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When you first spin up BioShock Infinite later this year don't expect to see the recently-announced retro-difficult 1999 mode on the main menu. That's because it's so tough Ken Levine doesn't want "the non old-school, hardcore gamer" stumbling into it. More »
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Farmville creator and king of casual games Zynga is in the midst of preparing employees for a Friday IPO, a source close to the company tells Kotaku. More »
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"Come play, my Lord", the ad beckons. "Save your lover!" it cries, as two seductive porcelain-skinned women lean into each other. "Start your journey now, my Lord", says another ad, this one featuring a busty, blonde bombshell in the process of removing her clothes. Any of this ring a bell? More »
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Do you ever use a word without fully understanding what it means? I have a friend like that. He uses the word "frumpy," but I'm fairly sure he's never opened the dictionary to find out just what it means. In his mind, "frumpy" means "bloated" or "bored" or whatever he needs it to mean in his present case of misappropriation. More »
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This booth was one of the biggest booths at the Tokyo Game Show. It took up one tenth of the entire show floor. It wasn't Sony's. It wasn't Square Enix's. It wasn't Capcom's. The booth belonged to Gree. So what the hell is Gree? More »
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Whatever Electronic Arts is spending to acquire PopCap, its casual gaming rival Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds, would cost more. That's according to ... well, Rovio. More »
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Some URL sleuthing by the domain-watching site Fusible revealed that the domain familyville.com has changed hands and hosts in a manner similar to URLs for Zynga properties like Cityville. More »
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People sometimes forget that 1 vs. 100, the MMO gameshow offered by Xbox Live from 2009 to 2010, is based on an actual gameshow of the same name and format, running in several countries, including the U.S. from 2006 to 2008. Though Microsoft declined to bring it back for a third season, it'll be resuscitated as a Facebook game, though you won't be playing it live with 100,000 of your closest friends. More »
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PopCap Games, the creators of small-ish casual games such as Bejeweled and Plants Vs. Zombies, has created a new studio to make games even smaller than those. Unpleasant Horse is one of those games. More »
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It's not the return of MVP Baseball, the long lost and lamented Major League Baseball title that went into exile after 2005, but EA Sports has gotten back on the field with MLB in World Series Superstars, a Facebook game rumored to be in development that launched by surprise today. More »
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The British hacker who fleeced Zynga Poker for 400 billion chips, which have an official worth of $12 million, $300,000 on the black market, will serve two years in prison. More »
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How do you expand a farming game played by more than 44 million people a month? You give them another farm. FarmVille English Countryside expansion gives FarmVille players a whole new row to hoe. More »
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Insomniac Games, the makers of the Resistance and Ratchet and Clank series, will push into mobile and Web-based games development with a new division - Insomniac Click - that the studio unveiled on Saturday. More »
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Perhaps spurred on by ripoff apps already in place, Angry Birds' developer says the game will have a Facebook adaptation inside of the month. More »
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The offline social game you play with your friends becomes the online social game you play with your friends with Monopoly Millionaires, the Facebook game where everybody gets their own Monopoly board. More »
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THQ adds its UFC Undisputed to the list of licensed console sports titles with a Facebook game adaptation, wheeling out a microtransaction-supported venture that focuses on training and leveling-up your created fighter. More »
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Cow Clicker, the send-up of social gaming absurdity, has expanded its parody of all things Facebook with an application platform that offers "seamless bovine integration." Cow Clicker Blitz is a proof-of-concept of the robust leverages it can architect. Or something. More »
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PGA Tour Golf Challenge, the third Facebook game produced by EA Sports over the past year, is now live on the social networking site, bringing real-time 3D gameplay elements to a genre with few console-style games. More »
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Colorfully named Kotaku commenter BubbleF**kingBuddy keeps it short and sweet in today's Speak-Up on Kotaku, asking why our readers love Minecraft but hate FarmVille. More »
