Video Game Experiment Teaches Angry Kids Not to Rage Against the Machine

There’s a new insane study of children and video games out there, and it makes me grateful the Wii died without that ridiculous Vitality Sensor ever coming to market. Let’s say you’re playing a video game, a space shooter (can’t tell if this is top-down or side-scrolling). Your job is to shoot down enemy spacecraft…

Drunk Jeff Goldblum Wants To Tell You About PayPal

You have likely already seen Drunk Jeff Goldblum enthusing about things. The internet, pizza, and more. This latest video, in which he slurredly marvels at the ubiquity of PayPal, might be my favorite. (Part of that may have something to do with the fact that I see the actual full-speed version of this ad approximately…

Minor Console Aggravation: Those Darn PS3 Installations

Download a game on the Xbox 360 or the Wii and you’re good to go. You can play it. Download a game on the PS3 and you just might have to then tell the PS3 to install it. You have to manually install any game that you have downloaded in the background. This is strange,…

Backhanded Box Quotes: Medal of Honor Gets a 10

Welcome back to “Backhanded Box Quotes,” a collection of measured, thoughtful criticism from the user reviews of Metacritic and elsewhere. What are you dressing up as for Halloween? I’m going as Medal of Honor: Warfighter‘s Metacritic score. No, make that Sexy Metacritic Score for Medal of Honor. Because the real one is ugly enough to…

38 Studios’ Sell-Off So Far Amounts to an $830,000 Drop in the Bucket

This auctioning of assets belonging to 38 Studios, the makers of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, brought in a combined $830,000, reports Joystiq. Sounds … good? Well, according to the Associated Press, that will barely dent the $100 million taxpayers may eat in Rhode Island, which guaranteed the loan for which someone gave themselves this award…

Gizmonauts Already Has a Limited-Edition Robot

Only a few days old and already I’m desperately trying to breed a beast before the end of Gizmonauts‘ Halloween spooktacular. OCD and me.

A Whole Bunch Of Square Enix Games Are On Sale This Weekend

Sleeping Dogs! Kingdom Hearts! Dead Island! Lots of neat Square Enix games are on sale this weekend, so head over there if you think something will strike your fancy. Particularly hilarious: the PC remake of Final Fantasy VII is on sale for $6.99. Instead of $11.99. Final Fantasy VII!

Eight Reviewers Go To War Against Medal of Honor: Warfighter

Medal of Honor: Warfighter was supposed to be the big military shooter of the fall. Or at least, of the fall until that other big military shooter comes out in a few weeks. Comparisons between Medal of Honor: Warfighter and its competitors, Call of Duty and Battlefield, have proven inevitable—and Warfighter does not fare well…

Find Tricks and Treats This Weekend in Madden, NHL‘s Ultimate Teams

A two-day-only sale, currently into its second hour, offers a super card pack in NHL 13‘s Ultimate Team mode, comprising 32 cards in all, 18 of which are guaranteed rare items. I don’t think you get any actual ethereal players, as shown in that trailer above, nor any enormous Zdeno Chara. He’s already large enough.…

Abusive Player Editing Shows We Can’t Have Nice Things in Madden

When it released, Madden NFL 13‘s new “Connected Careers” mode forbade the editing of any player. This was somewhat understandable, as the roster is used by others online and changes can affect the outcomes of games elsewhere in your league. It was still rather Draconian, as it meant you could not edit your own created…

According to Twitter, The Wii U is “AWESOME,” “Overall pretty comfy”

Retailers Best Buy and GameStop have slowly been receiving Wii U demo kiosks to show off the upcoming Nintendo hardware to interested gamers. Though not every store seems to have gotten their kiosks yet, many have. And many gamers have gotten their hands on the Wii U’s GamePad. So what are they saying? What do…

The Week in Gaming Apps Goes on a Toy Run

There was a period of my life during which I spent all of my time either playing pen-and-paper role-playing games or running from Wal-Mart to Wal-Mart in search of the hottest toys. This Week in Gaming Apps is dedicated to that guy. He would have loved this. We’ve got two games based on cartoons with…

Conan O’Brien Knows How To Save Zynga

Zynga, beset by layoffs and financial losses, has been having a rough time lately. Such a rough time, in fact, that now it’s the butt of late-night talk show jokes. Comedian Conan O’Brien’s site suggests five games that the social mega-publisher can use to turn their fortunes around. And sure, Brony Wars would attract a…

Guillermo Del Toro’s Man Cave Is a Whole House. And It’s Really Awesome.

The man responsible for Pan’s Labyrinth is busy. He’s still looking for a home for his InSane horror game trilogy and putting the voice of GLADoS into his giant-robots-vs-giant-monsters feature film. But Guillermo del Toro still has to cook up more ideas for the books, films and other projects he wants to do. And the…

We Are Explorers: In Search of Mystery in Videogames

My favorite videogames are the games I don’t fully understand. They stay with me after I stop playing. They ask questions I cannot answer. They resonate with mystery. I get little satisfaction from completing a game. How boring, the feeling of 100%, all content exhausted, all achievements earned, all collectibles collected, all endings ended. If…

The Next Ratchet & Clank Game Comes Out on November 27th

Full Frontal Assault, the next release in Insomniac’s Ratchet & Clank series, will be out just in time to turn the holidays into a cartoony sci-fi frag fest. The downloadable title is going to cost you $19.99. For that price, you get the game for both PS3 and PlayStation Vita, with cross-play and cross-save across…

XCOM Isn’t A Horror Game, But It Sure Does Feel Like One

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a turn based strategy game…or is it? While I acknowledge that I am a grade-A wuss in all things frightening, XCOM can still feel scary—almost like a horror game. You’re incredibly vulnerable, for starters. Regardless of how much I upgrade, the alien threat is always capable of destroying me. So I…

Apple’s Game Center Seems to be Malfunctioning Today. Blame Letterpress?

Game Center is really acting up today. iOS players have been taking to Twitter to voice concerns about Game Center breaking when attempting to play games, specifically Letterpress Letterpress is a fairly new word game for iOS devices. It relies on Game Center’s connectivity that allows you to play against your friends, sending notifications as…

Gearbox has patched the PC version of Borderlands 2 so that the latest DLC works with PhysX

Let’s Worry About The Games We Already Have

When I was a kid, my parents bought me a copy of Final Fantasy Legend II. This was okay for a while. It was a fun game. Then I found out there was a sequel. “There’s a Final Fantasy Legend THREE?” I said to my mom, screaming. “WHY DON’T I HAVE IT?” Things haven’t changed…