March 14 is a special day in Japan. It’s White Day. On White Day, men are supposed to give chocolates to the women who gave them chocolate on Valentine’s Day. But why give chocolate when you can make a gummy version of yourself? As website Spoon & Tamago points out, Shibuya’s FabCafe is doing a…
Japan loves foreign products—Apple, BMW, and even Red Wings shoes are popular here. Yet, there’s the Xbox 360. Gathering dust on store shelves in cities like Tokyo and Osaka. Unloved. People in Japan just don’t care! Poor Xbox. The original Xbox was a failure in Japan. The Xbox 360 was a failure in Japan. Microsoft’s…
Famed manga artist Mari Yamazaki is doing a biographical manga series on Steve Jobs (via ANN).
Sometimes, people look familiar. You know you’ve seen them before. Maybe they look like a friend from college. Or an animal. Or an electrical appliance. In the West, there are websites such as Totally Looks Like that compare images which… totally look like each other. On web forums, Japan does the same thing, finding images…
“I’M OPTIMUS PRIME AND I SHOT YOU IN THE FACE”, “WELL I’M A NINJA TURTLE AND I BLOCKED IT THEN KICKED HIII-YAH”, “WELL I USED MY FORCEFIELD TO STOP IT THEN TURNED INTO A TRUCK AND VVRROOMMM DROVE OVER YOUR LEGS”. That’s how I remember most playground lunchbreaks beginning, and ending, when I was a…
Inspired by the work of famous 18th-century automata builders Pierre Jacquet-Droz and Henri Maillardet, Italian engineer Daniele Benedettelli built this LEGO robot called LEGONARDO. He is programmed to draw. And he will not stop until you are dead (or stop giving him drawings to draw). It is as impressive as it is unnerving. LEGONARDO [Site,…
You may have noticed, but I’ve got a bit of a thing for the Sega Master System, and in particular its unique brand of documentation and branding. Which lay somewhere between Tron and a tablecloth. So it made my day/week/month when reader Jim let me know about his personal project to scan and upload as…
I was only saying last night how impressed I am with indie strategy title Death Inc.’s art design, so it’s only fair tonight that I elaborate with this collection of works from Tim Holleyman, the art director at developers Ambient Studios. With almost a decade’s experience in the business, Tim has worked in both games…
If you’ve played Crysis 3 on the PC, you’ve probably noticed that the first level, even on a powerful system, chugs. Badly. It gets you off on the wrong foot with the game, because you start worrying more about hardware than the experience, and that sucks. Stick with it, though; bizarrely, as the first level’s…
Last year, Dutch artist Tim Hijlkema created an amazing video called Video Game Planets. This year, he’s gone one better, with a compilation of 26 famous video game locations. The idea is that you try and name them all, but even if you have no idea what Bullworth Academy looks like, you’ll still be able…
It’s such a crude yardstick, yet it’s the one most people use when trying to gauge the leap between console generations. Graphics. How a game looks. It’s great for sizzle reels and screenshot comparisons, but at the end of the day, it’s not where the real leaps in video games are made. Those are made…
There’s no company quite like Valve. Super successful and with an organisation some would call crazy, there’s also no company quite as interesting. So hearing about how Valve hires, and fires people, is far more educational than it would be for just about any other video game company. Writing on Gamasutra, the company’s economist Yanis…
Feels like everywhere I turn these days, I see Patton Oswalt. He’s on Portlandia, he’s killing it on Justified. He has a role in the hotly-anticipated-by-me game Metro Last Light I like the guy a lot, and so I enjoyed this short documentary “To Be Loved & Understood,” which was released today by The Thrash…
The Banner Saga—that beautiful strategy game made by ex-Bioware devs—is releasing sometime later this year. But you can play the multiplayer segment of the game right now, if you want. It’s out on Steam, on its own—for free, to boot. Check out the launch trailer above. I’m a big fan of this move. In fact,…
The grand finale of Fire Emblem: Awakening made me feel things. Emotional things. In fact, it made me feel so many things it kinda knocked me out. This was unexpected. It took me about 27 hours to complete the game. If, about halfway through, you had told me that the ending was going to make…
I always figured I’d be pretty crap if I had to survive in a real-life version of GoldenEye. I was pretty solid at the N64 game back in the day (or at least, I think I was), but give me an actual Klobb and set me loose, and I’d be done for. In honor of…
I have to say, while I enjoyed watching Woody from Toy Story wreaking havoc in Liberty City, I didn’t really think I’d like watching Mater from Cars do the same. Come to think of it, I think I figured my relative enjoyment would be about on par with the difference between my enjoyment of Toy…
Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot likes the PlayStation 4. Otherwise he wouldn’t have showed up at Sony’s big PlayStation 4 event last week, right? He likes the PS4 in part because it’s, well, a little less like a console and a little more like some of those other machines you might play games on: the computer…
So, there’s new Fire Emblem: Awakening DLC. With it, comes new maps and characters. One of these characters comes with a special item that can transform other characters into a special class. The bride class. I’m serious. Watch the trailer above if you’d like to get a quick glimpse. Curious about the class, I ended…
Natural Selection 2 is getting some free new DLC on February 28. That’s right: free DLC.
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