As I mentioned in my preview of the game’s opening hours, swordplay in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is intuitive and fun. This is largely due to the fact that it incorporates the Wii’s Motion Plus controller, allowing for much more nuance in how players swing the blade. In the tutorial video above, we…
At times, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword feels a bit like a dream, one of those vivid ones that’s all colors and sunshine, freedom and flying. Earlier this week I played the first several hours of the game at a Nintendo press event and came away impressed with the complexity of the controls, the…
The newest trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword teases many of the events and characters seen in the first few hours of the game — the village of Skyloft, the Wing Ceremony, Zelda and Link, and the general dream-like beauty of the game. It also shows a few things that I wasn’t able…
As I watched Felicia Day interact with a video game version of herself, I was struck by the degree of existential weirdness that was going on in front of me. What must it be like to come face to face with a pre-recorded, interactive version of yourself? I tried to imagine having a branching, BioWare-style…
While I may never get to play the cel-shaded Castle of Cagliostro video game of my dreams, I was happy to hear that the Italian board game publisher Ghenos Games will be putting out a board game based on the adventures of the animated film’s protagonist, Lupin III. (And hey, from the sound of things,…
It’s been a banner week for gamers and “doing things that count in the real world.” First, they solve a decades-old scientific AIDS stumper using Foldit, and now, they’ve discovered two new possibly Earth-like planets. For a couple years now, NASA has been running the Kepler Mission, which gives “citizen scientists” access to photographs taken…
Video games have so many iconic sound effects—hearing the simple “ga-ling!” of the Nintendo coin can invoke a nostalgia as powerful as any memory of actually playing a game. From the Mario’s three-note warp-pipe descent to Simon Belmont’s famous whip, all games feature sounds that players will hear over and over and over again until…
Let’s start with my love of the Dragon Age universe, as well as Dragon Age: Origins. Man, I loved that game. Okay, we’ve got that out of the way? Good. Because I’ve made no bones about the fact that I was profoundly disappointed with Dragon Age II With that said, several aspects of the game…
I learned a lot of things while playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I learned that it is always better to stun than to kill (unless I’m fighting a boss battle), I learned that the easiest way to get from a rooftop to street-level anywhere in China is to jump, and I learned that if I…
It’s a far cry from a Half-Life 3 announcement, but PC gamers around the world will get a free bonus in their Steam version of Avalanche’s downloadable blast-em-up Renegade Ops: Gordon Freeman’s iconic buggy. The buggy is cool-looking, but its best feature is surely its ability to summon Ant-Lions and sic ’em on enemies. Don’t…
Some of the best ideas are born of strange, stressful circumstances. Case in point: Twisted Pixel’s inspired and highly enjoyable new Kinect game The Gunstringer. To hear Twisted Pixel CEO Mike Wilford and chief creative officer Josh Bear tell it, the two of them came up with the idea for the game… during their pitch…
By now, you’ve heard about the new study from Nottingham Trent University that found that playing lots of video games can result in “Game Transfer Phenomena”: the real world and the video-game world start to blend together, and gamers begin to see conversation menus during real-life interactions and going for button-prompts to perform real-world actions.…
Hopefully all you iOS users have had a chance to play around with Rock Band edveloper Harmonix’s goofy new music-type app-thing VidRhythm. If you haven’t, I recommend giving it a go
The Riddler and The Penguin may get increased stage-time in Batman: Arkham City, but the latest trailer for Rocksteady’s upcoming game is all about our old friend The Joker. Looking quite a bit the worse for wear after his misadventures in Arkham Asylum, the J-Man sounds like he’s enacting another big, complicated plan to ensnare…
The original 2007 Crysis has a benchmark-y quality to it. It is no longer the Best-Looking PC Game In The World, but it retains some of that “must-have” mystique nonetheless. Perhaps it’s because it’s one of only a few hardcore first-person shooters that has never been ported to consoles. But every time one of my…
Silence and danger; stark, foreboding mystery, and the wonders of a truly alien world. Eric Chahi’s Another World stands as one of the great video games of the 1990’s, a testament to the power of one man’s creative vision. It was a game that was so far ahead of its time that many of today’s…
Over at the Irrational Games’ Blog, the BioShock Infinite developer has posted concept art and documents from an old, abandoned game called Dungeon Duel. The game had made it all the way to development back in 2002, based off of a pitch that described it as a “fast-paced RTS strategy with the addictiveness of card…
Enslaved: Odyssey to the West was one of the unexpected surprises of 2010—a wonderfully colorful, well-told story full of enjoyable Uncharted-esque gameplay and some some remarkably well-done digital performances. Its story wasn’t perfect, but those opening chapters (and that finale!) stick with me even today, as do its two mismatched protagonists. So I was bummed…
We already know that the soundtrack for Batman: Arkham City looks promising. It’ll feature original tracks from a ton of bands, including Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Boxer Rebellion, Serj Tankian, and The Raveonettes. All of the groups seem to have put a lot of work into providing quality cuts. The track from the Danish…
The video game cutscene has undergone a lot of transformations over the past couple of decades, and many games these days present elaborate, dazzling CGI sequences that are often billed as “Hollywood-caliber.” But the truth of the mater is that most cutscenes wouldn’t rate a straight-to-DVD release. In fact, according to Wired‘s Jason Schreier, many…
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