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The Absurd Motion-Sensing, Keyboard-Packing, Gamepad
Veho’s Mimi Wifi Keyboard & AirMouse with Game Controller gizmo looks as clunky as it sounds. The device includes a full keyboard with definable hot keys, motion sensing air mouse, left and right mouse buttons, LED indicates for battery status all packed into a gamepad that also has two analog thumbsticks, an eight-way directional pad,…
By Brian Crecente Published March 10, 2011 -
Okabu, the Secretly Pro-Environment Video Game
Okabu isn’t meant to be an “issues” game. It isn’t meant to teach you that we should care for our environment, that pollution could one day kill us. But it is, and it does. Fortunately it’s also a charming, creative game that hides those lessons behind the oddly anthropomorphic heroes of Finnish artist Mikko Walamies’…
By Brian Crecente Published March 10, 2011 -
Minecraft, Its Maker and The Fantastic Mr. Starfox
We have about 20 days until our entire three-floor house has to be completely packed up. This move is killing me. The Art, Food and Drinks of Plants Vs. Zombies Last week’s PopCap Games party at the Game Developers Conference wasn’t just a chance to indulge in Plants Vs. Zombies drinks and snacks while watching…
By Brian Crecente Published March 9, 2011 -
The Art, Food and Drinks of Plants Vs. Zombies
Last week’s PopCap Games party at the Game Developers Conference wasn’t just a chance to indulge in Plants Vs. Zombies drinks and snacks while watching flowers cavort around the packed room. It was also a chance to check out some really neat concept art from the game and, you now, talk to people. Make sure…
By Brian Crecente Published March 9, 2011 -
A Look at L.A. Noire’s Investigations and Interrogations
L.A. Noire will have you picking through the misery and gore of unsettling murders. Then you confront suspects and witnesses with your findings. Here’s a deeper look at some of those gameplay elements I described in my hands-on with the game last week. While it gives us another look at the game’s spectacular facial animation,…
By Brian Crecente Published March 9, 2011 -
The Kart Racer That Addicted One Third of Korea Is Coming to Your Phone
One of the world’s most popular Kart racing games is coming to Apple portables and Android devices soon, and no it’s not the one created by Nintendo. Web-based, free-to-play Crazyracing Kartrider is so popular in South Korea that some estimate that nearly a third of the country’s population has played the game. Publisher Nexon says…
By Brian Crecente Published March 9, 2011 -
Grumbly the Orc Says Hello
I’ve been getting slightly, every so slightly, addicted to Dungeon Overlord. It’s a kinda fun, kinda interesting Facebook game that has enormous potential, which I worry won’t be realized. Uncharted 3 Has a Hard Target. Your Heart. Nathan Drake is a klutz. That’s why we care what happens to him. Back when Naughty Dog was…
By Brian Crecente Published March 8, 2011 -
Uncharted 3 Has a Hard Target. Your Heart.
Nathan Drake is a klutz. That’s why we care what happens to him. Back when Naughty Dog was first developing Uncharted they knew they wanted a character-driven game. Making sure that happened was one of Amy Hennig’s main axes to grind when she came on as the series creative director and head writer. “We have…
By Brian Crecente Published March 8, 2011 -
A Reality In Which I’m a Terrorist
In a slightly different reality Japan is a vassal state to the Greater Republic of Korea, much of the United States has become the New Korean Federation of Occupied America and I’m the shadowy figurehead of a seditious and violent anti-Korean movement. This isn’t the fiction of the Homefront video game due to hit PC,…
By Brian Crecente Published March 8, 2011 -
If Uncharted 3 Doesn’t Make Me Want 3D Gaming, What Will?
Nathan Drake is surrounded by flame, it pops and sputters, licking out of the television toward me. Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception should be the winning argument for gaming in 3D. It is spectacular. In the moments of gameplay we watch while crowded in a second-floor meeting room at San Francisco’s posh W Hotel, that extra…
By Brian Crecente Published March 8, 2011 -
Homefront’s In-Game Quadracopter Comes to Life
Turns out that Rango the video game could be as good as last year’s Toy Story 3. I loved Toy Story 3, but more importantly Tristan loved it and he’s the one saying Rango could be better. I’ll be checking it out tonight probably. Totally unrelated, how weird is it that THQ sent me two…
By Brian Crecente Published March 7, 2011 -
Generation Kill, Hurt Locker, Black Hawk Down, All Are Inspiration For Battlefield 3
You can’t make a first-person shooter without a story driving it. Gone, it seems, are the days of Battlefield games that are just that: A virtual battlefield. That doesn’t mean that Battlefield 3 will be any less a Battlefield game, just that it won’t just focus on the multiplayer gaming that made the series so…
By Brian Crecente Published March 7, 2011 -
SOCOM 4 Rewards You for Playing as a Woman
A warrior named “Forty-Five” is SOCOM 4’s answer to stealth, a South Korean covert operative that can sneak up on enemies or take them out from afar. Park “Forty-Five” Yoon-Hee is also the game’s only playable female character. But it’s because of her stealthy abilities that Forty-Five gets a couple of her own trophies. Played…
By Brian Crecente Published March 7, 2011 -
Sixty-Year Old Technology Could Change the Face of Gaming
The future of gaming is more than 60 years old. Back in the 1950s, researchers started playing around with a technology that would allow them to store data in a form of memory that had no moving parts. While the new tech was destined to be faster and more reliable than the giant discs used…
By Brian Crecente Published March 7, 2011 -
The Pixel Mural With 5,760 Artists
Game Developer Conference attendees this week were asked to use a single pieces of square paper to help recreate an 8-foot by 20-foot mural by illustrator Jude Buffman. The 5,760 squares represented the pixels of the bit art. Seen here on Friday afternoon, it looks like the show and its developers delivered.
By Brian Crecente Published March 4, 2011 -
That Heartbreaking Dead Island Family? They’re Not In The Game
The little girl doesn’t die. She’s already dead. Dead Island captured a lot of attention with a heart-rending trailer that showed in reverse the death of a little girl and her family during an outbreak on the island resort of Banoi. It’s an unsettling 90 seconds of video that makes promises on which the game…
By Brian Crecente Published March 4, 2011 -
A Meaningful PS3 Game in Four Post Cards
Okabu has players cleaning up a planet fouled by machines, pollution and littering with the help of ridable anthropomorphic clouds. Each postcard shows a glance at one of the four levels of the PS3 game developed by Handcircus, makers of Rolando.
By Brian Crecente Published March 4, 2011 -
This is Your Brain On Call of Duty
The technology behind popular brain-control games like Star War’s Force Trainer and Mindflex could make future video games more challenging, more frightening. Puzzlebox Jigsaw is a high-tech solution to tracking what people think about the games they play by reading a gamer’s mind as they play them. Puzzlebox’s Steve Castellotti created a system that uses…
By Brian Crecente Published March 3, 2011 -
Dead Island Is a Decade’s Worth of Zombie Games in One
There is blood on the wall, a smear that drags down to the floor, bits of hair swaying gently in the breeze. It’s not in the game booting up on the computer, but in the mock-bamboo and straw cabana in which I’m sitting, somewhere in an office tucked away in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. The…
By Brian Crecente Published March 3, 2011 -
Dead Island Movie Deal In Works, But Not Quite Landed Yet
Days after the haunting, evocative trailer for Dead Island showed the world that little girls can die in zombie outbreaks too, rumors hit that the game had landed a movie deal. That’s not exactly true, the developers tell us. Variety reported that the producer behind The Mummy had bought the rights to a Dead Island…
By Brian Crecente Published March 3, 2011
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