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  • The 11 craziest video game feats ever captured on video These 11 videos show people taking ordinary video games and making them truly extraordinary.

    Video games: how much do we love them? Enough to inspire us to devote a good chunk of our lives to them, at the very least. The incredible world of electronic gaming has something for everybody, from the base casual to the most hardcore multi-monitor Eve Online sock-pooper. We’re going to be talking about the upper echelon of gamers in this piece: the men and women who don’t stop at mere enjoyment and instead fight for utter mastery. These are people who squeeze every last byte out of their games, twisting them under their mental strength until they crack. These 11 videos show people taking ordinary video games and making them truly extraordinary.…

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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.

    February 7, 2018

    Under the thumb: the evolution of buttons How the buttons we press daily were formed over many decades.

    November 29, 2020

    Playing with the human side of history Games traditionally present history as monolithic spectacle, but this new breed focuses on the individual experience of simply existing alongside great events.

    May 1, 2018
  • 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!

    Super Mario Bros continues to break its own records, once again becoming the most expensive video game ever sold. Last year, an original 1985 copy of Super Mario Bros. in mint condition made news when it sold for $100,150. Then, earlier this year, an even mintier condition Super Mario Bros. copy of the 1985 hit sold for $114,000. But this Friday someone purchased a Super Mario Bros. 3 cartridge for a whopping $156,000. All the auctions were held at Heritage Auctions, which is associated with rare and expensive antiques and old collectibles (the kind grandpas collect) but is no doubt starting to appreciate digital vintage. A Heritage Auctions statement explains…

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    No, game journos, Grand Theft Auto doesn’t make you sexist False interpretations of already worthless and pseudoscientific studies. But hey — narrative.

    April 18, 2016

    17 years ago today, a wild Pikachu virus appeared! W32.Pokey.Worm was not very effective...

    June 29, 2017

    Top 10 missions in the Grand Theft Auto classics Ten of the best crimes you'll ever commit in Liberty City, Vice City, and the state of San Andreas.

    July 25, 2012
  • Why Super Mario Bros. 3 is still a masterpiece Before Mario had a World, he had the biggest stage on Earth – and played the part to perfection.

    Talking about Super Mario Bros. 3 risks devolving into a numbers game. It sold over eighteen million copies worldwide, another million on its Virtual Console re-release, who knows how many if you include pack-ins/re-releases, and still stands as one of the biggest sellers ever twenty-seven years later. Released in Japan on October 23, 1988, it wouldn’t see America till 1990 or Europe till 1991, but Super Mario Bros. 3 was always white-hot. In Nintendo’s western television advert, thousands of children chant ‘Mario, Mario, Mario’ as the camera pans back, the figures morphing into Mario’s face and then the North American continent. Such was the anticipation and profile for this 8-bit…

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    What Frostpunk could learn from real-life survival stories If you’ve idly wondered about the everyday lives of your little survivors, Ernest Shackleton’s failed Trans-Antarctic Expedition may prove a treasure chest of enrichment.

    May 18, 2018
    web-archive-commodore-amiga-games-library

    You can now play 10,000 Amiga games in your browser for free, on archive.org Take a nostalgia trip with some real retro classics.

    August 10, 2016

    How to make a good sports game Sports games are unique in that they have to accurately recreate real life. Here are the parts of a sports game that can make or break it.

    August 31, 2017
  • Mario and Sonic: a tale of two mascots Super Mario Odyssey and Sonic Mania reflect the histories of their star characters almost too well.

    This article contains minor gameplay spoilers for Super Mario Odyssey and Sonic Mania. Back in the early 1990s, two mascots bestrode the gaming world like platforming colossi. For a few years there in the 90s, before guns and car theft started to dominate public perception, these two basically symbolized the gaming industry. Nintendo’s Mario, the mustachioed patriarch who established the foundations on which all other platformers were built. Sega’s Sonic, the spiky challenger who promised to do what Nintendon’t. Spin dash ahead to the present day, where the gaming landscape is dominated by sports games and online shooters, and Mario and Sonic aren’t quite as central as they used to…

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    How ‘Untitled Goose Game’ went from meme sensation to real game House House partner Stuart Gillespie-Cook went into the company’s Slack channel in August of 2016, posted a picture of a goose and wrote “Let’s make a game about this.”

    September 20, 2019

    Video game romance: a lost cause? You can't force love, especially not when it comes to western games.

    July 27, 2012

    The rise and fall of video gaming’s most vocal enemy Over the course of 10 years, lawyer Jack Thompson aggressively pursued video games in the courtroom. This is a history of his career.

