Regardless of how good a game might be, regardless of how many hours of entertainment it provides, a game that dares to end is a game that has damned itself. We don’t want our games to end, and the recent complaints around the Diablo III endgame are a testament to that desire. Taking a look…
The thing about humor, Phil Tibitoski told me, is its ability to mask hidden truths—sometimes, these are things that are actually kind of disquieting. This somber remark seems strange coming from the president at Young Horses, the folk behind Octodad: Dadliest Catch—an amusing game about the difficulty that comes with being a cephalopod who is…
Polymorphous Perversity, for those of you that don’t recall, is the sex game whose development may have crossed lines. Nicolau Chaud, the mind behind the title, had his relationship with intimacy altered in peculiar ways during development. Nonetheless the game was released into the wild earlier this week via the game’s blog. Those of you…
I’ve never been one for goodbyes. Sometimes goodbyes feel like a formality—I’ve known a person long enough that bidding them adieu is just mechanical, automatic, like saying “hello” or asking someone how they are, even if I don’t actually care. The sentimental ones, those screw with me. It’s like I have just one final moment…
The tale of Cinderella, as most of us know it, is a Disneyfied version. It goes like this: a young woman lives in terrible living circumstances thanks to a wicked step-family, but her innate good nature and attractive looks change her fortune when a prince takes notice. The point of the story is karma, the…
Meet PASSIONGAMER4CHANGE. As the capslock might suggest, he’s not only a man with unfettered passion, but also a man on a mission. A mission to help establish gaming as the most important medium of our time, capable of making us cry—the ultimate metric for Something As Profound Art. I like to call him by his…
In defiance of the sudden onslaught of flashing lights comes Girl’s Generation’s latest single, “Paparazzi.” The nine-woman supergroup from South Korea, known for their charming personalities and perfect legs (and covered plenty in the past here at Kotaku), released music videos for the song today. Paparrazi is the lead single for the girl’s upcoming Japanese…
You are summoner extraordinaire in Diluvium, a small game that arose from the TOJam game jam earlier last month. You summon animals by typing in their names, and you can create a totem pole of up to three animals. There can only be one of each animal on the playing field at once, and the…
For me, beating a game isn’t in reaching the end point. Finishing a game is easy enough. Having the highest stats, the best gear, exploring and experiencing everything though? That’s not as simple. Still, reaching that “optimal state” is my personal holy grail. Once the path toward that optimal state is clear to me—once I…
Getting my family to sit down and have a meal? Hah, forget it. Too many conflicting schedules. Trying to have a conversation when we could actually sit down? Also impossible, and this is that Twitter didn’t even exist when I was a teenager. I can’t imagine having an entire family sit down and actually converse…
“I raped you.” If words could lynch someone, then this was the moment for it. The post-game scoreboard said I had technically won, so I’d shown them all, right? No, no I hadn’t. The avalanche of trash talk was one thing—you play online enough, you come to expect it—but the laughter, the laughter stripped meaning…
Companies fail all the time, but this, this was different. For Brenda Laurel, it was personal. Logistically, Purple Moon amounted to six years and $40 million dollars spent on research where thousands of kids were interviewed, and eight games were produced. Prior to 1996, when the company was created by Brenda Laurel, a pioneer extraordinaire…
Like something out of the book 1984, The Republia Times is a small flash game that forces the player to become complicit in a government’s attempt to increase public loyalty. You are a news editor tasked with choosing stories that best function as propaganda. You need to assure the world that Everything Is Okay in…
Super Monday Night Combat exists in a dystopia in which spectacle, corporate greed and marketing are the fundamental pillars that hold society together. The premise is this: there’s a deadly organized sport—that’d be Monday Night Combat—where two opposing teams of corporate-sponsored clones duke it out for money and prizes by shooting each other in the…
I’ve never really been one for the appreciation of the “great outdoors.” Take me out of my skyscraper rainforest, ground me in something other than the tangled detritus of concrete streets and roads, and I become unmoored. I blame it on my upbringing: I was largely sheltered, and as a result my outdoorsmanship was developed…
Examining why I play the games I do sometimes yields surprising insight. It’s become clear to me that many of the games I like…are kind of dating simulators, despite what the presentation or marketing might suggest. I don’t think I’m supposed to admit that, though. To say something like that feels like losing legitimacy as…
Some of the most well-known and successful rappers in hip hop right now aren’t the typical ‘thug’ act. These rappers—such as Lupe Fiasco, Childish Gambino and Frank Ocean—don’t just rap about money and fame. Their lyrics go beyond what can be found between a woman’s legs or at the tip of a lighter, too. Instead,…
The folks at DinahMoe production house have created a couple of whimsical music games that you should definitely mess around with. The first is Plink, a multiplayer toy where players can hop into rooms and experiment with different sounds. You interact with Plink by clicking and dragging your mouse—very simple and intuitive. Probably best experienced…
A post by a psychotherapist on the RPG-Maker forums informed the world of his latest idea: a game about sex. Not the clean, safe sex we typically see in games, mind. The game would be an exploration of sexuality and the human libido, including the kinkier, if not darker sides of desire—from perversions to fetishes…
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