Every Single Article Written by N - All 1343
Facebook Allows Parents And Gamers To Debate Violence For The First Time
C’mon, Couric.
Is it 1993? Because on a recent episode of Katie Couric’s talk show, the once mighty journalist made a baffling, one-sided argument tying violent crime to video games. I fully expected a Mortal Kombat or Doom reference to pop up. No, it’s 2013 and these times allow concerned parents, who are naive about the operation of video games and probably still need three more friends to help them out in FarmVille, to discuss the issue in the same forum as agitated video game players who are frustrated that media like this still exists. It’s weird and amazing.
‘Strip Search’ Recap: Season 1, Episode 19 “Elimination #6”
An epic battle ensues!
And then there were six. After two months and nearly twenty episodes, our artistic castaways are now half. This week, it’s Erika v. Abby in the Thunderdome! Is it perhaps the best Elimination episode, yet?
‘Shadow Of The Eternals’ Is A Spiritual Successor To ‘Eternal Darkness’, IGN Reveals Cheesily
Yeah, that looks like something from Eternal Darkness, all right.
First off, it’s really kinda cheesy how IGN is presenting this. Sure, I remember the old days of PC Gamer where the back page would hint at some great exclusive coming the following month, but releasing an exclusive teaser trailer for Shadows of the Eternals on Friday and promising the goods on Monday is straight out of the marketing farm, not the journalism den. At any rate, this proposed ‘inspired by’ from Precursor Games, whom I assume are a lot of former Silicon Knights employees based on their Too Human-inspired logo. The thing is, with how badly that company went down the drain, should we be excited that Denis Dyack is still on board?
The Stinky Footboard For PC Gamers Is Real; Wait, What?
It doesn’t look very stinky?
One of the coolest aspects of PC gaming is that you can kinda do anything you want on the platform. Before games got mouselook working proper, a joystick was still a fixture on three desks in my house. Take crazy peripherals and add in some crowd-funding and what do you get? Something like the Stinky Footboard, of course.
Is The ‘Aliens: Colonial Marines’ Lawsuit Against Gearbox “Frivolous”? Yep.
The game was a disaster, I don’t need to defend it.
In case you haven’t heard, Gearbox and Sega are being sued by a disheartened fan that believes that early footage of Aliens: Colonial Marines was misleading. Yesterday, Gearbox stepped out to say that the lawsuit was “frivolous”. I don’t need to defend Gearbox or their game, but they’re absolutely right; a Gearbox loss in this case could establish some pretty terrible legal precedent for the gaming industry. Read the rest of this article…
StarDrive (PC) Review: Swing And A Galactic Miss
The few moments where StarDrive shines, it really shines.
When I was in college, I took the few dollars I had to take a tram down to Denver’s 16th Street Mall and buy Master of Orion 3. It had been a decade since the original game released and my thirst for a suitable replacement for the game that started it all had not been quenched by its dull-looking, detail-oriented sequel. I took that rusty-colored box home and I struggled with it for hours. Unlike its predecessors, MOO3‘s learning curve was unforgiving and I blamed myself for “not getting it”. But one only needs to keep “not getting it” so many times before it’s obviously a game issue. As I mentioned in my review for the bland Endless Space last year, developers are trying to pay tribute to the genre by making games that try way too hard to cram in as many details as possible and, minus the budget, lack the showmanship to compensate for it. This has lead to the continuing march of space-based 4X games that appeal to the hardest of core and totally ignore the approachable charm that made this genre so great. Sadly, StarDrive is the latest link to this terrible chain.
How Much Does GOG/Steam Take From Game Sales?
How much money does Phil Fish get when you buy Fez? It’s something like $.30 on every dollar. But…
With the recent release of 2D/3D platformer Fez on GOG and Steam, creator Phil Fish is telling you to not buy it on GOG or Steam. Wait. Hang on. Instead, he wants you to buy it directly from his site via the Humble Store. Why? What is this madness? Royalties, man. But how do his numbers stack up?
Ten Years Ago, iTunes Changed My Life
Before it made things complicated, iTunes made things simple.
Don’t you remember owning music? Not in the legal sense, as Record Industry v. America proved, but in the Pokemon-ish “collect them all” style of ownership. Buying CDs and recording tracks off the radio to your cassette player, that’s what I’m getting at. The first piece of music I ever owned – “owned” being a poor word for it, more like “acquired” – was a bad rip of John Williams’ “Duel of the Fates” from The Phantom Menace that I spent forty-five minutes downloading over a dial-up connection. A year later, the first CD I ever bought was Moby’s Play, probably his last listenable album. Between Napster and the occasional CD purchase, building a local collection of music was pretty great until, y’know, your hard drive failed.
Why Would A Gaming League Steal Your Computer’s Power For Bitcoins?
Bitcoin mining is an expensive proposition, unless you’re using someone else’s equipment to do it.
If you want a slice of the Bitcoin pie, you’ll either have to shell out cash or invest a lot of electricity into your computer’s number-crunching capabilities to mine them from the digital ether. As Kelly explained on a recent PRO SHO, the result of his 24-hour, 100% CPU/100% GPU blast was a whopping seven cents, a fraction of the amount needed to power his computer for that long. So what happens when you’ve got access to 14,000 high-powered gaming computers? Well, you can do a lot more than that, about $3,300 worth.
Peter Molyneux’s ‘Curiosity’ Finally Winding Down, Its “Life-Changing” Secret Soon Revealed
It’s a lot smaller than this now.
While it was really only designed for some temporary pleasure – about six months’ worth – 22 Cans’ Curiosity won my heart. Sure, tapping on bricks, a lot of bricks, is kinda boring and actually a pain on smaller screens, but ultimately millions of people downloaded it and tapped away layer after layer, hoping to be the one to have access to its deep secret.
