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Reviews
Edge Micro-Review: Elegance, Cubed
Edge, for the iPhone and iPod Touch, may remind you of Marble Madness with its otherdimensional motifs and tactile controls. But is it more than just pushing around a cube where spheres once rolled? Loved Controls: In Edge, you control a block that moves about its gridded environment by “rolling” on its edges in the…
By Owen Good -
Hey, What’s That on Owen’s Grandpa’s Bookshelf …
To: Luke From: Owen Re: Same Desk, Different Apartment Funny, you know, I’ve got that same thing in six parts on Betamax. Well, it was released under a different title. Some highlights from this weekend: GDC Design Challenge: A Game About Gettin’ Lucky Study Says Playing Shooters Improves Vision Leaked Footage Gives a Shaky Look…
By Owen Good -
Week in Games: Is This April Fool’s?
Guitar Hero: Metallica is this week’s big drop, coming out today. Anyone else find it funny Duke Nukem Trilogy is out on April Fool’s? Especially when you consider its E3 trailer. After Lars and Duke, I’m thinking Gardening Mama. Not sure what the hell “Burger Island” is. Maybe if they made “Bacon Island” I’d buy…
By Owen Good -
Four New Screens for Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings
Ordinarily I’d look at these Wii screenshots and think, it doesn’t look like much (get those spiders!) but it’ll probably look great on the core consoles. Then I remember it’s not being made for them. Coupled with the gameplay footage – I know this is a third person action game, but it looks like it…
By Owen Good -
Now, the Periodic Table of Controllers
So there was the Periodic Table of Game Characters, and that spawned numerous imitators and spinoffs. Now we’ve graduated to the Periodic Table of Controllers: Console peripherals on top, handheld controls at the bottom. Given my admittedly limited understanding of the actual periodic table, this arrangement would make the Sega Saturn the most reactive controller,…
By Owen Good -
YouTube Fan Tops Halo Song Spoof
Couple weeks back, Jude Kelley and Dan Amrich (he of OXM) recorded “Halo (All I Play-Oh),” a virtuoso spoof of “Snow (Hey-Oh)” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Now someone’s matched the lyrics to footage. That’s a ton of work, considering Usethefork (the YouTuber who created this) had no video output and was setting up…
By Owen Good -
Kick Ass with Shoebox Fight Sticks
A $300 tournament edition fightstick on the gray market? Screw that. Reader Rotundo made one for himself and another for his friends out of $40 in spare parts and two shoeboxes. Oh, and one’s wireless. He picked up a couple of Happ joysticks and 14 buttons for $35, then set about taking apart some Xbox…
By Owen Good -
iPhone Fart Apps Bring Out the Lawyer-Mans
With enough chutzpah to make a patent troll wolf-whistle, a Florida company has claimed the phrase “pull my finger” – used by a competing iPhone fart app, of course – infringes on its intellectual property. The two sides, Air-O-Matic, maker of “Pull My Finger,” and InfoMedia, developer of iFart are in negotiations to settle the…
By Owen Good -
Waiting on That Marvel MMO? Maybe It Gets Here in 2012
The tentative release date for the Marvel Comics MMO seems to be timed with the release of the Captain America and Avengers movies. That, or the end of the world according to the Mayan Calendar. Simon Phillips, who is Marvel’s president of worldwide consumer products, floated 2012 as a possible date to MTV’s Splash Page…
By Owen Good -
GDC Design Challenge: A Game About Gettin’ Lucky
Picking outfits, buying condoms, setting mood music – the sixth annual design challenge contest at GDC tasked panelists with thinking up a game about “your first time.” What didn’t win? “Zack & Miri Make a Portal.” The Game Design Challenge, a staple of the conference, brings in top designers to grapple with a quirky challenge…
By Owen Good -
Study Says Playing Shooters Improves Vision
How’s your “contrast sensitivity”? What’s that? Well it helps you see in the dark, and read, and it degrades in old age. But a study found it improves in gamers who play shooters. The research, reported in the latest edition of Nature Neuroscience, took a very deep look at how games affect vision. The results…
By Owen Good -
Games Get Huzzah in Parliament
MP Edward Vaizey last week introduced a motion recognizing (sigh, recognising) games recently honored (sigh, honoured) by BAFTA. He also used the motion to decry “the complete lack of support from Government” of the industry. Fable II (Lionhead Studios), Race Driver: GRID (Codemasters) and LittleBigPlanet (Media Molecule) were all developed at UK studios, and all…
By Owen Good -
Leaked Footage Gives a Shaky Look at Mass Effect 2
This 2 minute clip came from a Bioware presentation at GDC about the development of Mass Effect 2. The gameplay is at a very, very pre-alpha stage. No spoilers per se, and the shakycam makes it hard to take in any visual differences. If you listen closely you might be able to piece together one…
By Owen Good -
Gamer Girlfriend Makes Left 4 Dead Cuddly
Reader Trevor H. so casually mentions his girlfriend’s hobby – making plush toys “for every wicked Valve game that comes out” – that this almost sounds too good to be true. Still, there’s a huggable, wuvable Smoker all ready to be tucked in and constrict your sweet dreams. Trevor’s squeeze also made a plush headcrab.…
By Owen Good -
Braid Delayed (for the PC)
PC gamers looking forward to Indie hit Braid are gonna have to look forward a couple more weeks. Jonathan Blow is delaying his game til April 10 to work out some bugs. Says Blow, on the official Braid Blog: The delay is just to fix some problems that came up in testing with various versions…
By Owen Good -
Iwata Asks, Rhythm Heaven Team Overshares
Nintendo top man Satoru Iwata subjects the creative team behind Rhythm Heaven/Rhythm Tengoku to a five part, comprehensive deconstruction of all of the development processes put into this franchise. It is a whopper of a read. But I plucked this from the kicker. It’s real fun when the company’s top boss asks three guys all…
By Owen Good -
When There’s Nothing to Blame, There’s Always Games
Last October, Stefan Martin-Urban shot up a suburban cul-de-sac, killing two people and then himself. Investigators found no drugs, no journals explaining his motives. But they did find video games, and so that’s the answer. That’s the line pressed by law enforcement in Grand Junction, Colo., where Martin-Urban’s killing spree took place. Although the specific…
By Owen Good -
Trailer: Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time
And here’s another goddamn WORLD EXCLUSIVE from Gametrailers. Cinematic teaser, no gameplay, but it’s Ratchet & Clank, which should whet fans’ appetites for now. Or make them jump up and down and chant “Ratchet and Clank!” and do the peepee dance, like Fahey did this morning when he brought this to my attention. Ratchet and…
By Owen Good -
Aussie Classification Board’s Site Hax0red, Deface-0red
Someone PO’d at the Australian Classification Board, which rates games and other media down under, hacked into its Web site on Thursday and placed anti-censorship messages on the front page. The site was taken offline to remove the graffiti and investigate the breach, but while it was up, here’s what visitors saw: This site contains…
By Owen Good -
ECA Membership Delivers Amazon Discounts — UPDATED
What’s in it for you if you join the Entertainment Consumer Association? Well, now the $20 membership gives you 10 percent off games on Amazon. UPDATE: From a forum admin at the ECA, it seems the discount codes they’re handing out now are one-time use only. The ECA describes this as a glitch – “the…
By Owen Good
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