You Can Play Pac-Man On Google Maps Right Now

April Fool’s Day is imminent, which means that we’re about to see A) lots of unfunny people making awful attempts to prank everyone; and B) some people—often including big tech companies like Google and Blizzard—creating some brilliant things. Here’s one example of the latter.

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Why Does Nintendo Want This Superfan's YouTube Money?

YouTube game reviewers and gaming publishers battle back and forth over copyright issues, and YouTube's policies favor the big guys.

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What happens when you don't let players pick their race?

Plenty of people play games to escape their real lives, and the character creators some games offer let us imagine ourselves in whatever image we'd like: realistic or idealized, some version of ourselves. Or someone entirely other -- not just a chance to invent your very own fantasy character, but to live as them, in a sense. I know a couple where one partner always builds one edition of the other in any game they play that allows for character selection. Isn't that romantic?

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You can now play Super Mario 64 in your browser

Super Mario 64 is still an amazing game, but nearly 20 years after it first launched on the Nintendo 64, it looks pretty dated. But with a little love, it can look amazing. Computer science student Erik Roystan Ross recently decided to remake the first level of the game while experimenting with the Unity game engine, and the results are impressive — the game looks almost as good as more recent games in the series, like Super Mario 3D World on the Wii U.

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13-year-old Minecraft player confesses to swatting, police say

A 13-year-old Southern California boy has confessed to three different swattings, one in which he threatened to blow up a house with hostages in a suburban neighborhood, police said Friday. "The Camarillo incident there were 20-plus officers there. I was at that call. We basically surrounded the house. The caller reported there were 10 hostages in the house and demanded $30,000 in cash or he would blow up the house," Det. Gene Martinez of the Ventura County Sheriff's Department said...

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If you've ever used Twitch, your logins could be compromised

Twitch, the game streaming website, has been hacked and users’ details have been compromised. Users’ accounts have been reset and it does not seem that any credit card or other financial information has been made available. But passwords do appear to have been leaked and the company recommends that users reset their details on any site where they use the same password.

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Kid Poker I

Basement high stakes game with some tough opponents. Kid Poker I. Winner 500px Editor's Choice. © Ian D. McGregor

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Why don't we feel guilty in video games?

Guilt and remorse are near-universal human emotions, but their role in narrative games is minimal. Isn’t it time this changed? Lady Macbeth was a gamer. She saw in the feudal chaos of Glamis and its environs a chance to play the system and win. Her mission objective was to eliminate King Duncan and take his power, and with her husband she succeeded. But this game of thrones hid from her a terrible mechanic. Guilt.

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Minigun

The use of the minigun in video games, movies and popular culture.

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$1 flash sale at Playstation Store

I figured I'd post it for everyone else to find. It's mostly all old or indie games but it's worth a look.

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Video games beat interviews to recruit the very best

Forget interviews. Being good at special video games could land you that plum job – and help make recruitment a fairer process. HATE writing covering letters? Fall to pieces in interviews? Not to worry. Soon the top candidates for a job will be chosen by how well they play video games. Last week a company called Starfighter was launched. Its aim is to create games you can only master if you have a talent for programming, although those with a natural aptitude can learn as...

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How Nintendo Conquered Manhattan in 1985

A number of things crossed Bruce Lowry’s mind as he listened to Nintendo of Japan President Hiroshi Yamauchi speak. It was 1985, and the company—flush with capital thanks to the success of arcade sensation Donkey Kong—was poised to move into the American home console market. Yamauchi was undeterred by the fact that retailers were still stinging from the 1983 implosion of video games: oversaturation and poor quality control had led to...

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Nintendo partners with DeNA to develop mobile phone games

After years of speculation from industry watchers and hints from Nintendo itself, the console maker finally confirmed its first steps into mobile phone game development today. As part of a "business and capital alliance" with Japanese mobile gaming mega-publisher DeNA, the companies will "develop and operate new game apps based on Nintendo's IP, including its iconic game characters, for smart devices."

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Pixels - Official Trailer (HD)

This summer, it's game on or game over! When aliens misinterpret video feeds of classic arcade games as a declaration of war, they attack the Earth in the form of the video games. Watch as the arcaders save earth.

