It’s 1977. I’m 12 years old. It’s a gorgeous Northern BC summer day, one of those glorious fleeting perfect days that are all the sweeter in the frozen north, because the memories of mud and slush barely fade before the leaves have already begun to turn again. Utterly pure blue sky, sun warm on the skin, grass a deep impatient green, a light breeze off the lake that is so invigoratingly packed with oxygen and piney perfume it might as well be cocaine. I’m playing third base, it’s what we’d call little league if we called it that in Canada back then, I’m just beginning to feel the awkwardness of adolescence, but the sheer pleasure of being alive and standing on that dirt under that gigantic bowl of sky on that day is more than enough to let me ignore my self-consciousness. I’m a big, strong kid, and even if I’m more bookworm than jock, I enjoy sports.

We return after holidays, work, and the inevitable technical breakdowns, but we persevere to bring you another podcast! This week, we discuss the impossible: Minecraft goes 1.0, the unfortunate: GSC Game Studios and GamePro fold, and the stupid: EA continues their über-ban policy, parents name their kid after a character in Skyrim, Telltale gets caught [...]

Making video game characters with whom I can fall in love takes a cocktail of hard work, genius, luck and Jennifer Hale. It turns out that making video game characters I can hate takes practically no effort at all. In this short series of articles a small collection of pixels, logic and random events will [...]

“Dry land is not just our destination, it is our destiny!” So sayeth Deacon and so sayeth our Hero, the ever optimistic Captain Blockypants Reynolds (or just Cap’n Mal for short). Hello and welcome to this introductory episode of Minecraft Waterworld on Hardcore Mode! Setting:  Our hapless hero has [landed, been banished, is stuck in [...]

As is apropos on this Veteran’s Day, we spend most of this week’s podcast discussing the latest in modern military shooters, starting with our review of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. I ramble for a bit about what I’d like to see in a modern military shooter game, and why the “vision video” concept [...]

After a long absence, we have returned! Work and life may interfere, but nothing will stop us from nattering inanely into your earholes about beer! And games! Always with games. After reviewing what we’ve been doing while we’ve been away, we dive right into the news with descriptions of the new Portal 2 Puzzle Creator, [...]

And once again, we return to you belatedly and with sadness in our hearts. Real life stupidly keeps on intruding into our efforts to bring you our particular brand of meaningless babble, and so here we are. This week, we cover such late-breaking news as Ubisoft removing the DRM from From Dust, freeing us to [...]

For reasons that are entirely unknown at this juncture, the podcast is going up a day late. Still, after enjoying the last blast of vacation before the end of summer, we’ve got a decent amount of news, both good and bad, to share with you today. The full majesty of EA’s idiotic plans with Battlefield [...]

The 36 Stratagems is a Chinese essay, derived from various written and oral accounts, offering Machiavellian advice in the realm of warfare and politics. The stratagems are presented as parables, making them flexible enough to apply to modern situations such as business, education, or… killing zombies. To that end, I present The 36 Stratagems of [...]

We’re back from vacation this week, and as a consequence, we’re a little…loopy, and not just from our customary alcoholic beverages. Many tangents are had, odd routes followed, and a higher-than-average amount of movie references made, especially for an episode where so much actual news is imparted. Defense of the Ancients 2 will be revealed [...]

We’re still a little tuckered out after last week’s rage-fueled barreling beast of a podcast, so this week, we decided that there wouldn’t be anything important announced. A fearful gaming industry obliged, and so we present to you a much more low-key, some would almost say sedate podcast. We do follow-up on the horrible, awful [...]

I, personally, choose to believe that we are all capable of being decent human beings at any time, and that corporations which are smart enough to make a serious impact on the world around us are also smart enough to not intentionally sabotage their own efforts, products, or customers. I also realize that people are [...]

Finally, we have good news to bring you, fair listeners! There’s the obvious announcements of Team Fortress 2 going free-to-play and the Supreme Court ruling video games as protected speech, but other, more subtle things, like LA Noire being announced for the PC and possibly the end of wireless bandwidth limitations. It can’t all be [...]

I will never forget the first time I started up NBA2K11. It began with a brief recap of the formidable career of Michael Jordan, arguably the greatest basketball player of all time, and then all of a sudden I found myself standing behind the man himself, in the tunnel of some cavernous basketball arena. “Are [...]

Well, today’s podcast would have come online earlier today, but due to a bewildering array of extenuating circumstances, it’s going up late. My frustrating day certainly matches the tone of the news we have for this week, what with EA deciding to retake their Asshole Crown and the gamer bitchfest about every decision made by [...]

Well, E3 has come and gone, and has brought mostly a load of uncertainty and disappointment along with it. We find a few gems worth highlighting in the coverage, and cover some non-E3 related gaming news as well, including the announcement of a Blackwater tactical shooter (yes, the PMC), Lulzsec proves beyond a shadow of [...]

TheMadJuggler slaves over his keyboard, trying to figure out how to transliterate a Boomer’s gastric juices. THEMADJUGGLER: Blurgle? Glurgle? Mlurgle? Enter Hypothetical Character With Whom to Dialogue, dressed in nondescript blue jeans and nondescript-er white tee. HCWWTD: Whatcha doin’ Juggler? Is that a new blog post? THEMADJUGGLER: Well yeah, I’m starting a feature about Left [...]

With E3 still a week away, and the PSN fiasco finally winding down, what news scraps are there left for poor amateur podcasters like us feed on? How about an announcement for a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game? Minecraft coming to Android and iOS? Kotaku showing some of that ol’ backbone that we used [...]

I love driving games. Even though I drive extremely conservatively in real life–and wouldn’t have it any other way–I really let loose with my inner aggressive driver with various video games. Codemasters games are amongst my favorites. I got introduced to the company through GRID (where’s the sequel dammit??), then DiRT 2 and now the [...]

We return, yet again, from the brink of work! This week, we bring you the not-so-triumphant return of Hellgate: London, Duke Nukem Forever and Playstation Network, news on the forthcoming lack of news at E3 2011, Modern Warfare 3‘s story will be even dumber than you think, a bit of positive news on Minecraft, asshole [...]

You’re welcome. I’ve been playing through The Witcher 2, a lavish action-RPG, and it is all kinds of fantastic. But there is one huge issue with the game that everyone brings up: the difficulty curve is completely inverted. The toughest fights in the game are in the prologue, and by the end you can slice [...]

It seems like game developers and publishers tend to take a few different strategies with how they release and support their games. This can be for any number of reasons, like meeting a release date, reaching specific sales numbers, and experimenting with sales models. Let’s take a look at what works and what doesn’t. Some [...]

We do strive to maintain a degree of optimism and positivity in our message and tone here at the Full Glass Empty Clip Podcast, but Goddamn, it gets hard sometimes. We enter the fourth week of the Playstation Network shutdown and discuss what that means for Sony and their partners with PSN (Hint: bad things), [...]

This is Part 3 in an ongoing series about my 53-year-old mother’s attempts to play video games. Part 1 can be found here, and all other entries can be found by clicking the “Your Mom” tag, to the left. I chose Super Smash Bros Brawl as one of the games for her to play, because [...]

This is the story of three cynical, greedy gaming cashgrabs. It is a story of bad design decisions, terrible PR and expectation management, treating customers with contempt, and ample lashings of just plain stupidity. In it, we learn what not to do, how not to do it, and we lose faith in at least one [...]

