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Gamers May Need a Real-World Bill of Rights for Better Living in Digital Worlds
Diablo III has inspired quite a bit of conversation among gamers this year. The game sold millions of copies right out of the gate, but its constant connectivity, server woes, connection issues, claims of hacking, and real-money auction house have, collectively, inspired quite a bit of controversy. Over at The Atlantic, writer Yannick LeJacq uses…
By Kate Cox -
Iconic Game M.U.L.E. Is Back, and It’s Coming to a Phone Near You
In 1983, Electronic Arts published a four-player, turn-based strategy game developed by a little company called Ozark Softscape. The game itself didn’t necessarily sell very well, but it left its indelible mark on a generation of players—and, perhaps more importantly, a generation of designers who would, in time, themselves become legends. That game was M.U.L.E.…
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You Can Only Play Starhawk On PS3, But You Can Look at Your Leaderboards Anywhere
Some games stay with you even when you’re not playing them. Sometimes, you get so deeply into a game that you need to bring it with you on the go. You need to keep up with everything that’s going on, and even looking over stats or reading through the game’s encyclopedia makes that time spent…
By Kate Cox -
How 22 Cans, and Other Experiments, Really Can Change Gaming Forever
Over the decades and centuries, many conventions we now take for granted in film, literature, photography, and so on first came from independent, experimental artists. It has seemed like common sense, then, to assume that the next best innovations in gaming would come from a vibrant indie scene, and from gaming developing a true avant-garde.…
By Kate Cox -
The Many Games of E3 2012 That We Can’t Play Until 2013
The good news is, we saw a lot of really good-looking games at E3 this year. Some we’ve known about for a while; others were surprises that leaped out at us, making us want more. The bad news? A huge number of them, like so many other games we’ve heard news about this year, are…
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Rebuild The Ruined World, One Zombie-Infected Tile at a Time
I’ve been playing a lot of Civ V on my PC lately. That’s probably why it was the first, immediate point of comparison that leapt to mind when I started playing Rebuild. Only really, they’re not very much alike. Sarah Northway’s Rebuild posits the zombie disaster with which we are now so intimately familiar: the…
By Kate Cox -
A Very Strange Bug Made My Civ V Game More Fun… For a While
Ever since playing a preview of the upcoming Civilization V expansion a few weeks ago I’ve been, as I predicted, sucked into the game. I started with small maps and few competitors, on easy modes, and with every win I’ve been ratcheting up the difficulty for the game that follows. Finally, I was playing a…
By Kate Cox -
Facebook Woes? Perhaps You Need More Facebook Foes.
Sometimes a frenemy just isn’t enough. Sometimes it’s not enough to smile when you run into each other on a mutual friend’s Wall, or to make nice to someone in public and then complain about them to your partner in private. No. Sometimes you just need a foe. Perhaps, even, a nemesis. Epic’s Tim Sweeney…
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Why “Jungle” Is A Verb, And Other Things I Learned About League of Legends
The last thing I did at E3 last week, before going to LAX and heading home, was to meet with some gentlemen from Riot Games. They greeted me warmly and offered me a seat on the sofa and some coffee, then asked: “So, what do you know about League of Legends?” “Honestly?” I blurted the…
By Kate Cox -
Nintendo’s Not Worried About SmartGlass, Because You Only Have Two Hands
While E3 was occupying everyone’s attention last week, Nintendo held an analyst event for their investors. During the Q&A, one meeting participant honed in on something many of us have been wondering since Microsoft unveiled their SmartGlass, and posed the question: “Are you worried about SmartGlass? How does Nintendo intend to differentiate its hardware system?”…
By Kate Cox -
Four Cool Things about Four ‘Free’ MMOs
The world of massively multiplayer online games keeps getting, well, more massive. We’ve come a long way since I first picked up the genre eight years ago. World of Warcraft may still dominate the traditional monthly susbcription market, but free-to-play multiplayer worlds of all kinds boast tens of millions of subscribers worldwide. At E3 last…
By Kate Cox -
A Case Mod That Takes “Mod” Seriously
PC designer Jeffrey Stephenson, whose work we have featured before, is back with his latest creation. There are case mods, and then there are ultra-mod case mods. This mod, is, well, mod. Have words lost all meaning for you yet? That’s all right. You won’t really need them to admire this sleek, svelte, sixties-inspired PC.…
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Sir, You Are Being Hunted Through This Haunting English Countryside
The idea behind Sir, You Are Being Hunted is, well, exactly what it sounds like. Man’s greatest enemy is man. That’s something we see in quite a few games, really. Mostly they have guns in them. But what gives this particular in-development indie title a quirky, unique edge is its Britishness. Also its robots. Its…
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Dawn of the Seeker is Best for the Lore-Crazy Dragon Age Fan
With games, the whole “ancillary media” thing is usually just not my style. I read and loved all of the Myst books, way back in the day, and for something like a decade that was it. But then came Dragon Age. I’m one of those rare sorts who really enjoyed both games—not just the first…
By Kate Cox -
Ten Years of Civ II Lock The World in Perpetual War
This is kind of amazing: one gamer, over on Reddit, has been playing the same save game of Civilization II off and on for the last decade. That, itself, is not the amazing part. The amazing part is how it’s played out. The first two thousand years of his reign went more or less like…
By Kate Cox -
How Dragon Age II Helped One Young Gamer Come To Terms With Coming Out of the Closet
When we get mired in arguing over whether or not games are harmful to impressionable young players, it’s easy to forget that sometimes, they can be amazingly inspirational, or even helpful. The BioWare blog regularly runs interviews with the writers, producers, and artists who make their games. This week, Dragon Age and Star Wars: The…
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We Are Scared Right Now: What Today’s Video Games Say About The Moment We Live In
A society leaves behind a pretty decent map of its psychology in the culture it creates. For example, the 1950s brought us a number of science fiction films that remain cultural touchstones to this day. And as any undergraduate student taking a Film Studies 101 course can tell you, a huge number of those movies…
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Take to the Skies and the Shadows to Rule the World in Dragon Commander
I’ve mentioned before that I have a soft spot for Larian’s Divinity franchise, dating back to 2003. Their games have never been flawless but, with only one glaring exception, they have been fun. So in a way, I had my fingers crossed, hoping for the best, when I went to their demo room at E3…
By Kate Cox
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