    September 15, 2015
  • Gaming’s most persistent myths and urban legends, debunked From blowing in cartridges to Lara Croft nude cheats and the secret Windows95 devil program. I’m sure you believe in at least one of these falsehoods.

    Rumors and videogames have gone hand in hand for years now. From school yard bragging about your uncle who works for Nintendo, to the almost constant leaks that seem to plague new releases. We’re all suckers for a lie or myth, and even with a healthy dose of skepticism, I’m sure you believe in one at least of these falsehoods. The Myth: Blowing in Game Cartridges Makes Them Work The Truth: We all know this one. Blowing into game cartridges was meant to clear the dust off the pins, and allow you to continue playing. In reality it was the removal of the cartridge from the console that helped. Blowing…

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    Woke at the GDC The Game Developers Conference is now about how games are to blame for every social ill — real or imagined.

    March 24, 2019

    J. B. Harold: the 20-million-selling game series you’ve never heard of With their labyrinthine plots and adult themes, the J.B. Harold games drummed up huge sales in Japan. But despite their success, they never made it to Europe.

    August 30, 2016

    You can now play XCOM in an Excel spreadsheet It’s called EXLCOM, and all you need to run it is a copy of Excel. What a time to be alive.

    December 3, 2015
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    Super Mario fetishist triggered by war—in Call of Duty According to Bob 'Moviebob' Chipman, Call of Duty may in fact have ruined the world forever.

    After the initial trailer was pummeled with YouTube dislikes harder than Ghostbusters, the new Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare commercial has almost made the game worth buying — for reasons other than the Cod 4 Remastered bundle. Watch this video on YouTube The combination of witty social commentary and a star-studded cast (Michael Phelps, Dany McBride) has garnered praise where the actual game does not. But as with everything providing a modicum of joy in this cruel world, someone got offended. Namely Bob “Moviebob” Chipman, a notorious far left movie and video game culture critic with an unhealthy obsession with Mario, who once called the 90s console war his own personal Vietnam. It's nice when CALL…

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    Why video game movies fail as adaptations What are movie makers doing wrong?

    February 27, 2017

    The secret to the success of the greatest MMO of them all Vanilla World of Warcraft fed on the blood, toil, tears and sweat of its players, testing their patience and resolve - but that was part of its magic.

    April 22, 2016

    The games that dare to sail the dark seas The humbling grandeur of the ocean: a place eternally unknowable, and indifferent to the fortunes of the seafarers it both sustains and destroys.

    June 23, 2017
  • 25 most heartbreaking moments in Nintendo history Sadness and spoilers within...

    The only time games bring a lump to your throat is when the lump is preceded by the fist of a mechsuited super-soldier. Right? Actually, no. In the following list, you’ll find some of the eye-weepiest, blow-your-nosiest moments gaming’s ever produced in Nintendo history… Super Mario Galaxy Watch this video on YouTube Rosalina’s harrowing childhood… After spending the day pinballing around the galaxy, Mario can anchor himself to Earth by visiting the Observatory’s library and listening to Rosalina’s tale of how she became mother to a brood of Lumas. The story tells of her futile search for her mother, before she finally acquiesces and becomes the astral equivalent of a…

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    Metroid Prime like you’ve never seen it before An extract from the new issue of Heterotopias.

    May 9, 2017

    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.

    August 10, 2020

    Before Old Kratos, there was PSP Kratos How Ready at Dawn humanized Kratos a decade before the recent God of War did.

    July 17, 2018
  • 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.

    In 1977 the Atari 2600 launched and along with it much of what we know today as the videogame industry. How did we get where we are today? We have surveyed our history and chosen one moment from each year that defines who and what we are today. 1977: This is your hardware, now and forever The wildly popular Atari 2600 gave us today’s modern console: a general purpose CPU, dedicated graphics and sound hardware, a standard audio/video output, generic controller I/O ports, an interface for swappable media, all powered by a wall outlet. For comparison, the battery-powered Magnavox Odyssey had neither sound nor color graphics and the Fairchild Channel…

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    Swearing at the screen: a history of rudeness in text adventures Much effort went into providing responses to inputs quite removed from an adventurer's staple activities of bashing heads and examining stuff.

    November 29, 2020

    Mario and Sonic: a tale of two mascots Super Mario Odyssey and Sonic Mania reflect the histories of their star characters almost too well.

    January 9, 2018

    Gaming’s most persistent myths and urban legends, debunked From blowing in cartridges to Lara Croft nude cheats and the secret Windows95 devil program. I’m sure you believe in at least one of these falsehoods.

    October 6, 2017

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