So, there was a thing! PSN got hacked and now we’ve all been sold wholesale to Estonian hackers to work in their gold farms or whatever. Also, Nintendo confirmed that the Wii 2 is actually a thing, which conveniently distracted everyone from the massive hit their year-over-year earnings took. We take a solid half-hour to [...]

So, you might have heard about this game that came out this week, Portal 2. We wish we could blame all of our tardiness on that, but really, it was the foul invasion of Real Life into our little bacchanalian world of beer and gaming that caused the delay. However, we have Podcast for you [...]

The Devil Tesla’s post about Duke Nukem Forever started me thinking about how people have been reacting to the various announcements about the game. I started wondering what exactly the reaction would be if the game let you choose between having men, women, or both as the objectified characters. I realize that this is very [...]

Hello! We have another show for you today, as is our wont. As the gaming industry has seen fit to try to starve poor us out of a podcast (starve, I say!), we have had to search long, hard and deep for today’s news. But we have triumphed! The fruits of our labor include Minecraft [...]

It is extremely weird to say something like “we welcome feminist anger,” but Randy Pitchford of Gearbox Software, the developers who are finally going to finish Duke Nukem Forever, said exactly that. He claims that if some kind of humanitarian organization uses Duke to further their cause, he’s all for it. That leads to the [...]

This is part 2 in an ongoing series about my 53-year-old mother’s attempts to play video games. Part 1 can be found here. After Portal, I decided to have my mom play Final Fantasy X. I chose this particular Final Fantasy game because it is entirely turn-based. Unlike many other games in the series, almost [...]

I once read a post where someone proved, once and for all, that Gears of War is better than Killzone 2. You see, Gears of War was given a 94 rating on Metacritic and Killzone only got a 91. That guy’s crazy, right? Well, he’s not alone. Executives brag about their company’s average scores in [...]

No, it sadly isn’t a real Golden Ticket to Valve’s headquarters, but listener Katrel was nice enough to make it for us after our opining last week (he tells us he found it in a “box” of Portal 2), which takes the sting away a little. Thanks, Katrel! This week has been slow for the [...]

Hey, remember us? After finally escaping from the bottoms of our respective schedules, Ben and I have returned with a brand new episode of the Full Glass Empty Clip Podcast! We talk at length about Valve, Portal 2 and the awesome things that happen inside that Pacific Northwest house of wonders, maybe rag on NPD, [...]

Generally a game has to be kinda off the wall to catch my attention. I’d much rather play, say, a game about punching bird people over another military shooter man game. But zombie games have a magical super power that keeps them from getting old, and I think I know why: 1. Zombies fit into [...]

My 53-year-old mother was recently in town visiting me, and while she was here, I decided to have her play lots and lots of video games. Even though she’s not really a gamer, she played Pong and Ms. Pac Man from time to time when she was younger, and when I was growing up, she [...]

We have returned! And by we, I mean me. I have returned. But we bring news with us! We lead off with a bit of indie game news, more updates in the ongoing battle of Sony v. Everyone on the Internet, we try to talk about video game films without blowing a gasket, Microsoft promises [...]

Seeing this recent post on RPS got me in the mood to do some singleplayer QuakeOneing. Just thinking about it gave me a shiver of anticipation, and I could hear the shotgun pow-tch-chk, the hiss and growl and roar and the clank-wobble-boom of grenades. That was it: the itch needed scratching. As soon as I [...]

We’re giving this new, shifted schedule a try here at the FGEC Podcast, maybe it’ll work a little better. As for this podcast, we bring you tales of Battlefield 3‘s awesomeness delivered in trailer form, Valve has big plans for its Steam platform, Notch and Mojang talk about their new project and bits of the [...]

There’s something special waiting for you inside this episode of the FGEC Podcast. What, you ask? Well, for one thing, we managed to actually get in the same room to record things. Will that carry over to an actual increase in quality? You decide, as we briefly cover such topics as the inevitable success of [...]

Sorry for the announcement delay, it was a long and busy weekend. The winners are: SpacePope NiceGuyMike Congratz to the winners! Sorry to all that did not win, but check back soon for more fun and exciting contests.

In November of the year 1095 Guy II, Comte de Macon attended church in the recently liberated county of La Marche to give thanks for recent events in his life. He had fully avenged the corruption of his previous wife Paola by capturing the county of La Marche for himself and sending Paola’s lover Bertrand [...]

In this episode of the Full Glass Empty Clip Podcast, we start off all positive and stuff for a change. Bulletstorm gets a positive review from the one of us who has played it, Microsoft officially announces their intention to release a PC SDK for the Kinect, a beloved game franchise returns from the dead, [...]

Oil Derrick Worker You never see them, because, well, they’re kinda isolated, but you hear reports about them, and they sound terrifying. Tai Chi Master If you ever swing that ax faster than an heavily sedated sea sponge, he goes down immediately. But should you go slower, HOO EEEEE!. Hipsters You only ever encounter their [...]

Today’s delayed podcast is brought to you by the inside of Ben’s sinuses. Poor Ben is now unconscious, having cracked open a couple of diphenhydramine tablets and rubbed the contents into his nasal passages. Hopefully, he can actually breathe now, or at least not suffocate in his own fluids as he sleeps. Tonight’s podcast brings [...]

I apologize for the late hour of this posting, ladies and gentlemen, my reasons are many, varied, and do not exculpate me from the late status of the podcast. Anyway! Yesterday’s podcast features the debut of the Sony Xperia Play, aka the Playstation Phone, and other Sony-related news, a game you probably forgot was even [...]

In the summer of 1088 Guy II of Macon returned to his home county from extended stay at the Royal Courts with a determination to deal with Bertrand, Count of La Marche for the slight suffered when Bertrand bedded Guy’s wife. Clearly, the plan would involve placing mailed fist to soft La Marche visage, but [...]

Sure, everyone knows about the LGBT characters who get all of the attention, like Tony Prince from The Ballad of Gay Tony, Zevran from Dragon Age, and a large percentage of the female Commanders Shepard from Mass Effect. But what about the lesser known gay characters in gaming?  These characters’ moment in the spotlight is [...]

The 6-episode web series will be written and starred in by Day, who will continue to make Season 5 of her existing web series, The Guild. More info at USA Today

Well, hell, it’s been a long time. I’m sorry for the disruption in service. To make up for it, I’m giving away 2 copies of Portal 2. You might have heard of Portal, it helped launch the Orange box, made TF2 a household name (at least in my circle of friends) So, here is the [...]

Piracy occurs on the big bad Internets, as Crysis 2 gets leaked and spread far and wide through the less reputable channels of the World Wide Web. Also, Ben and I express confusion as to the appeal of Battlestar Galactica, Activision summons the ghost of an old franchise in order to twist it into something [...]

Becoming a Count at age eleven is hard work, especially when your uncle has a valid claim on your title and may just be hoping you get some intestinal worms and keel over in the next five years. Needless to say, Guy de Macon was simply hoping to survive long enough to marry and have [...]

It is a dark week for old tired music game franchises, as Activision has shuttered their music games division and halted all development on Guitar Hero and all its DLC. Harmonix is also hit with layoffs, and so it seems like the lean times for music games are finally taking their toll on developers. Also [...]

