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It’s alive! How the last decade of horror cinema is influencing indie games The cinematic genre's margins are violently expanding and contracting, and videogames are learning from the best examples.
The horror film, like all cinematic genres, has a dual identity. There are the things it wants to do, and then there are the things it must do. The genre history gives it focus and a set of rules: an aim to scare you (whether that’s a sudden gasp at the time or a moment of hesitation before turning off the lights later), and a set of established methods to do so (pace, shot framing, sound). The hopes and troubles of whatever era it comes from provides a less obvious framework, one that consciously or otherwise seeps into the gaps of whatever story is being told. The last decade has seen an especially rich crop of horror cinema,…
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‘Cobra Club’: an amazingly weird celebration of dick pics (NSFW) In Cobra Club you play a man stood in his bathroom taking pictures of his penis. It's deeper than you think.
Teen secretly spent $20k of mom’s savings on Twitch celebs, and the streaming giant thinks that’s just fine Twitch ignored the distraught mother and then silently deleted the evidence—or so they thought.
Why Final Fantasy 7 is (still) unstoppable 25 years since its release, the cultural phenomenon is still generating headlines.
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The lost Call of Duty mode worth saving from extinction 50,000 people used to play here. Now it's a ghost town.
For the follow-up to its genre-defining Modern Warfare trilogy, Infinity Ward needed a ‘wow’ factor. Though the developer was largely responsible for establishing Call of Duty as a blockbuster in the first place, by this point its studio heads and a big chunk of talent had left to form Respawn – so not only was there a certain degree of ‘difficult second album’ syndrome, but it felt like the studio had to prove itself all over again. The next Infinity Ward COD would not only set the tone for the new generation of consoles, PS4 and Xbox One, but it would show whether the developer still had what it takes. Call of Duty: Ghosts was…
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Development hell: 12 funny tales from game dev history There was a time when lax employment legislation meant development teams could be locked in the office overnight.
The ultimate history of fighting games Fighting games have always been around. The first one on this list landed in arcades in 1976!
Top 10 licensed songs in gaming There are times when the use of a licensed piece of music is so perfect that it elevates the gaming experience to a new level.
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Returning to Runescape, over one decade on We’re going back... back to the browser!
Back in the distant past of 2004, when Avril Lavigne was still in her heyday and Green Day made me feel like an American Idiot in spite of living on the English south coast, I started playing my first MMORPG. I was around thirteen years old, and I remember being introduced to the wonders of Runescape during a lunchtime spent quietly hidden away on a school library computer. It was a MMORPG that ran entirely in-browser, and as such could be made to work on our ancient and technologically-limited school computers. Someone in my class had been passing around a proxy server access file on a flash stick, meaning that…
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The World of Warcraft legacy server that is no more In closing Nostalrius, Blizzard finds itself the bad guy despite having the law on its side.
How No Man’s Sky generates life The game generates its universe and the many possibilities therein from a relatively small set of assets.
69 things you need to do in GTA before you die So you think you’re done with Liberty City? Think again.
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The games players love more than critics We use statistical analysis to shine some light on the divide between video game players and critics.
Believe it or not, I haven’t always been a games critic. Once upon a time I enjoyed games with nary a thought of cataloguing performance and assessing if they furthered the state of the art. There’s a difference in how you look at games once it’s your job, a shift in focus. A critic might value different things in a game than the wider audience does, and vice-versa. With the help of complex statistical analysis, we decided to shine some light on that divide. Here we’re going to look at the games that users rate more highly than critics, and see if we can tease out any interesting trends. The…
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The real reason LEGO Universe shut down: it didn’t anticipate the ‘penis cost’ The challenge of keeping a family-friendly MMO penis-free was too much for Warner Brothers.
Legendary Commodore 64 Daffy Duck game finally found, playable for first time It’s a 228KB download, which was huge for the time.
Returning to Runescape, over one decade on We’re going back... back to the browser!
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These are the most controversial games of all time, according to science We’re sitting here with a beautiful big dataset from Metacritic. It's time.
We’ve all been there, casually browsing a forum with nary a care in the world. The sun may be shining but you’re safe in a darkened room absorbing top-tier video game chat when boom – some little scrote called ‘XXb0ngsm0kA98XX’ throws a hand grenade into the room. “Bloodborne is overrated emo trash, like all of Miyazaki’s games.” And so your day, which had began so well, is now consumed by thoughts of vengeance. Yep, one of the things we fleshbags just can’t get our head around is the fact that opinions are like bumholes – everyone’s got one. Rarely are they so pronounced or hotly contested as in the video…
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The sex is the saddest thing about GTA V (NSFW) Grand Theft Auto V is an incredible, incredible video game. So why is its sex so terrible?
Mortal Kombat has kept a secret for three decades That's... a long time to keep a secret. Huh.
Mint condition Super Mario Bros. 3 cartridge breaks all records—sells for $156k Super Mario Bros is once again the most expensive video game ever sold. It's-a more money than sense!
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Sony makes the worst exclusives, according to science We downloaded over 350,000 reviews from 18,000 different games so we can rank Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony.
