Video Games

Earlier this year, PC game developer, Valve caused quite a stir in the gaming community when rumors began swirling that it was working on its own video game console that would run its popular Steam service. It's still unclear just how valid those rumors are, but the company's latest announcement certainly confirms that Valve has its eyes set on gamers' living rooms. The developer recently released a beta for Big Picture, a version of the Steam game client formatted specifically for use with home televisions and game controllers.  Read More

Those who grew up playing video games from the 8-bit era will likely have various of the theme tunes from those early arcade classics – including some of the Atari games now playable on the Web in HTML5 – stuck in their heads forever more. Super Mario Bros., Pokemon, Mega Man, and, of course, Tetris are all classic games with classic theme tunes. Modern video games cannot quite compete with these old-skool songs, which is perhaps why the Pianocade is such a compelling product, at least for those of us of a certain age.  Read More

Fans of Kirby, the rotund pink title character of the popular series of video games from Nintendo, set a bubblegum blowing world record to mark the 20th anniversary of the first Kirby game release.  Read More

The first Borderlands game was released on PS3, Xbox 360, and PC in 2009 and its cel-shaded visuals and heady mix of RPG and shooter elements resulted in a positive critical reception. A sequel, unsurprisingly titled Borderlands 2, is due to be released on Sept. 18 and the developer, Gearbox Software, is putting the publicity drive in gear. The latest push to gain attention is the release of a 16-bit version of Borderlands playable in a (Flash enabled) web browser. Titled The Border Lands, (like Facebook, it dropped the "the"), it offers some simple "old-skool" fun for gamers while they wait for the main event.  Read More

OnLive has gained some steam in the past couple years with its impressive cloud gaming service, which allows modern games to stream instantly to almost any device. In just the past two months alone, the company has announced deals to bring the service to both LG Smart TVs and the Android-based OUYA gaming console. So it was shocking to say the least for OnLive employees to learn this past weekend that all of them were being laid off and the company had been purchased by another firm in a bid to avoid bankruptcy. As one of only two major players in the cloud gaming business and the owner of a number of patents on the technology, the news raises quite a bit of uncertainty for the future of cloud-based gaming.  Read More

Crowd-funding sites like Kickstarter continue to impact on product development and manufacturing work flows - contributing to what American economist Jeremy Rifkin termed a Third Industrial Revolution. At the Classic Gaming Expo in Las Vegas this month, David Crane announced his ambitions to bring this revolution to the video game industry through a project called Jungle Adventure. The creator of best seller Pitfall! wants to use Kickstarter to redefine how video games are produced. Framed under the banner of Jungle Venture Inc., his team is asking for US$900,000 to design a game tipped to be the definitive David Crane jungle game.  Read More

The largest annual video game trade show in Germany, Gamescom 2012, kicked off recently with dozens of publishers and developers presenting what they have in store for the coming year. Sadly, since it's only been two scant months since E3, most game companies in attendance don't have many surprises to reveal aside from additional features for some already-known titles. Luckily, that just gives some developers a chance to show off their projects that don't fit into the usual shooter, RPG, racing and dance categories. Here are a few titles revealed at Gamescom 2012 that are poised to change the way games are played.  Read More

First released as an arcade system and then two console models in the early 1990's, the Neo Geo's high price and relatively low adoption ensured its sales never reached the heights of more mainstream devices like those made by Nintendo and Sega, but the Neo Geo name still commands a strong cult following to this day due to its fantastic catalog of titles such as Fatal Fury, King Of Fighters and Windjammers. Now, more than two decades after its initial release, the Neo Geo is to rise again, reborn as a portable gaming console with included dock and joystick.  Read More

It's hard to believe just how popular Angry Birds and its spin-offs have become since the first game's release in 2009, but there are plenty of people still enjoying Rovio's series even now. With numerous ports for almost every popular mobile device, game console, and web browser, not to mention downloads totaling over one billion, it's clear that casual gamers are still enamored with the game about suicidal birds and explosive pigs. A couple of students have even gone so far as to create a slingshot-style controller just for the game out of a motorized slider from a sound mixer and an Arduino microcontroller.  Read More