In parts one and two we covered FPS and RTS Star Wars mods, respectively. Now it’s time for us to turn our attention to anything that doesn’t fit in those first two categories. There turns out to be not that much. Most games with modding tools are for those first two genres. Luckily, it turns [...]

In the year 1066 while Guillaume le Batard de Normandie was wresting the English crown from Harold Godwinson, Guy was beginning his second year as Comte de Macon at the tender age of 11. The 20 years that followed would be a period that saw him often referred to as “The Silent count.” A period [...]

Once again I’m back to walk through one of the most common PC game modification settings ever: Star Wars. The first installment covered FPS mods, this time, RTS games are getting the treatment. Despite the Star Wars series having many official RTS licenses over the years: Rebellion, Force Commander, Galactic Battlegrounds, and Empire at War, [...]

Yes, the date at the top is a day late. There were some planned new ideas that did not pan out in time, but soon! Soon, new shiny will be among us. I blame football, as I do for nearly everything, independent of season. We now have a place for all fifteen of you who [...]

This past August Paradox Interactive announced that 2012 would see the release of a Crusader Kings II, a sequel to the 2004 original that is part of the “Grand Sweep of History” series – a series which allows the clinically insane to start a game in 280 BC with Europa Universalis : Rome and finish [...]

So if you’ve been playing PC games long enough, you probably feel like every game that comes out that isn’t already one of LucasArts’ 12 Million Star Wars games has its own Star Wars mod. Well, you wouldn’t be far off. There are a whole lot of them. Today I’m just covering the FPS games, [...]

LAN parties — those wonderful gatherings where gamers haul their computers to one location, network them together, and play multiplayer games. Pizza, caffeine, and alcohol are often involved as well. Back when broadband Internet connections were less common, and some games didn’t even directly support Internet play, LAN parties were one of the more practical [...]

I’m sure that you, dear listeners, know that sometimes what seems like a good idea can turn out to be a catastrophically poor notion in hindsight. It might seem like an amusing idea: during the podcast, drink an entire 32 ounce can of Four Loko, the recently-banned alcoholic energy drink (because 12% ABV and enough [...]

Ah, Ben has now returned to his proper residence in Goleta, which means that his side of the podcast will no longer be transmitted by carrier pigeons. One would think this would free us from technical issues (pigeons are a notoriously unreliable way of sending Skype traffic), but you would be mistaken! We struggled mightily [...]

Here is the promised second bit of our back-from-vacation podcast. We hope you missed the sounds of our voices ringing in your ears and our enjoying our new header image. (For the record, it’s Kasey on the right, and yours truly on the left.) After wrapping up the first half of the episode, we moved [...]

Hello, everyone! I have recovered enough from my journey to lands far away to catch up with the several thousand bits of news that I missed while I was away, and we are now ready to present to you a lovely new episode of the Full Glass Empty Clip Podcast! Not only that, but thanks [...]

Square-Enix recently announced that they were working on a direct sequel to Final Fantasy XIII, titled Final Fantasy XIII-2. As a card-carrying Final Fantasy fanboy, I am already excited about this, based on nothing more than a 2 minute trailer. However, there is still that nagging voice in the back of my head that keeps [...]

Beyond Black Mesa, the twelve-minute live-action fan-made film based on the Half-Life universe has been released, and it’s pretty damn good.

You like games? You like Metafilter? Well, you just might like this. Tell me that I sent you! ∞

Looks like it’s won’t be too resource-hungry. Steam release was also confirmed via Twitter. ∞

Watch out, they mean SERIOUS BUSINESS! More info here

We’ve heard a lot about the AAA games coming out in 2011 like Bulletstorm, Diablo III, and Portal 2. But what else do we have to look forward to, especially in that sweet spot of $10-15? 2010 was a bumper year for the indie gaming community, and 2011 looks to be continuing that trend. Here’s [...]

Well, I fear it is time for me to say those dreaded words for all of you: the Full Glass Empty Clip Podcast is going on break. I’m off to Europe for a vacation for the next week or so, and so in that time, there will unfortunately be no podcast. I have made arrangements [...]

No one would call me an unreasonable person. Few people would look at me and say, “That Niteowl fellow, he’s one to go skinny dipping in a kiddie pool full Crisco, a grievously injured king cobra, and seven squirrels in the latter stages of rabies”. I have a mortgage, a real job,  and what is [...]

Welcome to the last Full Glass Empty Clip Podcast episode for 2010! This milestone might mean a bit more if we were more than a handful of episodes in, but we’ll take what we can get. For this final episode, we talk about Bulletstorm and the potentials for amusing censorship contained within, Microsoft refuses to [...]

Preparations have begun in earnest for the annual family tradition of subjecting poultry to our pathetic attempts to render something resembling the Rockwell-esque family feast ideal. Neighbors have been notified, the proper authorities alerted and the Army is on standby in case we have a repeat of two years ago and need to, as the [...]

I built Full Glass Empty Clip last year to be the public face of Mefight Club, the semi-private gaming community I started together with a bunch of other Metafilter members more than three years ago. Mefight Club and this weblog have both succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. We have a stable of great writers and, [...]

So, on the day of the eighth, being a rather hectic Wednesday for me, I found some time to run over to random.org and I played the tnumber game. My first roll, strangely enough, was a 1. In a DnD game that would have equaled fail. In this game, hat equaled Rush, a puzzle game [...]

The blatant inferiority of my biological existence has been made manifest. As I am made of wet flesh and fragile bone instead of strong, sleek, superior titanium, carbon fiber and electroactive polymer, I rolled and broke my ankle yesterday. This inevitable failing of my organic body has delayed the podcast by a day, something that [...]

Hello, listeners! For today’s episode of the Full Glass Empty Clip Podcast, we have our first group review! The lucky first game to fall under our judgmental gaze just happens to be Super Meat Boy, a game we’ve been exhorting you to buy almost every other podcast (Spoiler: we like it a lot). Also, Australia [...]

Podcasts, while entertaining, do not a groupblog make. So in order to add a little spice to the recent postings, I want to enlist the help of our readership! I need a new game, and I need to write up about one. So all of you participating readers out there get to pick! My next [...]

My oh my, do we have an episode for you all tonight. Many interesting things happened between the last episode and tonight, so many that we had to push off some of the news until the weekend. Still, we have more than enough to satisfy your desires for the finest in low-fi gaming chatter. EA [...]

Having crawled out from underneath several metric tons of leftover turkey, stuffing and gelatinized cranberries, we’re back with a new podcast! Fortunately, the rest of the gaming industry took the rest of last week off, as well, so we actually had a slight news shortfall! Fortunately, Ben came through with an awesome bit about Minecraft [...]

Well, we said Saturday or Sunday, and it appears to be Monday (Tuesday, more like), but here we are regardless. Yes, it’s the second episode of the Full Glass Empty Clip Podcast, and while our sense of timing has degraded somewhat, the quality of the podcast itself has improved! We have our names at the [...]

Thanks to everyone who typed some letters and then hit the “Submit Comment” button! The 5 lucky winners are: Timothy beardlace Lawton27 gamegeneral Gemmy check your email, or steam popups. Enjoy your prizes! Stay tuned for our next event.

The last few years have been something of a golden age of casual gaming.  Widespread development tools plus low cost distribution platforms like Flash made it possible to make games for the web.  Many developers combined an indie vibe with an interest in mass appeal to create intentionally casual games.  I love me some great [...]

