming news in the past year, for better or for worse. Festooned with the launches of two major consoles from Sony and Microsoft, 2013 was always going to be a memorable year for gaming. But it wasn't just the machinations of massive corporations that shaped the last 12 months. Much…
The man behind the sculpture Icons of Doom, a handmade representation of the classic shooter that the designer John Romero himself bought for $6,000, is at it again. His latest masterpiece is called Childhood Religion, a response to a lifetime spent under the thumb of the Star Wars licensing empire. "Episode X: Childhood religion," reads the crawl on the video…
Arkane Studios designers Ricardo Bare and Harvey Smith have more in common than work on stealth adventure game Dishonored: they've both written books. Both designers began crafting their fiction long before their dive into Dunwall. Smith, who is also Arkane's co-creative director, began writing his semi-autobiographical novel Big Jack is Dead in 2005 and worked on it in brief weekly…
Nicolas Badila is a 14-year-old video game designer from Atlanta, Ga. who represents the educational aspirations of the Obama administration, which has committed billions of dollars to teaching kids science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Badila is one of the winners of the third annual National STEM Video Games Challenge, which today rewarded 14 kids from 6th to 12th grade…
Atari: Game Over is a wonderful movie. It's a love story about video games, the people who play them and the people who make them. Director Zak Penn tells the story of the famous Alamogordo landfill dig that, earlier this year, unearthed a trove of Atari 2600 cartridges that had been dumped by Atari back in 1983. In doing so, he…
Square Enix has announced its full livestream event schedule for the upcoming Tokyo Game Show via a new teaser trailer. The schedule, which is shown at the end of the teaser, details the various presentations the company will hold throughout Sept. 19 and 20. The most intriguing inclusion on the packed list is an event simply labeled "secret." This mysterious…
In 1958, the United States Air Force developed a plan to launch a nuclear strike on the moon. In hindsight, this was a bad idea. But at the time — nestled deep in the paranoia of the Cold War — the U.S. and the Soviet Union alike engaged in a space race very different to what we know today. Project…
A company-wide meeting is currently being held at the Icelandic office of Eve Online developer CCP as the studio readies for a round of layoffs just months after the cancelation of the massively multiplayer game World of Darkness, a studio representative confirmed to Games4Life. As part of this restructuring, 49 employees will be laid off beginning today, we are told. CCP…
