GCDC 2008: 'Space Invaders' Pummel World Trade Center
On a dim electroluminescent screen splayed across an entire wall, row after row of electric green invaders march inexorably downward, slowly dissolving two gray pylons one fiery chomp at a time. In the holes left by their rampage, tiny...
GCDC 2008: PC Gaming Rebounds! (Except Not Really)
Not really, because PC gaming was never really down, according to PC Gaming Alliance (PCGA) president Randy Stude, who at the Games Convention Developer's Conference in Leipzig claimed the industry was worth $10-point-7 billion worldwide in 2007. Far more...
Emily is Not Real: The End of "Real" Actors?
I have seen the future of computer-generated video game animation, her name is Emily, and Emily is not real -- or is she? See for yourself in the following clip just released from 3D facial animation company Image Metrics, and...
Driving Force in Video Gaming: Women and Baby Boomers
A new report out today claims that 38 percent of US gamers are women, the average player is 35 years old, and 24 percent are over 50. According to Los Angeles-based intelligence group IBISWorld, the percentage of female video...
July NPD Sales Numbers Fire, Industry Volleys
July video game sales leapt an appreciable 28 percent over last year, the 360 and PS3 finished in a dead heat, and Nintendo creamed everyone, as usual. Overall video game sales were up an astonishing 35 percent year-to-date, prophesying...
Transform Your Xbox 360 into a PC
Fed up with your 360 doubling as a space heater? Sick of muzzling the thing with barricades and enclosures when it's whirring like a leaf blower? Don't mind taking up a bit more space around your entertainment center? Know...
Space Siege: 1,001 Clicks of Excitement!
You know the game kick the can? Space Siege is kind of like that, but with bullets and tchotchkes. What I do, between sniping aliens and cyber-dudes and making trips to the level-up bank, is pulverize thousands of crates...
Space Siege: Deja Vu, but Don't Drive Angry
Call me sergeant Seth Walker, call me Ishmael, call me Bill Murray in a David Twohy version of Groundhog Day, waking to misery after misery. Smoke. Klaxons. Guttering machinery. Spider-legs of electricity skittering across paneling. Scorched plasteel. Guts splashed...
"Extreme Gamers" Game More Than They Work?
Full time employment in the US commonly computes between 32 and 40 hours a week, but a new study from NPD claims "extreme gamers" are spending an average of 45 hours a week plonked in front of glowing screens....
John Carmack: PC Sales Aren't What They Used To Be
Tom's Hardware, the site that coached me through cobbling together my first homebrew rig over a decade ago, quizzed John Carmack yesterday on why id Software has its sights trained on consoles with its upcoming shooter Rage. "The ground...
Ready for the $12 Nintendo Computer?
You've heard of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) with its bid to put a $100 laptop in the hands of children the world round, but how about a tiny slice of silicon that only costs twelve bucks? According to...
Grand Theft Auto, Murder Most Foul, and the Fallacy of Misleading Vividness
The world is full of crazies with nutty agendas and lethal intentions, but none quite as collectively cuckoo as a media that can produce the illusory bulge of a bell curve trend from thin air. Case in point, a...
Grand Theft Auto IV Belatedly Confirmed for PC
Doth I protest too much, or does this business of anxiously pining after game majors ported to PCs months after their ballyhooed premieres on console bricks coupled to scintillating TVs in sprawling entertainment centers taste more and more like...
Spoon Plus Fork = Spork, Spore Plus Porn = Sporn?
EA's sandbox-y Creature Creator's been out for a month and it's already packing a melange of oddities like chameleon droids, demonic elephants, two-legged grapes, and pigs with schnozes the size of hoovers. It's also, thanks to some lascivious digital...
The Selfish Video Game: Play Games, Change Your Biology?
Conventional wisdom paints games as mildly comforting but physically toothless palliatives when employed as agents in the treatment of life-altering illnesses. The Wii can help us lose weight but it won't cure genetic propensity toward obeseness. It can complement...