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The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces

​Mariina Hallikainen, CEO of small Finnish game developer Colossal Order, is having a good day. When I call her, it's only been a few hours since she learned that Colossal Order's SimCity-like game, Cities: Skylines, has sold more than half a million copies in its first week. The first 250,000 of those were sold in the first 24 hours, making it the fastest-selling game its publisher Paradox Interactive has ever released. The irony here doesn't escape Hallikainen.

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Mario Party 10 Review

While there are some moments to be had with Mario Party 10's minigames, it doesn't have the depth or the challenge to hold your attention for long.

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Super Mario Runs Left to Right Because Our Brains Say So

Does this gif hurt your brain? You're not alone. Ever wonder why side-scrolling video games from the 80's and 90's almost always scroll in a single direction—left to right? This might seem like a silly question (duh...it just makes sense that way), but if you really think about it, it is a little odd. Why do games always scroll that way?

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When Will Virtual-Reality Headsets Stop Making People Sick?

From the Oculus Rift headsets to the new HTC Vive, virtual reality devices will soon be flooding the gaming market. But, the technology has also been plagued by some unwelcome side effects.

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PlayStation May Soon Transform Gaming For People With Disabilities

The PlayStation 4 may be poised to make gaming more accessible for people with disabilities. An upcoming firmware update could add new features catering to people with visual, auditory or other impairments. Twitter user Ahsan Rasheed posted photos of a friend's beta version of the 2.50 firmware patch, including one that shows a list of new PS4 settings like text-to-speech, color inversion, text enlargement, closed captions and...

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If You Die In This Game, You Can Never Play Again. Ever.

Some games have permadeath, where death causes you to lose a character forever. Upsilon Circuit, however, has perma-permadeath. If you lose, you can never play the game again.

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I Tried VR Porn, And It Was Weird

"Have you ever tried VR porn?" Vander Caballero asked me. The video game developer was trying to convince me of VR's potential to revolutionize intimacy. "Do you want to try it right now?" Of course I said yes. Of course I did. It's hardly what I expected from my demo session of his new game, but you don't say "no" when a game developer offers you the opportunity to try VR porn. I know this from experience. (I don't know this from experience.)

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Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor Wins Game of the Year at GDC Awards

Shadow of Mordor takes home top prize at this year's awards show; see a full list of winners and nominees here.

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Buy Guild Wars 2 for 10 bucks this weekend!

Prepare for an epic adventure with the Heroic Pack! With a suit of Legacy Armor, an 18-slot Mithril Box to expand your inventory, and 10 hours of increased XP gain, the Heroic Pack has everything you need to begin your Tyrian journey!

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Ubisoft Is Making a Game That You Need a Doctor's Prescription to Play

Ubisoft is developing a game you’ll never be able to play without a doctor’s prescription. It’s called Dig Rush, and by using a pair of old-school, tinted 3D glasses, it may help treat Amblyopia, a sight disorder that affects 3% of the earth’s population. People with the condition often have a “lazy eye,” but it can take another form where one eye is simply much weaker than the other.

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Gaming's First Easter Egg - Adventure Let's Play with Creator Warren Robinett

It was 1979, and Atari programmer Warren Robinett was frustrated. The young engineer had already shipped a successful game called Slot Racers for the fledgling Atari 2600, and now he was working on something much more ambitious. Inspired by the text adventure games he’d played on computer mainframes, Robinett was building Adventure, a fantasy-themed graphical exploratory game and the conceptual predecessor to the action RPG.

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Microsoft bought 'Minecraft' after a single tweet by its creator

We're only halfway through the decade, but it's already obvious that Minecraft is the biggest game of the '10s. Its creator, Markus "Notch" Persson has now been honored for his achievement with a cover story in Forbes. The piece reveals a few interesting tidbits about how he came to leave the game that made his name, including the fact that the $2.5 billion sale to Microsoft was prompted with a single tweet.