Unlike eBook readers, CD players, MP3 players and BluRay drives, video games consoles are in the unique position of not featuring standardized hardware. Where any cassette player would play any cassette, video games need to be tailored to the unique rendering hardware of their machines, which incentivizes hardware manufacturers to create their own first party exclusives. You buy an Xbox One over a PlayStation 4 if you want to play Gears of War more than God of War, which makes first party exclusives a vital deciding factor between similar gaming hardware. So… we’ve got a lot of data about this. But because video game fans can be silly, we’re going…
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The 30 moments that defined the video game industry From consoles to genres, from lawsuits to graphics, these are the 30 big moments that define the video game industry—from 1977 to the early 00s.
10 great adventure games everyone must try From the games we grew up with to the best modern examples of this wonderful genre.
Blizzard employee reveals demoralization & drama inside “out of touch” company in massive leak Chaos and widespread demoralization inside dev of the formerly "too big to fail" MMO World of Warcraft.
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Subnautica developer fired for retweeting conservatives The hate mob strikes again.
Subnautica developer and sound designer Simon Chylinski became the target of a social justice-driven hate mob on Twitter after he shared tweets by conservative journalist Paul Joseph Watson. Chylinski was subsequently fired by his employers at Unknown Worlds following a sustained campaign over the weekend by social justice activists on both Twitter and the ResetERA gaming forums, who called on the developer and publisher to act against him. Subnautica is an underwater survival game filled with eerie noises and a haunting soundtrack, for which Chylinski is responsible. Over the weekend, the outrage crowd discovered an old set of tweets by game director Charlie Cleveland, who set up a poll in…
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I played No Man’s Sky with an astronomer to separate its science fiction from facts An infinite gaming world, but is any of it based on scientific fact? We sat down with one of the world's leading astronomers to put No Man's Sky under the intergalactic microscope.
Catacombs: the inside story of Square Enix’ canceled shooter It’s always a great shame when a game is cancelled, but much more so when a genuine original is lost.
The making of Until Dawn The story behind one of the best horror games of recent times.
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Atari founder Nolan Bushnell loses game industry award following feminist outcry Atari founder and the father of video games, Nolan Bushnell, was set to receive an award at this year’s Game Developers Conference until a group of feminists cried foul.
GDC selected three individuals for their “Pioneer Award,” including indie game developer Rami Ismail, Psychonauts creator and Double Fine Studios boss Tim Schaefer, and Atari founder Nolan Bushnell. The inclusion of Bushnell, who is widely credited for his contributions to the video game boom, was first met with applause, until feminists raised their ire against him over an excerpt from a 2012 Playboy article that described Atari’s frat-like working environment. “It was a wild environment,” he recalls wistfully. “It was post–flower revolution, women’s liberation, no AIDS yet and lots of company romances.” The engineers began code-naming their projects after women — including Darlene, a beloved employee who, according to Bushnell,…
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The ultimate history of fighting games Fighting games have always been around. The first one on this list landed in arcades in 1976!
80 years before X-COM, H.G. Wells designed ‘Little Wars’ H.G. Wells' contributions to modern pop culture can hardly be overestimated, and even video games haven't escaped it.
Before Old Kratos, there was PSP Kratos How Ready at Dawn humanized Kratos a decade before the recent God of War did.
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Twitch forces black streamer to submit DNA analysis over african cooking show Another race flap is the last thing Twitch needs right now.
Streaming giant Twitch has caused outrage after banning an African-American girl for her Africa-themed cooking show and seeming to accuse her of being a white cultural appropriator. The girl – youtuber Brittany Venti – was then forced into the humiliating position of having to submit an actual DNA analysis to prove her descent, shocking Twitch Support screenshots reveal. “This is insanity,” Brittany shared on Twitter. “I can’t even talk about my own race on Twitch, I get told I’m not my own race and I can’t have a cooking stream based on REAL African and Haitian food that is WELL known and DOCUMENTED.” “I got banned for having an African…
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You’ll never be able to afford these top gaming battlestations MOM! BATHROOM!
Former WoW Team Leader: “This won’t stop. WoW gamers are leaving for good. “ Mark 'Grummz' Kern acknowledges explosive leak and writes about failures of AAA culture and why World of Warcraft is dying.
The history of Wing Commander Wing Commander’s paved the way to the modern video game industry, and its design continues to influence game development to the present day.
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Five standalone ‘sidequels’ that are far better than their main series The bitesize masterpieces that edge out their main series counterparts.
An ever-more-common style of game is the standalone ‘sidequel’. An experience that, while not quite enough of a leap forward to be thought of as a fully-fledged sequel, still keeps the fans happy that year and can be sold separately. It’s easy to see why they prove to be a tempting prospect. Built in the same engine, reusing certain assets, and released separately from their base game, these standalone sidequels have obvious attractions for the industry. The surprising thing is that, increasingly often, they can outperform their bloated inspirations. They’re often more focused, and don’t feel the need to add interminable filler. They respect players’ time a lot more and, better…
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Nintendo needs to wake up and realize it’s a video game company The biggest problem Nintendo has is understanding that the internet exists, and there are many useful things on it that could help it out.
Rise of the oversensitive gamer Easily offensive? Or easily offended?
The game journo echo chamber: suppressing dissent and vilifying gamers Apart from a few comments sections, gamers are often defenseless to the torrent of accusations against them by ivory tower weirdos.
