After LucasArts' brilliant 1993 game Day of the Tentacle, cartoon-style point-and-click adventure games slowly became their own sub-genre. Although the genre has had its ups and downs, these games are still around: Think Gemini Rue or the new Broken Sword.

Wizards of the Coast has turned Magic: The Gathering — Duels of the Planeswalkers into geek Madden, each year releasing a fresh set of cards, formulating new challenges, and unleashing them upon a card-collecting public that never stops wanting more. This year's entry reaches a little further than 2013's iOS, PC,…

Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition is pouring on the fan service with this week's release of Skin Pack 4—providing delightfully low-res interpretations of Claptrap from Borderlands, Klei's Mark of the Ninja and The Behemoth's Castle Crashers, plus a whole lot more.

My two-year-old daughter doesn't think of stars as huge bodies of flaming gas millions of miles away. She thinks of them as little five-pointed symbols that live inside books and on top of Christmas trees. In similar fashion, she knows that there's a moon in the sky but also thinks the glowing circles formed by domed…

You don't realize just how good a gaming year it's been until you look back at all of the games you actually played. From physics puzzlers to ninja simulators, 2012's library was full of interesting, creative, unique experiences.

The original version of Karateka launched on an Apple II two decades ago and helped show that video game design could deliver idiosyncratic, narrative experiences. Back then, both Apple and video games were in their toddler stage, stumbling around trying to figure out what they could do.

PlayStation gamers, Bethesda swears it's not ignoring you.

Let me break it down for you: 12 years of Catholic school. Powder-blue communion suit. Did the Stations of the Cross ON MY KNEES for multiple years. Childhood best friend was an altar boy. (He's fine. Nothing ever happened. Thanks for asking.) I say all this to establish that I know all about nuns. Nuns have paddled…

Army, Navy, Air Force, I haven't played with or against a service academy in years in NCAA Football. This year, the game added parachutists to deliver the ball to the 50-yard line at Michie Stadium—and I'm told play-by-play man Brad Nessler now pronounces Michie Stadium correctly (it's MIKE-ey, not "Mitchie"). All…

Take the bubble-bursting puzzle gameplay of the popular Bust-a-Move series, turn it on its side and toss in some magical spells and memory matching puzzles and sharp cartoon visuals and you've got Supermagical, an award-winning iOS game from Super Awesome Hyper Dimensional Mega Team, a developer with an obvious…

So, maybe Marvel's console game portfolio is a collection of hits and misses. But Avengers Initiative sure makes it seem like the House of Ideas wants their portable releases to be a different story.

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 digital…

Elation, sadness, calm, rage and confusion; these are the tools Mush uses to propel its puffball protagonist through colorful platform puzzle-worlds. Strange that all I feel while playing this award-winning Windows Phone 7 game is joy.

It's impossible to miss the huge amount of Disney love that Warren Spector brings to bear on the Epic Mickey games. The celebrated game designer has been talking about how much he cherishes the world Walt Disney engineered ever since the run-up to the first Epic Mickey game. But this year he did more than talk.

My worst year on earth may well have been 2005. I had gone from a blood-and-guts newspaper writer to headcount hire sitting in a cubicle with nothing to do for weeks on end. I'd once been the coolest guy at the cocktail party, now I was just another stiff with a badge around his neck in the cafeteria. I'd moved from a…

The nominees for the 2012 Game Developers Choice awards have been announced. The awards, which will be held at March's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, are one (if not the) most prestigious awards ceremonies in gaming. They occur the same night and location as the Independent Games Festival (IGF) awards.

When Ocarina of Time was released, the next game in the series re-used its art design. When Wind Waker was released, it spawned a number of handheld and multiplayer games borrowing its cel-shaded look.

As a gamer that regularly reviews big titles and otherwise has the means to procure his own video game entertainment, it isn't often I get to experience the joy of a thoughtful video game related gift. Instead, I give things to my family and live vicariously through them. What did they get this year?