Classic Sierra games, playable in-browser. Mmmm, that’s some tasty nostalgia right there! ∞

Hello, Full Glass Empty Clip readers! We’ve received a literal trickle of emails complaining about the lack of sensory stimulation that our humble blog provides. Here’s an example letter: “Dear Full Glass Empty Clip: Your website is wondrous to behold, a treat for the eyes, both in design and the uniformly high quality of the [...]

So, Minecraft. You may have heard of it. You may have even played it. And you may have then said, “Man, I love building stuff, but sometimes I wish I could plan out a structure before building it.” Or maybe you haven’t said that. But wouldn’t it be cool if you could? As it turns [...]

This is the third and last in a series (first, second) of posts where I look at the technology tree in the game Civilization from my perspective as a professional archaeologist.  If you have not read the other posts please start at the beginning.  In this post I want to talk about how and why [...]

In the previous post I started discussing the technology tree in the Civilization games from the point of view of an archaeologist.  In this post I want to point out that the Civilization tech tree is basically Marxist.  Yes, you heard me right.  And no, I don’t really consider this a pejorative – and not [...]

I am a gamer, but in real life I earn my living as an archaeologist.  In a three part series of posts I am going to put on my professional hat (a fedora?) and consider the tech trees from the Civilization computer games from the point of view of a prehistorian. It would be easy [...]

New lines from our favorite videogame/webcomic characters. Free TF2 items. POKER! What isn’t there to love about the new Telltale Games Poker Night at the Inventory? The Lack of multi-player you say? DID YOU NOT HEAR ABOUT THE FREE HATS? Anyway, this week I am giving away five (5) YES 5 copies of the Steam [...]

It’s no secret that I’m a cheap and penniless bastard. Therefore me and games have a love-hate relationship when it comes to money. If I have to pay at all, I’m grumbly. if I have to pay more than twenty bucks, you better be a good game. If I pay full-price, sixty dollar title fee, [...]

Congrats to Absalom, his comment was the most randomly chosen out of all of them. May all your knucklebones come up sixes (unless you are playing against me)! Thanks to everyone who entered, look for a new contest coming soon.

I love Blood Bowl, and I always have. I spent my college years playing it religiously despite all common sense: impossible to find miniatures, expense of said miniatures, my total lack of any artistic talent or ability, my dislike of tedious work like precision painting, the frustratingly steep learning curve,  and the fact it took [...]

Wow, I didn’t realize how long it had been since I posted a giveaway. I will try to do better in the future. For this edition of Full Glass Empty Wallet, I will be giving away one (1) copy of Blood Bowl: Legendary Edition on steam. Leave a comment below, and I will choose one [...]

Mr. Steven’s the butler in “Remains of the Day” As it is the case with these things, indeed, any thing which one might think on and analyze, and, in doing so, create a montage, an eclectic collage, if you will, of themes and and motifs, I’m not sure a cohesive whole, a singular zeitgeist could, [...]

Rock Band 3 is out! I’ve had the game for about a week (thanks Newegg!) so I have some early impressions…. If you plan on getting the keyboard, don’t bother playing on anything but Pro Keyboard. Regular Keyboard is just the simple five note highway we are all accustomed to with the guitars, except you [...]

I suppose it shouldn’t be a total shock, but come ON! ∞

Every Civilization game ever released is notorious for the “One More Turn Syndrome”. A wretched disease that has lead to a 4% dip in Computer Science degrees conferred as well as a 10% increase in Google searches for “video game + addiction” and “shut-in life expectancy”. So it was with some surprise that, when I [...]

So, I’m on a brand new iMac, with few games to play and I’m definitely too lazy to bootcamp a Windows installation. My gaming diet those days it’s mostly Minecraft and TF2. And Dwarf Fortress. Except I’m not playing Fortress Mode. I’m playing Arena. At first sight, Arena is not really a new mode, but [...]

Dateline: Bellevue Washington. Valve Software’s resident Australian, Robin Walker, announced sweeping changes in the hit multiplayer game Team Fortress 2. “With this latest update” Walker began “Players will now be able to buy hats and weapons with tangible money that they would normally use for food, or rent!” A whopping 64^4 new items, many community [...]

After several months of teasers, it’s done, and it’s very amusing indeed. You may want to go the site of the Tubes to watch it in all its HD glory — there’s a lot going on!

Ever see a comedian that was so bad it made you angry? Say a guy in Vegas, off the strip, who’s only there because he’s the owner’s brother-in-law? He’s on stage, huffing and puffing away, smelling of cheap laundromats and thrice cut cocaine telling jokes told by a ten-year old if he was a 45-year-old [...]

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we [...]

Good Old Games has decided that their shutdown was just a joke, and will be up and running and out of beta soon.  “We are working hard to provide users with much fun, so do expect some great surprises until Christmas.”  What’s their next joke going to be, installing a trojan that fries my motherboard?  [...]

There I am, riding high on my recent separation from the Sarranid Sultanate, finally a free man. Under my command are an elite army of about 35 Swadian Knights and 40 Sarranid Mamlukes. My men are happy, morale is high, and lo and behold, we stumble upon a castle with only 120 relatively weak soldiers [...]

It is harrowing to have the veil ripped away from ones eyes, the infinite horror of that nameless alien weakness.  I go to the study, go to my office, throw dinner parties, with never the glimmer of suspicion as to what eldritch terror will grab me from the dark, pull me into an mute stupour [...]

A few months ago, John Carmack got a twitter account. Typically twitter is used to express the mundane details of one’s day, sometimes to chat with others on subjects, and gives one’s followers an update on what’s going on at work. John Carmack uses his twitter account to talk about his job. Most of the [...]

As others have noted, there is a challenge going on right now among MeFightClub members to name the best game.  EVAR.   MeFightClub is a group of grown-ups (in both the sense of age but more importantly in maturity) who play games (and who sometimes say EVAR).  The community was started around Valve’s multi-player shooters so [...]

[There's a competition going on at MeFight Club for a blog post about "The Most Important Game Ever". You've got about a day to get your entry in. The prize is pretty sweet too.] Wow, all time. That’s something. It’s a bit like trying to pick the single best meal you’ve ever had, or the [...]

A fascinating and lengthy blog post (made in January but it’s making the rounds now) about a visit to a museum of Soviet-era arcade games.  There are many pictures.  And I am very glad I was not a child of the Soviet 80s. ∞

Ah yes. Gaaaming. One could hardly think of an area more ripe for exploitation. Pasty-faced youths living in their parent’s basements avoiding all contact with the outside world. Actually, that doesn’t sound so bad if ‘outside world’ includes mothers. Hm. In any case, now they want to play with each other? Maybe some sort of [...]

According to the Vancouver Province, Relic developer and Vancouver native Brian Wood, who worked as lead designer for the Company of Heroes series, swerved to take the brunt of an oncoming car on the driver side. The accident occurred Friday night in Washington State. Police report that had he not taken this last-second action, both [...]

There’s been a bit of discussion of late on the MeFightClub board about the Most Important Video Game Ever (thankfully no one insisted on going all meme-ish and spelling it Evar). Easy, I think, it’s got to be the first video game ever made, right? So off I pop to Wikipedia and start looking around. [...]

