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If Tetris Were About Making Words, It Would Be This Game
I play a lot of word games. Competitive, single-player, silly, serious… I like messing around with all the weird and wonderful combinations the English language has to offer. I am used to the ebb and flow of word games, to the way consonants feel, to the hunt for vowels. They comfort me. Which is why…
By Kate Cox -
The Secret World, Log One: A World More Gaiman than Tolkien
It all begins with a bee. You are not an elf or a troll or some sort of mystical creature. You are a human man or woman, an ordinary soul living in a stylish, IKEA-inspired, thoroughly modern apartment. One night, while you sleep, there comes a bee. And not an ordinary bee. It comes to…
By Kate Cox -
A Fifteen-Foot-Long Scarf for All Your Journeys
Journey is, in many ways, the story of a scarf. Or at least, the scarf represents the breadth and depth of the story Journey has to offer. It lists your avatar’s story and encounters; it follows you from scorching desert sands to frozen snowbound wastelands. It flutters in the breeze behind you as you fly,…
By Kate Cox -
The Secret World Begins to Share its Mysteries in This Launch Trailer
Funcom’s new MMORPG The Secret World officially launches today and with it, this new trailer for the game. The game is in some ways a departure from most traditional MMOs. The biggest difference is that it’s set in our real Earth, in the 21st century. Characters wear jeans and business suits and carry smartphones and…
By Kate Cox -
A Weekend Without Internet Made Me Worried About the Always-Streaming Future
Friday night, we went out to a movie. And when we stepped out of the theater to come home, we found ourselves standing in a maelstrom the likes of which neither of us had ever before seen around DC. The storm caused astonishing levels of damage in under an hour, and left 1.3 million of…
By Kate Cox -
There Are Good Reasons We Don’t Use iPhone Games to Control Cars
You would think it would be fine to download and play an iPhone game in the car, as long as you’re not the driver. The long road can get boring. Surely a passenger can safely spend ten minutes here and there staring at his phone instead of looking out of the window at all the…
By Kate Cox -
You Don’t Know Jack Lead Writer Says Being Funny Is Serious Hard Work
I’ve got a perhaps irrational fondness for trivia games. It’s easy to like the genre when your brain is filled up with seemingly disconnected facts; trivia games give them a place to go. A tiny little factlet purpose in life. One of my favorites is You Don’t Know Jack, the intentionally irreverent trivia game. Once…
By Kate Cox -
No DLC Can Ever ‘Nerf’ This Awesome Mass Effect Nerf Gun
This won’t help you take out Reapers. And it’s probably not such a good choice against Cerberus, either. At least, not if you want them to stay dead after you shoot them. Because this? Is the best Nerf gun ever. It’s Commander Shepard’s favorite Nerf gun on the Citadel. It’s a Nerf gun painstakingly handmade…
By Kate Cox -
That’s a Mighty Big Box for a Mighty Small Memory Card
Video games and the consoles we play them on may use a significant amount of materials. But even when going digital, it seems we can’t get away from the waste. Reddit user firstmarker ordered a PS Vita memory card. The Vita is a handheld. Memory cards for it are not large. And little tiny memory…
By Kate Cox -
Watch What Could Happen if Real Life had DLC
What if real life had DLC? That’s one question this video attempts to answer. But the better question, really, is: How cool would it be to go stand in a field and be able to fight like Batman? Pretty cool. This is a great recreation of the camerawork and action we all know from inside…
By Kate Cox -
Flinging Cute Fuzzy Things to Their Doom is Kind of More Fun than Rescuing Them
I spent a not-insignificant amount of time in middle school and early in high school playing Lemmings games with my friend who lived next door. It was, of course, satisfying to guide the mindless little morons through perils to safety. And it was more satisfying still to misplace a beam intentionally and watch them all…
By Kate Cox -
Watch Dogs Game Gives Out Real People’s Email Addresses
Watch Dogs is a game that feeds on our connectedness and paranoia. It posits an ever-so-slightly tweaked version of the reality we know, and tells us it can be manipulated to no end. The footage we saw at and after E3 has led into an ARG centering on the fictional art gallery owner Joseph Demarco…
By Kate Cox -
Sega Shuts Down European and Australian Offices to Focus on “Digital”
Sega first appeared to be running into trouble earlier this year. Sega of America faced layoffs, though not a total shut-down, as in the face of large losses the studio condensed its efforts onto four core series. While Sega of America is still in operation with its reduced staff, other Sega offices worldwide are proving…
By Kate Cox -
This New Company of Heroes 2 Trailer Shows How Cold War Can Be
A new teaser trailer for next year’s strategy title Company of Heroes 2 has just arrived. And while it doesn’t feature any gameplay or show off its fancy features, the trailer does show one thing incredibly effectively: It gets cold in Russia, y’all. A narrator rather effectively intones the dire history of World War II,…
By Kate Cox -
The Most Important Character in Mass Effect 3 Never Even Showed Up Until After the Credits
I didn’t realize how important the Stargazer, the nameless old man who appears briefly after the credits in Mass Effect 3, was to me, at first. It took some significant changes to the way the game’s final ten minutes are told for me to realize how crucial he always was to my story. I’ll just…
By Kate Cox -
Liara, You’re Looking Awfully Blue Today. And Very Three-Dimensional.
Hello, Dr. T’soni. Why are you looking at me that way? One Reddit user Nobody_home’s cousin is apparently both a sculptor or prop artist and a Mass Effect fan. This recreation of Liara may not be pitch-perfect—she’s hovering somewhere between her earlier, innocent archaeologist self and her later, darker, Shadow Broker self—but it’s still remarkably…
By Kate Cox -
This Iron Man Case is Not Made by Tony Stark, But is Still Cooler Than You
You know who’s cool? Tony Stark is cool. He’s so cool he doesn’t have to give a damn about things like “civility” or “gravity” or “playing nicely with the big green monster scientist.” Iron Man is also cool. Mostly because he’s Tony Stark in a suit of badassery. This PC may not be able to…
By Kate Cox -
Opening Origin Always Makes Me Feel a Little Bit Sad, These Days
I didn’t always feel sad when I started up Origin. Vaguely annoyed, perhaps, with the way it always defaults to “Store” instead of “My Games.” Somewhat grumpy, when confronted with bugs. But lately, I feel a little pang of woe. And it’s not really from Origin at all. No, what makes me sad is seeing…
By Kate Cox -
The Complicated Alternate Reality of The Secret World and its Secret Seals
The Secret World officially launches next week, on July 3. It’s a somewhat unconventional approach to the MMORPG genre, set in the sinister, secret underbelly of the real world, the 21st century Earth we all inhabit. And while developers Funcom have been running the standard closed beta and public beta weekends, something more sinister has…
By Kate Cox
Kate Cox
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