The Roast Of Mario Is Not Safe For Work

Click to viewWhen Bowser opens Mario’s foul-mouthed roast at Peach’s Castle with insult gags like “Mario, you beat me so often, I feel like Toad’s dick!” it can only go downhill from there. And it does. Mario’s enemies, rivals and esteemed colleagues, from Bowser to Kirby to a ‘faced Luigi, rip into the star of…

Frankenreview: Call Of Duty: Black Ops

An elite force of soldiers that operates beyond the boundaries of any law. They are shadows, waiting for the perfect time to strike. They are the assembled video game critics, and this is the Call of Duty: Black Ops Frankenreview. There’s a new Call of Duty game in stores, and regardless of what the critics…

New Dick Cheney Video Game Is Weirder Than Expected

George W. Bush has a new book out. Dick Cheney has a new video game. But the latter is not an official product and does the strangest things with its source material. The Cheney game is called CheneyStar. It is sold for download for a dollar on the Xbox 360, in the Indie Games Channel,…

Cuba Slams Call of Duty: Black Ops As ‘Perverse’ Propaganda For Sociopaths

Call of Duty: Black Ops is rubbing one nation the wrong way. Cuba’s state-run media has blasted Activision’s latest entry in the Call of Duty series as “doubly perverse” propaganda for a story arc involving former president Fidel Castro. According to a report from the AP, state-run news web site Cubadebate is slamming Black Ops,…

Leona Lewis Launches Kinect With Her Voice

The UK pop singer responsible for the English theme song to Final Fantasy XIII, Leona Lewis helped launch Kinect in England yesterday during an event at the Natural History Museum. Gameface is a photographic celebration of the people who make, play and love video games.

Why Mario Became The Star

The creator of Mario and Donkey Kong explains why the plumber was better-suited to star in so many games than the ape. A win for the little guys out there. Donkey Kong Jr. was created to solve this problem, Miyamoto tells Time’s Techland. Smaller heroes were better-suited to the 8-bit era of the Nintendo Entertainment…

You can make the argument that people are playing the game wrong, but if a user has to keep guessing on how to play it or why something isn’t working, then the design of the gameplay is flawed. No game developer should ever have to offer to fly a person in to show them how…

Madden NFL 3DS Screens

Wildlife: Forest Survival Screens

Madden NFL Football Is Game For Nintendo 3DS Launch

EA Sports is kicking off the Nintendo 3DS launch next year with a little Madden football, an off-season release that brings the NFL license into stereoscopic 3D in the palm of your hand. Electronic Arts expects Madden NFL Football (with no yearly designation) to be available at the Nintendo 3DS launch in North America, which…

More Than Two Million Felt The Need For Speed Demo

A new Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit title is bound to get some attention, but more than two million downloads of the demo in two weeks? That’s a huge number, and EA has more where that came from. Two million demo downloads in two weeks is quite impressive indeed, and I was right there with…

Review: Fighters Uncaged And The Problem With Punching Air

In the classic boxing movie Rocky II, Rocky Balboa learned to beat better fighters by chasing a chicken. As an instrument for simulating face-pummeling and rib-cracking, Fighters Uncaged — the first Kinect fighting game! — is only slightly less ridiculous. Fighters Uncaged is a fighting game played in the spacious part of your living room,…

A Visual Guide To Fighters Uncaged

The Rocky II chicken scene! Fighters Uncaged official trailer Comparison 1: The Wii does motion fighting… Wii Sports Boxing Comparison 2: The PlayStation 3 does motion fighting… The Fight Lights Out

10 must-watch movies that influenced Scott Pilgrim

In celebration of today’s Scott Pilgrim DVD/Blu-ray release, guest editor Edgar Wright is posting all day at io9. First up: his detailed list, given to io9 exclusively, of the top 10 DVDs that influenced Scott Pilgrim 1. Flash Gordon Some people seem to be down on the 1980 Flash Gordon, but personally I love it.…

The Large Hadron Collider Eats Lead

Move over protons, now there’s something meatier. Scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, Switzerland have swapped out protons for electron-stripped lead atoms. Why? To see the beginning of the universe. It only took four days for researchers working on the Large Hadron Collider project to…

Tearing the Sky – An Excerpt

The former head of the Game Developers Conference and current Electronic Arts indie headhunter just published his first science fiction novel, Tearing the Sky. “Building on their lavish extrapolation of modern discoveries and technology, the most enduring science fiction stories interactively challenge our acceptance of the status quo in our own world,” Jamil Moledina said.…

What If Every Cool Video Game Character Was In Mega Man?

When Chris Bringhurst is bored at his job at a call center in Utah, he dreams of what video game characters would look like if they were in a Mega Man game. Simpler, blockier, and often cooler. He sketched 100 of them earlier this fall and just revealed a grander 200-character collection to website PikiGeek.…

Vietnam Vet Calls Black Ops Release Timing “Tacky”

Vietnam veteran and East Kildonan, Winnipeg resident Ron Parkes is angry, and Activision is to blame. The Vietnam veteran accuses the company of purposefully releasing Call of Duty: Black Ops to coincide with Remembrance Day. For those of you in the United States, Remembrance Day is a holiday observed in Commonwealth countries that remembers the…

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood Commercial Is Creepy Good

Creepy, subtle, seemingly completely unrelated to video games, this Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood video is exactly how I like my commercials. Let’s hope the actual game lives up to them.

Minecraft The Live-Action Role-Playing Game

Any video game deserves an equally epic live-action counterpart. That’s why Gary Bigham, pro-LARPer, turned to Minecraft. “So, woke up with dookie on my face. It’s just one of those mornings when you know it’s not going to be a good day.” I know the feeling Gary, all too well. This might be the most…