Seriously. Every joke has been made. All the snark has been used up. Every dead horse has been revived and then beaten to death again. Yet, it seems we’re on it again:  Gearbox Software, makers of Borderlands, has officially confirmed picking up the development of Duke Nukem Forever where 3DRealms left it, and release is [...]

Part I to this aimless ramble is here. By not allowing users to distribute their custom maps and requiring  authentication to get a map hosted on their servers, Blizzard make themselves the middleman. They want to control the types of games you can play. Censoring out ones they don’t like so much, you know, with [...]

Congrats to wulfhere for winning a copy of CIV V, email has been sent. Prize will be handed out on confirmation of email. Thanks to everyone who entered. See you next time.

Now that Worms: Reloaded has been out for a week, I figured it’s high time we got a review for it all up in here. I feel there should probably be some disclosure though: I LOVE ARTILLERY GAMES. I have loved them ever since playing Gorillas in QBasic in elementary school with similarly quick-typing, computer-savvy [...]

With a gentle beep the email arrived in my inbox, to approximately the same welcome as viagra-sales spam. Worse, in fact, as it wasn’t blocked by my spam filter at the server before being served to my desktop like a freshly-laid dog turd. “Thank you for being a valued member of Xbox LIVE. We want [...]

Welcome back to the feature formerly known as Do You Like Free Stuff. This time around, I am offering up one pre-order Direct2Drive copy of Civilization V. The contest will run til 8:00 P.M. Eastern Thursday September 2nd. How do you enter? Just leave a comment below. I will randomly choose one winner this week [...]

It isn’t often I’m moved to rant about video games. There are plenty of other nerds with better thought-out opinions, usually supported by graphs and proofs and the phrases “non-trivial”, and “Let N be…”. But this, this is a hill where I plant my flag, affix bayonets, and take a stand, with all the power [...]

Civilization IV is a fantastic game. In fact, any game starting with “Sid Meier’s” is probably going to be awesome. But the Civilization series in particular has always gripped me, and kept me playing for hours on end. There’s something so satisfying about finally taking over the world through an ideal combination of war, politics, [...]

Now, that’s interesting. And only 54 weeks before the scheduled release, too. But if it uses Steamworks for multiplayer, that’ll be a mighty good thing indeed. See also… ∞

The core strength of gaming’s appeal is, I think, the fact that a game’s success or failure essentially boils down to one question: is it fun? All the other factors that we judge a game’s quality by are essentially tacked-on items that either increase or decrease the fun contained in the game. There’s a lot [...]

So there you are, having just finished riding out into the middle of nowhere Mexico to find that last damn woolly blue curl for your Survivalist challenge, and blammo, you fall down a little cliff that your 90yr old grandmother could have stepped down and your horse dies. Now, you have a couple choices here: [...]

John Carmack is, perhaps, the nearest thing to a demigod the gaming world can claim to have. Half man, half deity, touched by the hand of the eternal, wandering the earth, solving really hard math problems, Sisyphean, DOOMed forever like Leonardo (or any of the other ninja turtles) to eternally strive for a goal that [...]

More web game goodness: this one’s heaps of fun once you get the speed ratcheted up (hint: go through the blue tunnel marker thingies). Paint landscape, whiz crash woohoo. You know the drill.

New trailer with some actual in-game footage of Deus Ex 3: Electric Boogaloo in between the cutscenery. Two observations: 1) man, that’s some rumbly and expensive-sounding audio design, and 2) hopefully they got those strippers from Mass Effect at a discount!

Just in case you hadn’t noticed: all of id’s and Bethesda’s games, currently on sale. If you want to play Rocket Arena 3 with us, or any of the hundreds of Doom maps and mods here, now’s the time! ∞

Ludicrously expensive, but at least it’s aimed at thinking adults who also play games, and they may be right that the ‘premium product’ model is the way forward for print publications. [via]

Okay, I got tired of the disturbing Dorito-consuming isopods at the top of the page, so now please enjoy the EXTREMELY adorable Laura Shigihara (and her cat Metroid!) sing her #1 song “Zombies On The Lawn”.

Thanks wow.com for the real-life zerg, otherwise known as giant isopods.  THEY KEEPING COMING AND COMING.  THERE IS NO DEFENSE.  FOR YOUR DORITOS.

That was a quick contest.  I honor of that, I will make a quick post. eyeballkid is this weeks winner. Once I get the confirmation email, the game will be sent your way. Congratz!

Since last week’s giveaway was so popular, I decided that another contest was in order. The only catch this week? The contest ends at 10 P.M. Eastern on Wednesday August 11th (because the game is released the next day). Up for grabs this week: One Steam copy of Puzzle Quest 2! How do you enter? [...]

Indie game competitions are the open mic nights of the indie game scene. Often new ideas are thrown around, games are cobbled together, and blood is shed. I decided to enter one of these competitions, partially out of boredom, partially out of challenge. The Independent Game Source is a blog devoted to the burgeoning indie [...]

Last night I was logged in to the MefightClub Minecraft Server. I had reached a milestone on construction of my manor house. I wanted to see the world beyond the draw distance. I needed adventure and a sense of wonder. I encountered hidden treasures in the least likely of places.  Here is my story: I [...]

Quake Live is out of beta, and to ‘celebrate’, id software has rolled out two subscription plans to try and suck some money out of people still keen to play a 10-year old game. It’s a little bit ludicrous, I reckon. You can read on for some discussion of why I think so, beyond my [...]

Quick roundup of some recent, amusing web games. Share and enjoy. Worm Food Skid MK Daytraders of The Dead Color Theory Achievement Unlocked 2

Thanks to everyone who Likes Free Stuff! Lots of new faces around here, as well as some old friends. Here are the official winners for Week 3.5: Tallguy Jepuliz™ SebAndSeb all get a free copy of the soon-to-be-released Worms Reloaded! I will contact all of you via email with your prizes. Congratulations to the winners, [...]

Interview with Team 17 about the upcoming Worms Reloaded. (Don’t forget to comment here for a chance to win one of three copies of the game…)

Parts of battle.net are down.  And someone’s a fan of Firefly.

Amazon published some Kindle Games! Though apparently I’m late to the game, as there have been other games available for a while now. My Kindle just got that much more addictive! Though I’ve always been terrible at Scrabble, I’m going to have to give these games a shot, especially since they’re free! Sorry, original Kindle [...]

Electronic Arts announced The Sims Medieval, a version of the game that presumably takes place in the far future, after the collapse of Simciety. In that wretched time, the plague caused by sims leaving piles of dirty dishes around their living quarters and crapping in the gutter because of an inexplicable lack of toilet facilities [...]

Those with FilePlanet accounts (AKA just about everyone) should be able to grab a free CoH Online beta key right now. P.S. If you have problems with the Captcha, try using Chrome instead of FF. ∞

To get myself back in the groove, I will make this short and (hopefully) sweet. I have 3 Steam copies of Worms Reloaded to give away. All you have to do is comment below, and I will randomly pick 3 winners. No stories needed! I will pick the winners Thursday night, and announce them sometime [...]

This looks to be a cool little program.  If you love video game music, you should check it out, as well as the Video Games Live website. ∞

There’s a lot of Freeware out there. Here’s a guide to help you sort the good from the bad, you cheapskate! Feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments. Desktop Customization Rocketdock Adds an Mac OS-like program launcher to your desktop. Rainmeter Allows desktop displays showing system stats, weather, and time in a [...]

