Forget The Most Powerful Characters. Use The Ones You Like.

Don’t let the wallpaper fool you. Underneath every game is an endless matrix of numbers that rule each and every possible action. These numbers dictate everything from how well you can swing your sword to how effectively you can shoot a gun. Numbers don’t lie: some actions are better than others. Some characters are better…

Gabe Newell Says Valve Layoffs Don’t Affect Any Current Projects [UPDATE]

Gamasutra today reported that several employees from Valve Corporation were laid off on Tuesday, terminations said to involve “large decisions,” according to their report. Further, Jason Holtman, Valve’s director of business development, is among eight persons no longer listed in the company’s public employee directory Valve has not responded to requests for comment on the…

Planescape: Torment Designer Chris Avellone Plays Old RPGs For Our Amusement

The latest update for development studio Obsidian Entertainment’s Kickstartered RPG Project Eternity isn’t about Project Eternity at all. Instead, it’s a solid 57 minutes of veteran game designer Chris Avellone playing the old role-playing game Arcanum, which is both entertaining and fascinating, even if you haven’t played the game. Avellone simultaneously plays the roles of…

The Aliens: Colonial Marines Demo Looked Great. The Actual Game, Not So Much.

By almost all accounts, Aliens: Colonial Marines isn’t a good game. Patricia certainly didn’t care for it, saying that “it was literally a pain just to get through.” But hey, it happens. Sometimes, for various reasons, video games aren’t as good as the people who made them wanted them to be. What’s remarkable with Aliens:…

On the PlayStation Blog, Naughty Dog confirms that The Last of Us is being delayed until June 14th.

Pro-Games Talking Point Calls Japan the Home of Violent Games, but Is That Really Any Better?

On Sunday, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats’ leader in the House of Representatives, went on Fox News and deflected blame from violent video games as a serious, actual cause of mass shootings in the United States. “In Japan, for example, they have the most violent games and the lowest death-mortality-from guns.” Now here’s Martin Short,…

Build Custom Creatures on Your iPad, Bring Them to Life Through 3D Printing

The latest entry in Autodesk’s 123D line of 3D design tools, 123D Creature gives iPad owners the power to sculpt and paint their own three-dimensional creatures and then share them with the community, export them as a 3D mesh, or have them sent to a 3D printing service to be transformed into real stuff. 123D…

Spawn Creator Todd McFarlane Said that 38 Studios’ Unfinished MMO “Was Going to Raise the Bar”

Thing I didn’t expect to learn at Toy Fair: the guy who created Spawn loves crazy video game rabbits. Specifically, Todd McFarlane loves the titular characters from Ubisoft’s wacky Rabbids franchise and thinks that that they’re going to be a huge pop culture phenomenon. I talked to McFarlane earlier this week at Toy Fair and…

In This Mind-Bending Game, You Fix Other People’s Memories

Imagine a future where memory loss and mental illness could be cured. Sounds a little crazy, right? But that’s the premise behind upcoming adventure game, Ether One. You are what they call a “restorer,” someone who has the ability to enter people’s memories and fix them. A little like To The Moon in that way,…

ChefVille ‘Sauce Man’ Quests: Everything You Need to Know

Last week, ChefVille players were asked to cook pasta dishes in bulk to complete one of Bello’s Valentine’s Day quest sets. Now, Bello’s back again with another challenge: Cook dishes containing Tomato Sauce. This series of three new “Sauce Man” quests that will be available for the next three days. We’re here with a complete…

BioShock Infinite‘s Lead Creator on History, Video Game Violence and… What Happens to the Sewage in a Floating City?

In an office in Union Square last week, BioShock Infinite ‘s lead creator, Ken Levine, said I could ask him about anything. He was in a kind and generous mood, offering me a strawberry from a bowl of them—he at eats at least half a pound of them a day, he told me. Anything? OK……

Insane Kickstarter Promises A Video Game You Can Play With Your Mind

In the world of zany Kickstarter projects, this is one of the zaniest. Give these guys $40,000 and they’ll let you blow things up with your mind. The aptly-named Throw Trucks With Your Mind is a video game that promises to let you use your mind to move things around in-game. You use a regular…

This Robot Racer Will Make You Love To Race (And Hate) Your Friends

These days, it feels like the phrase “iPhone racing games are a dime a dozen” is an understatement—heck, more than a dozen of these games are free. So when I’m playing a new one, it had better grab me in the first thirty or forty seconds, else I’ll just go back to playing Time Surfer…

Here’s video of the Empire Strikes Back table for Zen’s Star Wars Pinball series. A look at Boba Fett comes next week.

Gabe Newell and JJ Abrams’ Wonderful, Unprecedented Talk Has An R2D2 Easter Egg

A week after it happened, you can now watch the DICE Summit’s kick-off talk between Star Trek/Star Wars‘ JJ Abrams and Steam/Half-Life 3‘s Gabe Newell. It was a fun talk that ended with Abrams and Newell talking about making games and movies together. That’s the news you probably saw last week. But watch everything that…

This Week’s Android Charts: Google Play Could Really Use a ‘New Release’ Section

Oh look, it’s Minecraft Pocket Edition at the top of the Android paid game charts, recovered from last week’ brief bout of Ruzzle fever. There’s not a single new game on the Android top paid charts, just the usual suspects shuffling about. Mosquitoes are starting to breed in it. The free chart isn’t much better.…

“Brutal…Brilliant”… and Coming Out Who-Knows-When

The moody, gritty PC/PS3/Xbox 360 shooter Metro: Last Light was supposed to come out in early 2013, which is probably why ads for it started showing up atop New York City taxi cabs many weeks ago. Then Metro‘s publisher, THQ fell apart. Metro will eventually be released by new publisher Deep Silver. For now, it’s…

MLB 13 The Show Gets Seven New Stadiums—in the Minor Leagues

When I finish with my professional obligations in writing about MLB The Show and sit down to play it for my own enjoyment, I’m nearly 100 percent a Road to the Show player. That’s the game’s career mode, where you bring a guy out of the minor leagues into the majors and, one hopes, stardom.…

Wreck-It Ralph’s Deleted Scene Would Have Mashed Up The Sims With Grand Theft Auto

When it hit movie theaters last year, Wreck-It Ralph had tons of little details that made the Disney film feel one of the few that got video games right. It’s available for download today and a new interview at MTV reveals that some of the best stuff—an open-world social game where Ralph goes to mope…

EA Readies Short Attention Span Tetris

Coming this spring to Android and iOS, Tetris Blitz takes the lightning round concept of Bejeweled Blitz and applies it to the world’s most beloved poozle (Russian for puzzle, probably) game. This does not mean you won’t spend an hour playing Tetris in the bathroom at work—you’ll just get a lot more games in one…