Brutal Zynga Update: 13 Games ‘Sunsetting’. More Studio Shutdowns. 5% Workforce Reduction

Following a day of bad news for the embattled maker of FarmVille and CityVille. Zynga chief Mark Pincus just sent this note to his company: INTERNAL NOTE FROM ZYNGA CEO AND FOUNDER, MARK PINCUS Team, Earlier today we initiated a number of changes to streamline our operations, focus our resources on our most strategic opportunities,…

You Might Be Able To Buy Some Wii U Games Early

Days before I bought a launch-day GameCube, I bought a GameCube game. Super Monkeyball, if you’re curious. It’s not unusual to be able to buy new games for a new console before you can buy the console itself. The evidence is mounting that you’ll be able to do so next month with some Wii U…

Persona 4 Golden Continues To Look Ridiculously Awesome

Here’s a new trailer for the Vita remake of Persona 4, which Atlus will release on November 20. Anyone buying a Vita just for this? I’d totally consider it if I didn’t have one already.

CityVille UFO Landing: Everything You Need to Know

If you’re familiar with the Whale Rescue feature in CityVille that asks you to expand out into the water surrounding your town in order to rescue lost baby whales, you’ll feel right at home with the newest event in the game: the UFO Landing. This event sees you building a UFO Landing site and then…

It Only Took Seven Months For Apple To Make Me Feel Like A Chump

On March 7, Apple announced the iPad 3. “Look how shiny it is!” Apple’s executives preached to a crowd full of cheering fans and press. “Retina display! Brand new graphics! You want one!” The pitch worked on me, and I bought one right away. Sure, it cost $600, but between the spectacular resolution, the impressive…

XCOM: Enemy Unknown‘s First DLC Takes The Alien Fight to China

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is getting something new with its Slingshot DLC: a self-contained story. Players tend to create a number of their own stories in XCOM, through customizing their squads and telling stories about what happens to them as they undertake missions. The Slingshot DLC is a little different: it comes with a specific background,…

Drop Bombs On Your Friend’s Head Using This iPhone App

What? You’ve never heard of Action Movie FX before? Oh man. It’s a simple iOS app. Point the camera at any flat surface, place a kitty on said flat surface, and record for about 5 seconds. Then watch the kitty explode from an EMP blast-damaged helicopter, or from missiles from Call of Duty: Black Ops…

Ten Comics That Will Have You Hating Goodbyes This Week

If you’re here in the Panel Discussion programming block, you might be a lapsed comics reader, trying to find a way back to the JLA Satellite. Or you might someone killing time until you pick up your weekly Wednesday pull list. Or maybe you’ve said goodbye to dozens of longboxes to embrace the promise of…

Avengers Assemble… for Free Codes for the Marvel Heroes Beta

The beta test for Gazillion’s massively multiplayer metahuman brawl launched a while back. What’s that, you say? You’ve been trying and trying but haven’t been able to get in? Well, you’ve hit the jackpot, tiger. Below are ten codes to make like a radioactive spider bite and give you the superpowers to swing into the…

Which Comics Artists Deserve More Attention?

When comics fans rattle off catalogs of great X-Men artists, there are a few names practically guaranteed to be on their lists. Jack Kirby, Neal Adams, John Byrne and Jim Lee are all givens. But me? I love Paul Smith. That’s his stuff up there. To me, he’s one of comics’ greatest unsung comics talents.…

Zynga Just Laid Off More Than 100 Game Developers During Apple’s Big iPad Event [Update]

Zynga has shut down their Boston office entirely and performed significant layoffs in their Austin office this afternoon, reports say. Boston-area game developers are reporting on Twitter that Zynga Boston has been completely shuttered today. The Boston studio, known as Conduit Labs before being acquired by Zynga in 2010, created the Indiana Jones Adventure World…

Apple Announces New, Fourth-Generation iPad With Double Graphics Power

Surprise! Apple today announced a brand new fourth-generation iPad that will be significantly more powerful than the last one. Showing off the new hardware’s specs at a press conference today, Apple’s Phil Schiller said it will have a ten-hour battery life and significantly more powerful graphics than the iPad 3, which was released in March.…

That Borderlands iOS Game Is Real. You Can Play It On October 31, For $5

Surprising no one, that Borderlands Legends iOS game will officially be a reality on Halloween. You can buy it for your iPhone for $5 or your iPad for $7. Entertainment Weekly has the first look on the mobile Borderlands shooter game that lets you control the four original vault hunters simultaneously and from a top-down…

The Strange Beauty of Killing Zombies In Horrible Ways

Halloween is on its way, and while ghosts and ghouls may have been the undead horrors of decades past, here in 2012 it’s all about the zombies and their ilk. What better way to get in the mood for spooky doom than with this weirdly lovely, thoroughly instructive image from Left 4 Dead 2? See…

Battlestar Galactica Online studio Bigpoint will no longer make games for the U.S. Cuts 120 jobs, according to GI.biz

Wow, Final Fantasy‘s Combat Really Is Based On Football

I’ve written before about how RPGs parallel football in many ways, and how the ebb and flow of an NFL game mirrors traditional turn-based combat. So it was vindicating to see this great 1UP interview with Hiroyuki Ito, a veteran game designer and one of the engineers behind many of Square’s Final Fantasy games, all…

Lara Croft looks quite pensive on the newly-revealed box art for the Tomb Raider reboot.

So. Uh. People Are Playing Games on Their Tablets. While On the Couch.

Ah, the video game console. It is the machine you use when you plop down on a couch and want to play a video game. It’s been that way for decades Console will always be the machine for gaming in the living room, right? Maybe not. Consider the tablet… In a study of 33 people…

This Is What It Looks Like When a Pikachu Explodes

This exploding Pikachu is not actually the creepiest of photographer Alan Sailer‘s explosions series. (That would be the doll head.) But it’s still plenty off-putting. Sailer is a photographer who specializes in high-speed images—in particular, high speed images of things being shot or blowing up. As he describes it, the destruction of an innocent Pokémon…

This is Role-Playing in Its Purest Form

Long before there was a Final Fantasy or an Ultima, role-playing was strictly something a group of friends did around a dining room table cluttered with pieces of paper, rulebooks and dice. Knights of Pen and Paper captures that experience beautifully. Countless games have boasted bringing the pen-and-paper role-playing experience to video games over the…