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Snow and Lightning Star in Final Final Fantasy XIII-2 DLC
Final Fantasy XIII-2 has debuted quite a few bits of DLC since its early-year release. They’ve added Sazh, Lightning, N7 armor, an octopus homage, and more, to say nothing of the various alternate costumes. Now, though, Square Enix has announced that they will finally finish with Final Fantasy XIII-2 after one last burst of content.…
By Kate Cox -
If You Ever Wanted To Get Kicked Out of PAX, Here’s How
Comedian Nathan Barnatt, in his performing persona of socially awkward Keith Apicary, was removed from PAX East this year after interrupting the Rooster Teeth panel with a stage-rushing, trouser-dropping incident. Barnatt’s own compiled footage of Apicary’s antics at PAX East is now available. In the first half, he wanders around the convention like a geeky…
By Kate Cox -
I’m Commander Shepard, and These are my Favorite Drinks on the Citadel.
The Mass Effect trilogy features a galaxy’s worth of exotic, alien-inhabited locations… with a bar in nearly every port ready and waiting to serve the Commander and her intrepid crew the finest of the milky way’s brain-draining beverages. Now you, too, can pull up an emergency induction port—I mean, a straw—and meet the reaper apocalypse…
By Kate Cox -
It Was Only A Matter of Time Before They Staged The Hunger Games in Minecraft
The dystopic, autocratic world of The Hunger Games hasn’t really been well-represented in video games just yet. There are ways a traditional game could work, but for the time being the only official version of Panem we’ve got is on Facebook In unofficial representations, however, there’s the wide world of Minecraft, where Hunger Games fans…
By Kate Cox -
Splinter Cell Studio Head Wants Games to Grow Up
Jade Raymond is currently head of Ubisoft’s Toronto studio, which is hard at work on the next Splinter Cell game. And yet, while she clearly enjoys games as a blockbuster spectacle, Raymond wants games to strive to be more. Speaking with Eurogamer in a lengthy interview, Raymond calls on the industry, her own studio included,…
By Kate Cox -
Watch Your Eve Online Character Float To Space And Back
EVE Online developer CCP bundled their players’ names into a pod earlier this week and shot it into the stratosphere, as near to space as they could get it. The weather balloon to which the pod was attached also had a camera on board. Earlier, we had amazing stills of the view far above Iceland,…
By Kate Cox -
I Buy My Mom Video Games Every Mother’s Day. It Helped Heal Her.
Mother’s Day is this weekend, and so the commercials for flowers and jewelry and Hallmark cards are incessant and overwhelming. But this year, for a gift, I did exactly what I did last May: I went to Amazon and I ordered my mom a new video game. My mother and I get along very well,…
By Kate Cox -
This Physics Puzzler is Amazeballs
The idea of rolling a virtual ball around the screen is not new. Nor is the idea of a physics-emulating puzzler. What I’m looking for, when I try a mobile app fitting that description, is execution and charm. Amazeballs provides. It’s not complicated. At least, not at first. Press button for rotation, roll ball around,…
By Kate Cox -
You Can Kill Demons Anywhere You Like, But It’ll Never Quite Sound Like Diablo II
College is all about getting exposure to new ideas and experiences. For me, after I made friends with a couple of PC gamers my sophomore year, those experiences began to include countless new games. We routinely played Worms Armageddon or Heroes of Might and Magic III (hot-seat mode on both) until dawn and then kept…
By Kate Cox -
I Lost Sleep Waging Holy War in the New Civilization V
So, I have to be honest: I’ve spent two years avoiding Civilization V on purpose. It’s not that I have anything against the evolution of city-states into empires, or that I find resource-gathering, diplomacy, and warfare uninteresting. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite: I am deeply, painfully susceptible to the classic Civ player crisis of,…
By Kate Cox -
Nearly 23 Million Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer Matches, And Yet The Reapers Just Keep Coming
A scant two weeks after Mass Effect 3 launched, BioWare shared some stats about how the galaxy of multiplayer reaper-killing fared. Now, two months later, they’re back with an update. It seems I’m not the only one who keeps coming back for more, as close to 23 million matches have been completed so far, and…
By Kate Cox -
EVE Online Developer Sends Their Players Nearly to Space
EVE Online players spend their time zipping through the cosmos, making deals and trading goods across vast swaths of virtual space. So it makes a certain amount of sense that CCP, the studio behind the game, would want to send its players into space… or at least, get them as close as possible. Last year,…
By Kate Cox -
You Have to Win the Game, Even Though I Didn’t
You Have to Win the Game, it tells me—it’s right there in the title!—but I just can’t. At least, not yet. I’ve tried, and with more hours to play maybe I could. But I have to admit that on first blush, this retro platformer stumped me more than once, which is awesome. You Have to…
By Kate Cox -
The Beautiful Rage of Friends Who Play Board Games Against Each Other
Canadian filmmaker Jay Cheel once worked for video game developer Silicon Knights, but in his 10-minute documentary The Politics of Competitive Board Gaming Amongst Friends, he focuses instead on tabletop gaming, casting his camera on his own friends while they play The Settlers of Catan. It’s a beautiful, funny, and poignant look at how competition…
By Kate Cox -
Video Games Are Getting More Like TV, and That’s Actually Good
When casting about for media to compare gaming to, most minds land on film. Action movies and action games still draw inspiration from each other, and when game budgets and incomes draw comparisons, it’s always to Hollywood. But over at The Atlantic, writer Yannick LeJacq argues that really, video games and television have much to…
By Kate Cox -
Some Things in Starhawk Just Never Get Old
Space-Western strategy-shooter Starhawk launches for the PS3 today. We’ve had glimpses of space dogfights, shooting, and careful battle tactics before. But in all the chaos of space war, some things are just cooler than others. Some really big guns just have that screen presence that makes you cackle out loud every time. Some targeted weapons…
By Kate Cox -
Facebook Games are the Worst Way to Tell Stories
The overlap in intended audience between Empire and The Hunger Games Adventures is probably vanishingly small. Both are found on Facebook but, in tone and in content, aim themselves completely different ways. It seems unlikely that very many players would approach both for long enough to realize that the two are, in every way that…
By Kate Cox -
“Psychopaths” at LucasArts Led to Cancellation of Star Wars: Battlefront III, Former Studio Exec Says
Star Wars: Battlefront III was once a game well and truly in development, at UK studio Free Radical. Since its 2008 cancellation, it has been supposedly off and on more times than anyone can count. Like many studios, Free Radical had its fair share of ups and downs, hits and misses over the years. But…
By Kate Cox -
The Gamers We Can’t Spot A Mile Away
Boston is my birthplace and always my home, but I haven’t lived there since late 2005. So for three years and counting, when the time for PAX East comes I find myself sitting in an airport, abuzz with energy. While sitting at the gate at Dulles or Reagan, it can be alarmingly easy to spot…
By Kate Cox
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