I've tried to be fair to the concept of free-to-play games, which you see a lot of in mobile gaming. Yes, it all seems a bit cynical—it trades a single price for a potentially unlimited revenue stream, but there's nothing necessarily illegal or unethical about that. It does depend on making some substantive portion of…
If you never saw Crazy People, a 1990 film starring Dudley Moore, I highly recommend it. Basically, an advertising agency is taken over by the insane, who decide that honesty—the anathema of marketing—is now the best policy. Volvos are sold as "boxy, but they're good." Another stunt offers "a free plant for fat…
It's funny when anyone on the Internet flips out, but no one does it better than the video gamer. When the issue involves someone not getting what they want, when they want it, at the price they want it—and you yourself don't want it—it's entertaining as hell watching someone break into a Rumplestiltskenian fit on the…
Console failures don't just happen to the little people. No, they happen to gaming industry professionals, too, and we're happy to report they don't get a customer service batphone and valet replacement service just because they happen to work for a major publisher, as "Frank" does here. He gets to suffer through the…
Helplessly watching this sweating man thrust all of his body weight into my bedroom wall, grunting over the whine of the drill, I realized I was seeing and participating in the perfect metaphor for my attempts to connect my Xbox 360 to the Internet in my new home.
Tuesday afternoon I got the Internet connected in my new home. From Wednesday morning until Thursday afternoon, my PlayStation 3 was downloading every free title due to me as a PlayStation Plus subscriber. Since I moved, that console has literally spent more time acquiring games than I will likely spend playing them,…
In about a week I'll move into a new home. My mother's giving me an antique pine cabinet which she says is perfect to support my TV and house all my video game equipment. When I get home my best friend and I will carry over this antique. Then I'll drill a huge hole right hrough the back of it.
The major controversies, disappointments and outrages of the preceding week all seemed to share one trait: They contained some eye-rolling levels of double-speak and ulterior meanings.
This past weekend, readers alerted us to an absolutely contemptible ripoff on the iTunes App Store. Someone had submitted a straight-up copy of the Canabalt flash game, called it Canabalt HD—which doesn't exist on the iOS. Once again, some unscrupulous dick managed to slide Adam Saltsman's game past Apple's mall…
It's easy to sit back and scoff at "review bombing," as we saw last week when Blizzard released a broken Diablo III. Flooding Amazon to give zero stars to something others have called a perfect 10, sure, that's not a legitimate review. And people staging a sit-in aren't there to legitimately patronize a public…
If the folks behind Kane & Lynch 2 should be sued, they should be sued for something other than the "vicious vilifying" of the Chinese people. And they should be sued for a lot more than $1,585 dollars U.S. That figure would represent no more than 27 copies of the title sold at full retail price here, and I'm certain…
When you face low expectations, falling short of them doesn't count for much either. And that's the dirty secret of Call of Duty, which has spent four years solidifying its image as a crass chickenhawk brand thanks to some particularly dumb marketing initiatives. But hiring Lt. Col. Oliver North as a spokesman for …
Two weeks ago, a million-dollar contest supplied an interesting prism through which to view the reactions to different people's failure to accomplish the same thing in a video game.
When a game gets as many things right as Trials Evolution, it's all the more noticeable when it gets something wrong. And man, this game's soundtrack is all wrong.
Dusting off some old friends on the original Xbox I was given back in January reacquainted me with several happy memories—and the two worst features in the history of console video gaming controllers: The black and white buttons.
There I stood, before the Greybeards, ready to learn the truth of my existence as a Dragonborn. Einarth stared down at the floor, and thus spake "Ro." Strange runes glowed upon the stones at my feet.
See that guy up there at right? That's "Bogeyman," my DC Universe Online homage to the Hobgoblin as created by Roger Stern and John Romita, Sr. back in 1983. I'm damn proud of him, but I can't tell if his colors match, or can even be called "orange" and "blue."
Oh, great. April Fool's is on Sunday. This is the worst day, the absolute worst, in video gaming.
The self-publishing capability of the Internet and the concept of viral spread has definitely made this holiday more hazardous for credulous reader and skeptical newsman alike over the past 12 years. But video gaming, as…
It's hard for me to look at the news of the preceding 10 or so days and not feel like there's been some enormous, possibly irreparable rupture between gamers and those who serve them. I certainly contributed to this with a post about the ending of Mass Effect 3 and the movement to have it changed or appended.
I…
Let's stop giving a shit what Roger Ebert says about video games, and art, OK? We've tried like hell to make him into a punching bag, and neither he nor the rest of America gives a crap for the fact we choose to feel so insulted every time he says something about video games.
