This Week’s iPhone Charts: Cheating is Charting

The free iPhone word game 4 Pics 1 Word is pretty damn popular. So popular that an app that allows players to cheat in the game debuts this week at number six on the free iPhone game charts. Sheesh. Mobile gaming is a wild and unruly frontier. One week you’re the game that copied that…

You Are Over-Encumbered. Drop Your iPhone.

I don’t own an iPhone anymore. I suddenly wish I did. This case costs $40, but the joke makes it almost totally worth it. iPhone Stats (Skyrim) by SkinnyJoe [Red Bubble] Skyrim [All The World’s A Stage, via Gamefreaks]

Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals is a Lot Worse Than I Remember

Anime and games are intimately tied together in Japan: popular games tend to get anime adaptations and popular anime tend to get game adaptations. Thus, over the years there have been a myriad of game-inspired anime—some good, others borderline unwatchable. I saw my first game-inspired anime right at the dawn of my anime watching career.…

Irrational’s Ken Levine tells IGN that BioShock for the Vita isn’t happening until funding is secured. (via VG247)

Thank AMD for the Best Video Game Hair Ever

Video game hair, generally speaking, looks awful. It really does. But computer giant AMD is changing all that with some fancy new hair tech. Oh yes, hair tech As AMD points out, making realistic hair is really, really hard. You need a bunch of math and calculations to make it happen in a natural and…

How I Fell in Love With JRPGS

Almost as far back as I can remember, I’ve been a gamer. At the age of four, my family got an original Nintendo with the Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, and the World Class Track Meet combo game—light gun and power pad included. Until I was in middle school, that Nintendo (and the aging Atari…

Japan’s Coffin Apartments Are Not for Claustrophobes

Tokyo is dense. Packed. And crowded. If you don’t have much money and want to live in places like Shibuya, you could live in a box. Literally. A Japanese news program recently showed off an “extremely cramped share house” (“geki-sema share house” or 激せまシャアハウス in Japanese). There’s a communal toilet and bath for the residents,…

Famous Anime Girls Brawl in This Fan-Made Game

Guardian Heroes is often considered one of the best of the Sega Saturn library. It is an excellent brawler complete with a robust story and branching paths. But you know what it needed? Famous anime heroines. That’s where Guardian Heroines: Final comes in. This fan-made game gathers girls from popular visual novels like Kanon, Tsukihime…

Make a Gummy Snack of Yourself. Because That’s Romantic.

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’s Advice for the Next Xbox

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).

Delight in How These Photos Totally Look Like Anime and Video Game Characters

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…

Your Crazy Childhood Nerd Arguments Are Now A Card Game

“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…

The Cold, Mechanical Terror Of A LEGO Robot That Can Draw Things

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,…

There’s Nothing Quite Like Browsing Through Hundreds Of Old Sega Boxes

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…

Death, For A Dead Guy, You’re Looking Pretty Good

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…

Ah, So That’s Why Crysis 3’s First Level Is So Terribly Slow

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…

There Are 26 Famous Video Game Locations In This Terrific Video. See If You Can Name Them.

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…

Remember, The PS4 And Next Xbox Have More To Offer Than Just Prettier Graphics

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…

How Valve Hires, And Fires, Its Employees

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…