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Zynga, makers of Farm- Frontier- and all things -ville on Facebook, slapped Disney with a lawsuit after it acquired social games competitor Playdom and, Zynga alleges, hired off ex-Zynga workers to learn its "secret sauce." The matter is now settled. More »
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It's finally happened. After an amazing fifteen months spent atop the Facebook application charts, Zynga's Farmville has been knocked off its perch. More »
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EA Sports is set to deliver its third Facebook game, but unlike Madden and FIFA Superstars, this one will feature skill-based, real-time gameplay, instead of a build-your-club management style. More »
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You have one minute to reach 88 miles per hour before being trapped forever at the bottom of the leaderboards in Telltale Games' Back to the Future: Blitz Through Time, now available on Facebook. More »
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Square Enix takes the winning formula from Zynga's Mafia Wars and applies it to Final Fantasy to create Knights of the Crystals. Will you party up, or spend some quality time breeding chocobos in Chocobo's Crystal Tower? More »
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Bejeweled 's Endless mode is soothing enough to put players into a blissful trace. With subliminal positive affirmations, fine aural tones, and breath modulation, Bejeweled 3's Zen mode could have players slipping into puzzle-induced comas. More »
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Bejeweled 3, the first "true sequel" to the popular decade-old matching game that more than half a billion people have played, hits PopCap.Com and retailers on Dec. 7 for a nickel shy of $20. More »
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This many. More insane Facebook gaming facts and figures after the break. More »
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Fresh off cameos in NBA Jam and NBA 2K11, President Obama and his two predecessors are appearing in Mafia Wars. As novelty masks, anyway. A bank heist weekend offers the chance to get them, and a badass machine gun. More »
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Yesterday, the Tampa Bay Rays succumbed to the Texas Rangers in the playoffs. We're not blaming iPad Farmville clone "We Farm," but David Price, who made a costly fielding misjudgment in that game, is a big fan of the game. More »
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A marketing research firm found that 17 percent of social gamers - Farmville, Mafia Wars and the like - consider themselves "addicted," though it's not clear if they say that regretfully or as a lighthearted self-description. More »
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Mark Cuban, the forward-thinking owner of HDNet and the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, is looking to Farmville-style games as a way to boost his team's fanbase and increase his network's productivity. More »
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After a little over four months on the job, Google's "game developer advocate" is no longer with the company. The development follows his discussion at GDC-Europe of Google's revenue plans for games sold over its Chrome Web Store More »
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Casual game players still have hardcore priorities, as social game behemoth Zynga is discovering after its plans to drop Street Racer on Monday without refunding players' balances incited a user riot. More »
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Microsoft's Kinect messaging is definitely core-obsessed. First they said they didn't want core shooters like Halo on it. Then they said it's got casual approachability, but core depth. Now, they're saying hardcore gamers will be first in line for it. More »
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As promised, FarmVille is now available for the iPhone and iPod Touch, dooming millions to endless mobile toil on virtual farms, unless the app's slow speed and crashing save the day. More »
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Tired of playing the old "how many dicks can I see in an hour?" game on webcam novelty Chatroulette? Might want to try something a little more structured. More »
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The maker of Farmville, shedding users by the millions, got a jolt of good news on Tuesday when the game's parent company reached an agreement with Facebook, settling a standoff over the handling of virtual currency transactions. More »
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Caught in an apparent pissing match with Facebook, Farmville creators Zynga seems to be losing. Two weeks ago Zynga lost 3.1 million monthly active users. Last week they lost 4.2 million of them. More »
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Social networks can no longer be ignored by game publishers, Capcom president Haruhiro told BusinessWeek, so the company plans to release its first game on Facebook as early as this fiscal year. More »
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FarmVille looks to overrun your corner convenience store this summer, thanks to a cross promotion that'll have 7-Elevens nationwide hawking exclusive items for the casual game, plus others from the Zynga family. More »
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