As Video Games Changed, So Too Did Mass Effect

Close your eyes and think back to it: It’s fall of 2007. That’s quite a while ago. Take your current age and subtract five. That’s about how old you were. That’s how long ago Mass Effect game out. Think about the game itself. How simple it was, how innocent! An Xbox 360 exclusive, released near…

IGN‘s got a video of the first fifteen minutes ofFar Cry 3: Blood Dragon. It looks very goofy, decidedly retro, and like a lot of fun.

The Next Xbox May Have An “HDMI In” Port. So?

A new source e-mails me several days ago. The source has access to a development kit for the next Xbox 360—the codenamed Durango. Accurately describes the look of the new controller, but mentions something he’s confused about. The Durango he’s seen doesn’t just send a signal out through an HDMI port (that’s normal). It has…

Microsoft’s Adam Orth, The “Always-On” Tweeter, No Longer With The Company

According to a report on Game Informer, Adam Orth, the Microsoft creative director who last week upset some folks with his comments about always-online technology, is no longer with the company. A source close to Orth tells Kotaku that Orth resigned from the company and was not fired. Respondingto a Kotaku report that claimed the…

City of Heroes’ Studio Fought to the Bitter End to Save the MMO, Designer Says

Gamasutra‘s postmortem of City of Heroes and Paragon Studios says the MMO’s development staff did everything it could to keep the game running—including trying to buy it from publisher NCSoft—and that plans for one final update were shot down right before the game was closed on Dec. 1. Matt Miller, the former lead designer of…

Go check out Manic Pixel Dream Girl, a wonderful comic miniseries by Elizabeth Simins about growing up as a girl who likes video games. Part three just went up yesterday, and there’s still one more part to go.

Defiance MMO Log One: A Little Better Every Time I Play

Last week I posted less-than-favorable launch day impressions of Trion Worlds’ Defiance, the massively multiplayer shooter tie-in to SyFy’s upcoming original series. I bemoaned the lack of PC options, criticized the silly vehicle physics and worried over its lack of general chat functionality. A week later those issues are still present, yet I’ve been playing…

Is it worth it to run two graphics cards in one gaming PC? Our friends at Lifehacker have some answers. (Short version: it depends, but they generally recommend one great card over having two lesser ones.)

From the Makers of Most of Aliens: Colonial Marines Comes a Much Cooler Shooter

TimeGate, the studio Gearbox tapped to complete the neglectedAliens: Colonial Marines, turns its attention from making the majority of another company’s game to making a Minimum of its own. Damn this looks lovely. Not that shooters have ever been about looks for me. There’s a sweet spot between Unreal and Call of Duty that’s the…

Hey, Hollywood, Listen to What This Mass Effect Writer Thinks You Should Do for That Movie You’re Making

Studio heads, directors and agents haven’t been knocking down Drew Karpyshyn’s door. The man who was one of the Mass Effect universe’s chief architects knows that Hollywood will be looking elsewhere for the talent that will power the upcoming film adaptation. But Karpyshyn headed up the writing for the first Mass Effect game and part…

There is a dating sim called Jurrassic Heart where you go on a date with a T-Rex. He plays the ukelele, but he’s shy about it because he once dropped it and couldn’t pick it back up again. Because he’s a friggin’ tyrannosaurus rex with tiny arms. Unfortunately it’s only about one scene long. (via…

Making an RPG in a Spreadsheet is Easier Than It Sounds, but Takes Longer Than You’d Think

Last fall, Cary Walkin was enrolled in business school at York University in Ontario, taking a course called “Advanced Spreadsheet Modeling.” He quickly realized the application could be used for more than just accounting. Five months later, he finished Arena.Xlsm, a role-playing game played entirely within Microsoft Excel. Walkin said he sacrificed his evening game-playing…

The Dark Souls II Gameplay Reveal in a Single GIF

IGN had their 12 minute long Dark Souls II gameplay reveal today. It contained a lot of dying. It also had torches and boars in it (I thought they were bears at first). The above GIF sums up the trailer pretty nicely. Footage via IGN

The New Novel by One of the Guys Behind Dishonored Is Dark, But Not How You Expect

Harvey Smith—who you probably know as a chief architect of Deus Ex and of last year’s hit stealth/action hybrid Dishonored—has made games about secret alien UFO labs and supernatural steampunk assassins. So you might expect a novel from the co-founder of Arkane Studios to be heavy with genre trappings and filled with fantastical imaginings. But,…

If Game of Thrones Was Made By Disney

Then it would feature a heck of a lot more singing, for one. Check out this Disneyfied Daenarys by AVbyte, a take on the character I’m not sure I like nearly as much as the badass Dany we see in the show. Still, it’s amusing to think about how different Game of Thrones would have…

Hungry for more of From Software’s brutally abusive fantasy RPG world? Watch IGN‘s reveal of Dark Souls II right here. Dark Souls 2 Gameplay Reveal – 12 Minute Demo [IGN]

“I Only Play As Femshep”, And Other Hipster Musings On Mass Effect

This article was originally published on March 16, 2011. We’re bumping it up for Mass Effect week! Hipsters. The scourge of modern times. And also scourge of the distant future, if this wonderful Mass Effect page is anything to go by. fuckyeahhipstereffect is a collection of, well, Mass Effect characters being ironic. And self-righteous. And…

The Moneysaver: SimCity for $32 with Mac version, The Last of Us and Splinter Cell for $50

Your cheetah speed has returned, so use it to go annex a PC and Mac copy of SimCity for $32- the lowest price so far. Prefer trying to survive the apocalypse over trying to prevent one? We’ve got $10 off the most anticipated not-Bioshock game this year, The Last of Us, along with the same…

Apple Cleared of Blame, ‘Censored’ Comic Will Be Sold on iOS Devices After All

Yesterday, all of the internet was ablaze with the news that Saga #12—Image Comics’ sci-fi adventure drama by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples—was being blocked from iPads and iPhones by Apple. A new announcement from digital comics purveyor Comixology indicates that they, not Apple, were to blame. It also says that the comic will…

The Last Months Of LucasArts (And A Glimpse Of Battlefront III)

In November, just after purchasing LucasFilm, Disney CEO Bob Iger held a company-wide meeting. During the meeting, according to a source in attendance, a few people asked what was going on. What was going to happen to them? What was the future of LucasArts, the LucasFilm subsidiary and 30-year-old video game studio responsible for a…