The Complete Kinect Round-Up

Kinect game reviews, good and bad. Kinect stress tests. Kinect photographed near a can of beans. A video diary of nine days with Kinect. A tale of two re-arranged living rooms It’s all here in our definitive Kinect article round-up. What We Loved, What We Hated About the Xbox 360 Kinect Microsoft calls it a…

What Are You Playing This Weekend?

This weekend, liquefied guts will be all over my television screen as I spend a little more time with Fist of the North Star: Ken’s Rage for the PlayStation 3. What about your gaming plans for the weekend? After throwing exactly one zillion punches, I plan to do a little shadow boxing of my own,…

The Daily Show Solves The Problem Of Violent Games And Children

Is the solution to children playing violent video games bundling Family Game Night with a machine gun, a nine-person shooter, or replacing Niko Bellic with American public radio personality Ira Glass? Watch out: He’ll shoot your penis off. The Supreme Court hearing regarding California’s violent video game law began this week, and The Daily Show…

To-Do In New York: Mario Party 25 At The Nintendo Store

The Nintendo World Store (and former Pokemon Center) hosts a grand-re-opening on Sunday — several days after re-opening — in New York City. They’re having a 25th anniversary party for Super Mario Bros., with the promise of Super Mario cake. Cake. Mario games. Someone in a Mario suit. Surely, Mario gets more of a party…

Will Kinect’s “Thousand Points of Light” Interfere With the Wii’s Remote?

Let’s say for some odd reason you want to have both your Xbox 360 Kinect on and your Wii? Why? I haven’t a clue, but if you did, would the two systems, which both use infrared, interfere with one another? I tried playing Rally Ball with the activated Wii Remote in my hand and had…

When A Man Turns 60

Chris Crawford, whose lifelong dream has been to master the creation of interactive storytelling, turned 60 in late June. He moved the final red bead, the ones marking each day of his sixth decade, to the jar on the left. In a sobering late June post I saw yesterday as it wound its way through…

How Video Game Graphics Sped Up Chemistry

Video gamers’ desire for more realistic graphics has produced more than just flashy new games; just ask a computational chemist. Theoretical chemistry involves using the principles of physics to explain and predict chemical reactivities. Computational chemistry takes the results of theoretical chemistry and pipes them through computer programs in order to calculate the properties and…

How Video Games Changed Our Science Fiction Fantasy

Roger Ebert has said that video games cannot be art. Similar judgments have been made over the decades and centuries about novels, plays, movies, television, comic books, and of course science fiction. Now, videogames are up in front of the Supreme Court. Once again a new and innovative form of art and entertainment is being…

Super Mario Bros. All-Stars Packaging

James Bond 007: Blood Stone Visual Guide

The introductory movie for James Bond 007: Blood Stone nails the look and feel of the modern Bond universe, the game’s greatest accomplishment. Real world Joss Stone versus her in-game counterpart Hunter. One of Blood Stone’s major locations, unofficially, is the Uncanny Valley. James Bond is not afraid to shoot dozens of people in the…

Call of Duty Launch

A Video Game That Dares To Make Americans Angry

I have little animosity for the virtual people I shoot in video games. They are cardboard targets. The worst they can do is kill the virtual me. My “death” lasts a few seconds. I can’t hate them for that. This changed last week. I played the beginning of the upcoming first-person shooter Homefront and I…

Where Call Of Duty: Black Ops Rides At Midnight

Will you be playing Call of Duty: Black Ops Monday night at midnight or Tuesday morning? Best Buy and GameStop detail plans for a massive number of midnight openings for Activision’s latest and potentially greatest. the release of a new Call of Duty titles is more than enough reason for gamers to stay up late…

Call of Duty: Black Ops Gets Its Own Pro Gaming Glasses

When Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 hit last year it arrived in stores escorted by a virtual phallanx of tie-ins of varying quality. There were the controllers, the controller faceplates, the throat mic. Some were good, some were bad. We all rolled our eyes at the marketing and moved alone. This year Call of…

A Look At The Old Republic’s Player-Versus-Player Warzones

Republic and Imperial forces clash on the world of Alderaan over control of the planet’s massive planetary defense cannon in this first detailed look at organized player-versus-player in BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic. We’ve seen plenty of cooperative multiplayer footage from The Old Republic, but the core of the story is the conflict between…

A More Mature Mario Party

Good friends, a little beer, some smokes, and a whole lot of Mario Kart DS, as seen on Frantisek Fuka’s Flickr page Gameface is a photographic celebration of the people who make, play and love video games.

“Questing” and Hero Creation in The Sims Medieval

I was a little disappointed to learn that The Sims Medieval is essentially The Sims gone… medieval. I guess I should have suspected that, but trailers like this don’t help. It makes you think it’s got a little RPG or action in the game. From what I saw at Gamescom, it really doesn’t.

Sonic the Hedgehog 4 Needed A Little Jazz Scat

I didn’t realize how much “Do Wop Dow” Sonic the Hedgehog 4: episode 1’s music was missing until I listened to Marc Gordon’s jazz scat remix of the game’s soundtrack. It might even be more “Do Wop Dow” than you can handle. Gordon, better known in ROM hacking circles as Cinossu, takes Sonic the Hedgehog…

Jimmy Fallon Pulls A Kinect Oprah

Xbox 360 Kinect’s third appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon features Microsoft’s Kudo Tsunoda without sunglasses, the Vampire Diaries’ Nina Dobrev playing Dance Central, and ends with everybody in the audience scoring a Kinect bundle. Kinect first appeared on Fallon’s show last year as Project Natal, where it performed admirably. It’s second appearance back…

Xbox 360 Kinect Stress Test, Technology Vs. Dogs, Darkness, Disguises

The Xbox 360 Kinect can be confused by large dogs and wildly flailing children. Those are two stress tests that Microsoft’s controller-free add-on failed in a series of trials involving lighting, human and dog distraction, rubber masks and voice confusion. The audio and vocal tests returned mixed results, but everything else we threw at the…