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Moneysaver of Honor: Dealbuyer
Microsoft seems to be having success bundling up full price releases with $20 worth of funny money on Xbox Live, so they’re doing that again this week with Medal of Honor: Warfighter. In other news, recent, solid releases like Borderlands 2, Sleeping Dogs and Darksiders 2 can all be found for less than full price.…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
The Best of Kotaku, This Week
Welcome to the Best of Kotaku, where I round up all of this week’s best content. This week’s best image is a mashup of Adventure Time with Yoshi’s Island, by Classy Raptor. I particularly like it because I can totally see Jake molding himself into Yoshi to take Finn on adventures. Classy Raptor indeed. Moving…
By Tina Amini - Uncategorized
Get Three Credit Hours Toward Your Degree Playing Skyrim Next Semester
The English department at Rice University, to my knowledge the only American university established by the murder of its benefactor (true story, actually) will next semester offer “Scandinavian Fantasy Worlds: Old Norse Sagas and Skyrim.” That’s right. You get to play Skyrim for college credit. If you’re enrolled at Rice, which is a rather selective…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Video Games’ First Spoken Words Still Sound Good Today
When it released in 1980, computer voice compression cost around $1,000 per word. Berzerk spoke about 20, and it was a sensation. Gorf and later Wizard of Wor likewise used speech synthesis to heckle players. We’ve come a long way since those dark ages, as this roundup of 50 early attempts at voice synthesis, compiled…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Backhanded Box Quotes: BFG is a POS.
Welcome back to “Backhanded Box Quotes,” a collection of measured, thoughtful criticism from the user reviews of Metacritic and elsewhere. Doom? James Bond? Dragon Ball Z? Big names, big deal. With critic scores inflated like your typical Ivy League comparative lit final, we’ve got to go to the vox populi to get the real word…
By Owen Good -
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Their Studio Gave them an Amusement Park Ticket—and Then a Pink Slip
How would you like to be fired? Do you want to go out in a take-this-job-and-shove-it blaze of glory? Would you like security to martyr you, marching you out by the elbows, as you clutched your box of things like Richard Gere carrying off Debra Winger? Would you just want the chance to look into…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
Two Years Later, Sleep Researchers Now Say Gaming Before Bed Is Bad
Two years ago, sleep researchers at Flinders University of Australia found that playing video games before bed was indistinct from watching a movie, in terms of the good night’s rest a teenager would have after either. This week researchers at the same university said that “prolonged gaming” before bed is disruptive to that longtime childhood…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
He Raised $25,000 To Make A Game. Then All His Programmers Quit.
2012 in gaming may well be remembered as the year of the Kickstarter. Crowdfunding, in all its forms, took off into the stratosphere with the DoubleFine drive back in February, and has just kept going since. Many gaming projects have been successfully funded, from little $5000 art and experimental games to multi-million dollar juggernauts like…
By Kate Cox - Esports
Today is the 40th Anniversary of the World’s First Known Video Gaming Tournament
In October 1972, video games were still mostly an after-hours pastime in corporate or university laboratories. Pong had been installed only one month earlier at a Sunnyvale bar called Andy Capp’s Tavern (today a comedy club.) Forty years ago today, just up U.S. 101, on Stanford’s campus, computer science students saw this flyer tacked to…
By Owen Good - Uncategorized
There’s Just Too Much Beauty in The Week in Gaming Apps
Sometimes there’s so much beauty in Google Play, iTunes and the Windows Phone Marketplace I feel I can’t take it; like my heart’s going to cave in. That’s my completely original explanation for why I did three of our Gaming App of the Day entries this week. I might have done five, but Ashcraft loves…
By Mike Fahey -
UncategorizedThese Former Big-Budget Shooter Devs are Overjoyed to Bring You the $.99 Twist Pilot
Steve Ellis is responsible for the beloved multiplayer aspect of Rare’s classic Nintendo 64 shooter Goldeneye 007, and was a founder of Free Radical Design, the studio behind the TimeSplitters franchise. Martin Wakeley was a designer and producer at Rare, creating beloved titles like Blast Corps and Jet Force Gemini before joining Ellis at Free…
By Mike Fahey -
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EA: Social Games Aren’t Dying, But Consumers ‘Won’t Pay for Crap’
With player numbers dropping and the recent revelation that 85 percent stop playing after the first day, a shadow hangs over the once ridiculously profitable social gaming scene. Speaking today at App Conference in San Jose, Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello said that the decline of social gaming is overplayed; it’s not dying, it’s evolving.…
By Mike Fahey