Lego Starcraft: Brick Rush Runtime4:34 View count1,702,142

There’s nothing more to this post than an image I found amusing.  Would that we could all just click an “okay” button when we fail.

Metafilter user a sourceless light is working on an undergraduate anthropology thesis revolving around FPSs.  She’s looking to interview  FPS players and modders from Doom onward with a focus on Valve games, online gaming and military-style games. Just the kind of stuff us folks at Lud do every day. Well, ok, she’s a real researcher. [...]

This seems like a better choice for portable gaming than a laptop, to me.  No keyboard/mouse to mess with, just a controller!  Via engadget ∞

Is it a statue? Is it a costume? No, it’s a case mod! Awesomest case mod ever? Could be! Did I mention the assault cannon spins up?

The World Trade Organisation has ruled that EU import duties on certain gadgets imported from the US, Japan and Taiwan are illegal. An agreement reached in 1996 removed import tariffs on 72 different products in order to boost trade in technology goods. The European Union later moved some of these items into a taxable bracket [...]

So I know most people won’t be bothering with the single player campaign in starcraft II, but if you are, and you are kinda lost with the whole story, here’s the Story So Far…

Street Fighter IV has some competition…

He just can’t get it up long enough. Yet there is a solution!

Long-awaited real-time strategy game (RTS) StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty has gone on sale after a 12-year wait. The game follows on from the 1998 release of StarCraft, putting the player in command of a group of humans battling for survival against an insect horde and telepathic aliens. StarCraft II now holds the record as [...]

Valve apologise for wrongfully banning innocent players of Modern Warfare 2 over the last week, which has been a major uproar in the forums. This is also the first time valve have admitted a problem with the valve anti-cheat system and the first time they have reversed account flags that stop people who have been [...]

Felicia Day and the crew from The Guild have come out with a second music video, which premiered at this year’s San Diego Comic Con.

Associated Press North Korea has threatened to use its “Zerg offensive” in response to planned release of Starcraft 2 by the US and South Korea this week. The regime promised a “retaliatory sacred war” amid increased tensions on the Korean peninsula over the April ban on late night gaming, which Seoul and Washington blame on [...]

OK, it’s not *only* in-game footage of farting in a villagers face, but also a look at the updated combat system and resisting arrest.

There’s an analysis article up at Gamasutra by Leigh Alexander looking at what’s rotten in the state of Gaming – peeling back the lid on an industry built around play, and finding problematic toxicity and unhappiness in the games business, from developers to media to the audience they both serve.

Youtube have added a new easter egg with their latest redesign – play snake on youtube videos with the loading icon! You need to be viewing a recently uploaded video (i.e. one with the video bar icon as three white vertical lines inside a grey circle, rather than a black dot in a dark grey [...]

I still love Team Fortress 2, it’s almost balletic at times.

Why do we love zombie games, and what does that say about us as a society? (via the ever-excellent Rock Paper Shotgun) ∞

Those who played Mass Effect 2 and were disappointed by Liara’s absence–your prayers have been answered by a DLC. (More info under the cut, including spoilers if you still haven’t picked up the second installment!) In ME2, the cute cuddly professorial Liara we knew and tolerated (or romanced) was replaced by a darker, embittered, and [...]

IGN presents a retrospective on the history of Fallout, prior to the launch of Fallout: New Vegas. ∞

Imagine a single player Left 4 Dead where you’re trapped in one room, you’re playing top down view, and it’s always a crescendo event. Oh, and the zombies are all stock traders, and they drop money and weapons. So you shoot them all dead (again) with machine guns, shotguns, miniguns, rocket launchers and airstrikes. And [...]

Sony got spooked about the DRM on the PS3 getting cracked, so unceremoniously dumped the other-OS feature of the PS3 with a mandatory firmware update. Multiple lawsuits were filed, and they’re now bundled into a single class-action suit. ∞

Basically, everyone and their sister is raving about Limbo, a new indie 2D puzzle platformer on Xbox Live Arcade for 1200 points – it’s supposedly the new Braid. Looks interesting. “That’s Limbo: a game that has very few humans, but a surplus of humanity.”

The marvellous parody ‘end call’ sticker for the iPhone? Well, now they’re really for sale on etsy. Slightly more seriously, the free case program is now in full swing. iPhone 4 owners who already bought a Bumper from Apple or AT&T can get a refund, while those who haven’t gotten one can choose between a [...]

Launching along the upcoming Tron: Evolution game and Tron: Legacy film, gamer peripherals maker Razer are launching a mouse and keyboard for those who can’t quite afford the $35,000 for a real Tron legacy lightcyle on ebay but do still have some wonga spare for a keyboard and mouse that well, glow in the dark. [...]

It was a close battle this week, so many heart wrenching tales of gaming addiction. Although this one seemed to sum it up the best: My gaming life started early on, playing Super Spellcopter at the public library. There were also downloadable freeware games there… Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, and probably some marginally educational ones [...]

It’s a rough galaxy out there. You go out there, every day. You flank and open fire and strategize because the galaxy isn’t doing you any favours.  You tear at your hair, at the bulkheads, you claw your way past the militant penguins and the looming space hulks because that’s what you do. And the [...]

The recent release of Valve’s free Alien Swarm got me inspired to write about the difference in aesthetics and gameplay between first-person and top-down shooters.  (One could say this is a think-piece about mid-level camera angles and their limitations).  Part of this was prompted by a sense that top-down games are making something of a [...]

Last week, Microsoft released a public beta of SP1, with a few bits of added functionality. According to technet, SP1 proper will be released in the first half of 2011. ∞

As many of us cross-platform gamers suspected, the keyboard and mouse has proved far superior to the xbox 360 joypad when it comes to getting your frag on. Microsoft had a secret project a while ago, some details of which have now surfaced from the CTO of HP’s gaming business blog. There was a project [...]

With Gears of War 3 slowly hoving into view, Epic Games decided to put the fate of the series’ newest member in our hands – with a twist. Starting on July 29, you’ll be able to buy T-shirts for your Xbox Live Avatars that say either “Save Carmine,” or “Carmine Must Die.” Clayton Carmine is [...]

So you’ve just finished rebuilding your computer with a new shiny motherboard, processor and graphics card, and you want to finish off that install of a brand new clean copy of Windows. What do you do next? In this series of steps I’m going to be using Windows 7, as these are actually the ones [...]

The AI Apocalypse is coming, and it will be built by geeks who say “Hey, look at this cool thing we built….”

Darkspore is a much darker take on the evolution game pioneered in Spore, a game that got mixed reception – not least over its intrusive DRM activation. In addition to the thematic change, Darkspore will also see a drastic change in terms of gameplay. EA describes the game as “online, science-fiction action role-playing game.” This [...]

How do you fancy a point & click adventure made out of real clay and cardboard (and flash)? Then The Dream Machine may be for you. You can play the demo here, and sign up for the beta to get access to the first chapter for free. “In the interest of full disclosure, we have [...]

Security Essentials, the free anti-virus software by Microsoft, has a new beta with added functionality. The network protection has two parts. Microsft Security Essentials now integrates with Internet Explorer to better protect against Web-based threats. This allows the program to prevent malicious scripts from running. The current version can detect such scripts when they get [...]

