We suspect it’s very difficult to work in game advertising. Videogames are a scary new artistic medium, and as such, not everyone knows how to market them – even to their target demographic. More than with anything else, videogame ad-makers love to target their audience with sex and sexy imagery, but that’s nothing surprising – advertisers have been using gender dynamics to sell products on TV since the folgers coffee days. ...
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For millions of MMO players, there was no love lost. In fact, last July’s widespread report, that the Chinese government had banned gold farming, was met with giddy rapture.
For years, gold farmers had been the worker ants in games like World of Warcraft and EverQuest, trading virtual loot for real-world profit. ...
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Given the current state of the economy, and the vigor with which store are going after what’s left of your dollar, we’re going to go ahead and declare this post-Thanksgiving Shopstravaganza of November 27th, 2009… The Blackest Friday. Retailers are well aware of your finiancial plight, and are dropping the prices on games so fresh off the press the cellophane is still melty. ...
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Whether you’re looking for electronics, hardware, anime, games, or anything remotely geeky, you’ll find it in Akihabara, a bustling shopping district in Tokyo, Japan. Located just north of Tokyo Station, Akihabara is really three towns in one. It’s a haven for tech hobbyists, a paradise for anime fans and gamers, and a popular tourist destination. ...
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Is there anything better than a bag of popcorn, a cushy sofa on which to recline and an iPhone or iPod Touch loaded with games? Well yeah, there is, especially considering what popcorn fingers can do to a touchscreen. But when you’re on a bus on your way to work, being able to punch up a bloody gorefest like Alive 4-ever or kick it through the uprights in a football sim does help while away the commute time. ...
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How many times in your life have you pressed “A” on a NES controller? Though we may not specifically remember every single occurrence of A-button pressage, we are left with a lingering sense of what that little red dynamo could do. Jumping, mostly, and sometimes shooting or punching or maybe some other stuff if it was one of those weird games. ...
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You don’t have to see or play absolutely everything on this list to be a proper zombie connoisseur, but you should at least know them. These are the genre’s defining relics. Some are responsible for the very creation of the zombie mythos, others adapted and advanced it, while the rest simply encapsulate it so exquisitely that they must be experienced. This may not be everyone’s definitive list of zombie lore ...
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We fear the unknown. Psychologists have proven that nothing troubles the human mind more, in fact, than that which cannot be predicted. Our phobias of death, darkness and strangers all stem from this single, simple truth. Apparently, so does our predictable taste in horror games. ...
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There’s a widespread notion in the videogame industry that game reviews can have a profound impact on game sales, and for the most part the evidence bears that out. But as tempting as it is to gloat about the supposed power that we, the videogame press, hold over the livelihoods of publishers and developers, it’s not always true. In fact, history is littered with countless examples of megahit games that had originally been ripped to shreds by reviewers ...
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“We find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is? When will we get to the cowboy level?”
– Professor Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
Time travel and videogames are a perfect fit. ...
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Back before you were a gamer, we didn’t have the multi-button, clickable-thumbstick, solar-powered controller gizmos you have today. We used to have to invite friends over and work together to push down the A-button because it was too stiff to move on our own. If we were lucky, we’d get two, maybe three good presses in before it got stuck and Mario just had to hope the rest of the level was flat. ...
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Let’s pretend, for a second, that everything bad anyone ever said about videogames was true. Why, we’d all be suicidal pixel-junkies, protected from our desperate self-hatred only by our own slovenliness! The world would be safe from our sociopathic, car-jacking, handgun-happy death wishes merely because we were too busy installing an IV drip to provide us with the powdered-cheese sustenance necessary to gain another level in World of Warcraft! ...
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