Sorry, the boys and girls of FGEC are busy trying to avoid the Alien Swarm in, well, Alien Swarm. It’s a free download, PC only.  Check it out!

Steam News: Two years ago Valve hired the talented team behind the popular top down co-op mod Alien Swarm. Since then they have been busy working on the Left 4 Dead Series, and now Portal 2. However, we never forgot about Alien Swarm and the team has spent a lot of time bringing the game [...]

Rockstar have axed a number of team members at the San Diego studio responsible for the development of Red Dead Redemption. “About” 40 employees were handed their pink slips, out of a team of 180. The remaining staff will concentrate on the upcoming DLC packs for Red Dead. In response to the cuts, Rockstar San [...]

I would like to talk to you about a serious problem, my friends. A problem that tears families apart and lays lives to waste: video game addiction. Like you, I’ve spent many nights alone in a dark room, with only the glare of the monitor to keep me sane. Ish. Too many nights, too many [...]

The First FullGlassEmptyClip Win Stuff Contest has closed, with excellent entries from all. Thanks to everyone for playing along! The entry that stood out for me was this one: My favoritest spaceship of all time is definitely the lego one I built. It looked almost exactly like this one. Except it was white with blue [...]

I’m on a heavy, powerful street bike. I’ve been riding for an hour or two, with breaks, and yes, I’ve been drinking beer. With some vintage The Hold Steady on my headphones, I can barely hear the roar of the engine, but there’s very little traffic, and I’ve only missed the best line on a [...]

If you’re still using Windows XP and haven’t upgraded to Service Pack 3 yet, you really should. Microsoft have ended support for versions of XP still on SP2 or older, so you won’t be getting any more security patches. The latest set of patches issued yesterday, including for the heavily exploited Help & Support Centre [...]

Preview of upcoming August PBS special depicting the Video Games Live concert series.  Here we have the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra and choir performing the opening theme from Civilization IV, performed live in New Orleans.  Pretty neat.

At least in part because of technical limitations, early games had opponents that were either absolutely equal to you (the other Pong paddle, for instance), or that were non-human or inanimate (Pac-Man’s ghosts, Donkey Kong and his barrels, Asteroids, etc.). At 8-bit resolution, it was difficult to distinguish the “good” humanoid figures from the “bad” [...]

ESRB, while replying to people who submitted concerns over Blizzard’s RealID fiasco, revealed their e-mails by hitting ‘reply all,’ or, “people concerned with their privacy lose their privacy because of being concerned with their privacy.” ∞

Hi, and welcome to The Lost Starfighter – FullGlassEmptyClip’s retrospective on that much-mourned loss to the PC gaming scene, the Space Combat Simulator. For the first column, an intro-retrospective not about my first Space combat sim, but probably my favourite: X Wing. I actually had to look up the correct dates here, it’s been so [...]

Google have released their new WYSIWIG app development tool for android phones; it’s all about using building blocks, no coding required. So now we can all write our own whack-a-mole game to play on the move!

…complete with that excruciating z-axis-free controller-movement that makes we want to punch the first goddamned 12-year-old I see. Here are the rest of the 5 new ones.

..and watch the rest.

The fact that this decision is being relayed by Mr. Morhaime of Blizzard and not Mr. Kotick of Activision is … verrrrrry interesting.

This won’t be a funny or light-hearted post. It will be about what women have to live with; as gamers and in general from men – and why that makes RealID such a bad idea. (credit to XKCD for the image) First of all, full (ish) disclosure. I don’t play World of Warcraft, nor do [...]

Nattie – a long-time WOW player – lays out precisely and in depth why RealID is such a bad idea, especially for women and minorities. In case you think Nattie’s fears are overblown, here’s where Ryan Erickson challenges people to find out more details about him with just his name, with fairly predictable results. A [...]

Well, do you? Welcome to the first edition of the FullGlassEmptyClip Weekly (insert free stuff of the week) Contest Giveaway Extravaganza! A contest you say? What do I have to do to get free stuff? What free stuff is there? Is it really free? Why are you being so nice to me? I’m glad you [...]

In StarCraft, your efficiency is described in “APM,” or actions per minute. According to this video, you need to be over 300 APM to be competitive. That means in 60 seconds, you need to accomplish over 300 things.

Blizzard has announced their 2010 writing contest.  They’re looking for short prose fiction between 2,500 and 7,500 words and set in either the Diablo, Starcraft or Warcraft universe.  To which I say fuck that, because I wanted to write some mustache fanfic based on the Lost Vikings. The deadline is August 23rd, which I can only assume [...]

Team Fortress 2 is the game that keeps on giving, like a fun version of food poisoning. The developers, Valve Software, have been releasing updates since the game’s release in October 2007. Many of the major releases have taken the form of updates focused around adding new equipment and abilities to a given class. Adding [...]

The first Engineer-class unlock for TF2 has been revealed. As predicted based on the last video to be released, it’s a fancy-pants shotgun. It delivers critical hits that are directly proportional to the number of sentry kills and whether or not the Engineer’s sentry gun was just destroyed. It is meant to be a revenge [...]

I don’t know what’s  happening to gaming these days. In my day you had a fortress, you had a team, and you just went at it. It was like tag or flag football, the bedrock of any small town community. I know community isn’t in vogue these days. It’s one for one and all for [...]

I could not agree more.

The NASA Learning Technologies program is releasing Moonbase Alpha on Steam on July 6, 2010. It’ll be free hooray! Produced in conjunction with evil child-warping propagandists and America’s Army developers Virtual Heroes using the Unreal Engine 3 (is there anything that isn’t, any more?), it’s apparently going to be a ‘realistic multiplayer game that will [...]

Dutch artist Robert Overweg is, in his own words, a photographer in the virtual world. The worlds designed in first (and third) person shooters, in his artistic vision, are the new spaces where contemporary society dwells (which is correct, at least if you consider the authors of this blog as “contemporary society”). He’s not very  interested in [...]

Some of this is kinda spoilery, so if you’re super-sensitive to that kind of thing, you might want to avert your eyes and/or ask your mom to watch them for you. Executive summary: everything is splendid and shiny and it looks as if it’s going to be a Real New Game rather than lazy sequelitis-stricken [...]

Guile cat is so cheap. All he does is flash kick over and over. ∞

In the beginning, id created the Engine and the Game. And the Game was without form, and void; and vanilla deathmatch was upon the face of the net. But Rocket Arena appeared in the lists of the servers. For David Wright said, Let there be frags: and there were frags. And players saw the frags, [...]

This one’s been sat in my steam queue for a while, and finally got around to giving it a go. It’s really rather fun, even if I do now have a tendency to panic when I see the mass of whitespace below this text, and feel the disconcerting need to turn the browser around. You [...]

Steam Deals – 30th June 2010 Today, I recommend: Mass Effect 2 – brilliant RPG with guns; a big step on from the first one with a lot of the cruft cut out and great graphics and a solid character driven story. Not a great discount, but still worth it. Torchlight – Diablo, with updated [...]

Mr. Chilton thinks World of Warcraft’s market share may one day be cannibalized by another MMORPG.  Which one would that be?  World of Warcraft II?

Steam Deals – 29th June 2010 Street Fighter IV – 75% off $ 39.99 $ 9.99 £ 29.99 £ 7.49 » $ 11.27 (+12.81%) € 37.99 € 9.49 » $ 11.58 (+15.92%) Numen: Contest of Heroes – 75% off $ 29.99 $ 7.49 £ 16.99 £ 4.24 » $ 6.38 (-14.82%) € 19.99 € 4.99 [...]

I’ve played through a few hours of Raven’s everything-old-is-new again First Person Thing, Singularity. I am now prepared to tell you exactly what you need to know about it. Q: Is it pretty? A: Yes, it is quite pretty, with the kind of predictable Unreal Engine prettiness that we — or me at least — [...]

Blurry textures in Singularity, Raven’s new old-schooly Bioshock knock-off? Here’s the fix. ∞

Steam Deals – 28th June 2010. King Arthur – The Role-playing Wargame – 66% off. $ 39.99 $ 13.60 £ 29.99 £ 10.20 » $ 15.35 (+12.87%) € 39.99 € 13.60 » $ 16.78 (+23.38%) Dogfighter – 50% off. $ 16.99 $ 8.49 £ 11.99 £ 5.99 » $ 9.01 (+6.12%) € 13.99 € 6.99 [...]

Simple but fun free flash physics puzzler. I give you rotate & roll.

How good games become bad, bad films… via UGO

Steve Jobs responding to a user that discovered that the new iPhone 4 models lose all signal when held in the left hand.

“People make maps in Team Fortress 2 specifically for grinding achievements. Bleak, joyless rooms of endlessly spawning bots and resupply crates, where people don’t play the game, they game it. But in one of these, achievement_all_v4, the author’s added a surprise…” THE GRIND Runtime1:37 View count757,866 Read more at PCGamer, including comments from Robin Walker [...]

He went on to exclaim “I am so fucking high right now you couldn’t even believe it, man. I don’t even know where I am.”

Discounts! At Steam! NOW!

Doodle God. Start with just earth, air, fire, and water. Combine them to create the universe. Reaction Effect. No timer, no enemies, and no level bosses, not even a soundtrack. Just a simple, soothing brain teaser. Share and enjoy!

Professor Toru Iwatami, the creator of Pac-Man, recently traveled to The Netherlands to speak at the Festival of Games in Leeuwarden. Along the way, on the bus, he produced a folder from his briefcase, inside it the original sketches for Pac-Man. In terms of game design, this is Michelangelo’s Creation of Man. Except that Mike [...]

I think what’s clear here, in this shot, is that it’s the humans that have the guns, the mandate to power in this situation. The undead, these new immigrants to a world that’s still very strange to them, they are, quite categorically, unarmed. There is a struggle for hegemony you can see here. Dominion over [...]

If you go down to the woods today, you’re in for a BIG surprise. Amongst all the pre-order hype over games like Halo Reach and Starcraft II, I spotted this little furry fella which should be launching in a few days on 360 and PS3. Impressions at E3 were positive. I mean – mass intimidation, [...]

Team Fortress 2 (TF2) was released in October 2007 as part of the Orange Box, which will be known to our children and our children’s children as the best Value in History, even better than the famous Christmas season when United Automatons forgets to charge extra for the vibrator attachment. Team Fortress 2 exemplified team-based [...]

What’s that sound? Ah, yes, my bullshit detector going ah-woo-gah.

Are you an aging gamer, like me, and do you find yourself pining for the days of gaming yore occasionally, when the sound and fury of the latest warporn deathsim Medal of Duty and Honour: America’s Bullet Pride game, fun as it might be, has left your head ringing? Yearn for some simple sprites and [...]

Here’s the video of Franklin Page beating the world record for texting using swype in March, to show why you want it. Here’s another guy beating him on youtube. The good news for android phone users is that the free beta is officially open again for ‘a few days’. Get it while you can! (edit) [...]

25,000 barrels go whee-splat in the Unreal 3 Engine.

My reaction to the new push for motion controls in gaming is the same as it is for 3D gaming: confusion, skepticism, and a dash of bewilderment to taste. It’s as if all of a sudden we found that game controllers caused cancer, or made your hands fall off, or that they all somehow managed [...]

I’ve finally been bitten by the smartphone bug. I received my Samsung Galaxy S today, one of the very first batch of pre-orders to go out in Europe. And I love it. This is my first impressions on playing with it for a couple of hours. I got my first proper PDA, a palm M130 [...]

It’s a Nintendo DSi, but 3D. There, that’s two days of hype boiled down into one sentence, the ecstatic and feverish media reaction to the 3DS reduced to the thick, fatty stock. Like all reductions though, there’s a lot of material contained in that little sentence, each requiring separate consideration to really appreciate the whole. [...]

via RPS

I don’t know if you guys know this, but the LA Convention Center is big. Not only is it big, but it is remarkably short on places to sit down. However, now that I have been properly fed after today’s events, thanks to Philippe’s and their awesome beef dipped sandwiches, and can feel my right [...]

When the average gamer allow himself (or herself, thank you shifting demographics) the heated imaginings of attending E3, she thinks of a magical all-access pass that really only belongs to the seriously industrious or the top shelf of the gaming press. Many of the games that I came to E3 to see lie locked away [...]

Today we start off in the West Hall of the LACC, and with what Sony purports to be the future of not just gaming, but entertainment and media altogether, 3D gaming. I got to put my hands on Wipeout HD and Motorstorm: Apocalypse in 3D, and for something that’s supposed to be some eye-widening experience [...]

Well, no one will accuse Bungie of being inconsistent. The ten minute glimpse into the gameplay that I was allowed to see was about half on-foot. If you really liked the first three and three-quarters Halo games, then Halo Reach is more of the same, and of course, if you really didn’t like the previous [...]

If you can read this, then that means my can-and-string laptop/Evo 4G combination is working, and I’m posting from the floor of E3! Literally, I’m sitting in line for the Halo Reach demo as I write this. If this thing continues to work, then I will be bringing you live posts from the floor of [...]

In case you’d noticed it was gone.

Hello, and welcome to the MeFight Club coverage of E3 2010! Tonight was the debut of the final release version of Project Natal, Microsoft’s attempt at making a controller that mandates waving your arms about like a complete loon. We weren’t invited, seeing as this blog is less than a week old, but we figured [...]

So you thought you were good with Lego? Jack Streat, a British 15 year old has garnered quite a following for his fully working lego guns. After construction, he takes videos of them target shooting in his hallway from an FPS viewpoint, along with shots of the mechanisms at work. He’s built several dozen prototypes [...]

Reuters reports that the FBI are looking into the security breach that revealed more than 100,000 email addresses of iPad owners through an openly exposed, deeply vulnerable and widespread gaping hole on AT&T’s website, which was discovered and demonstrated by Goatse Security group, named after the site hosting a picture of the infamous gentleman with [...]

A press release by QUICKHIT reveals that EA’s “exclusive” licensing deal with the NFL (set to run out in 2012) may not be all that exclusive after all.  Perhaps the NFL tires of EA?  Perhaps the NFL 2K series might return?  Perhaps pigs will fly to the moon?  Will this post look good when I [...]

Have you ever played Super Mario World and wished that one of the question blocks would pop out a tiny clipboard that would equip Mario with a suit?  Have you ever wanted the warp whistle in Legend of Zelda to whisk you away to a magical boardroom full of stale coffee and stale people who [...]

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