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Valve’s Vive VR Prototype Is Better Than The Oculus Rift’s

I’ve used the Oculus Rift DK1, HD and DK2 for hours and hours and enjoyed my time with each of them immensely, but on each occasion, I’d feel some sense of relief upon taking the headset off. Relief that my head could cool down, relief my eyes could relax, relief that I hadn’t thrown up. When my twenty minutes with Valve and HTC’s Vive came to an end, I felt no relief. Instead, I only felt disappointed that I couldn’t continue exploring the 3D painting demo or...

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Nvidia will launch a 1080p game-streaming subscription service in May

We've watched Nvidia's work on cloud gaming for some time now, and now it's official: Nvidia Grid will be a subscription service that promises to stream top-tier titles up to 1080p and 60 frames per second. The service will launch in May alongside the new Nvidia Shield home game console. Nvidia will offer two tiers for subscription: free and premium (pricing not announced).

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The PlayStation 4 is already leading the virtual reality arms race, here's why

It's important to stop asking which virtual reality hardware is the best, and instead think about which has the best chances of breaking through to the mainstream.

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EA shuts down Maxis Emeryville, studio behind SimCity

Electronic Arts is closing Maxis, the studio behind the SimCity franchise, EA confirmed in a statement to Polygon today, following reports on Twitter from now-former employees of the...

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DayZ creator Dean Hall working on "wild mass multiplayer ideas"

DayZ creator Dean Hall has big plans for his next project, and even though he hasn't actually said anything about what they are just yet, he did recently offer some interesting insight into how he's going about bringing them to life. In a recent blog post, he wrote that he's working with technology company Improbable on a new multiplayer project that he called "the most exhilarating thing I have ever done."

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Android users will soon be able to use their phones to play games on Android TV

Google announced a new feature that will allow users to play multiplayer games on Android TV while using their Android smartphones and tablets as controllers.

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Steam Machines are coming this fall and this is what they look like

Steam Machines. Maybe you've heard of them. They're Valve's oft-talked about, rarely seen in the wild solution for streaming PC games to the fancy HDTV in your living room. And at GDC this week, the company brought us closer to the promise of that commercial reality with a display of all the various units you're likely to see hit retail by November of this year.

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Inside The Post-Minecraft Billionaire Life Of Gamer God Markus Persson

With Minecraft, Markus Persson became a deity to millions in his virtual world. Then he abruptly took $2.5 billion and walked away. A look inside the deal of the year--and the confused, indulgent life of a fallen idol.

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Unreal Engine is Now Free!

Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free, and all future updates will be free! You can download the engine and use it for everything from game development, education, architecture, and visualization to VR, film and animation. When you ship a game or application, you pay a 5% royalty on gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter. It’s a simple arrangement in which we succeed only when you succeed.

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World of Warcraft Tokens will let players exchange gold for game time

Word that Blizzard was considering a tokens-for-time option for World of Warcraft first came to light late last year, when Community Manager Micah "Bashiok" Whipple revealed that the studio was looking at ways to make life more convenient for its players. Today it confirmed that the system is on the way in the form of WoW Tokens, a new in-game item that players can buy and sell for gold or real money, and then exchange for 30 days of World of Warcraft game time.

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Job Simulator is the first SteamVR game to be announced

Deep space? The far future? The serene beauty of an abstract world? No, the first SteamVR game to be announced will be none of these things. It's a job simulator. It's called Job Simulator. Okay, to be fair, it is set in the future. The premise of Owlchemy Labs' sim is that robots have taken over all the world's menial jobs. In order to learn about their ancestry, the humans of 2050 simulate the jobs of the past. Essentially, then, Job Simulator is a job simulator simulator.

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Deconstructing the method to Nintendo's madness

It's easy to hate on Nintendo. With the Wii U, the company played right into negative consumer expectations by releasing a product derided for its kid-friendly appeal, Fisher-Price toy-like looks, less-than-bleeding-edge silicon, confusing branding and (initially) clunky operating system. The message to the market at the system's launch seemed clear: The gaming giant had fallen behind the times. But that's not quite the truth.

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Canadian "new game" prices jump to $75

As spotted by HardcoreGamer, the local Canadian branches of Amazon and EB Games have raised the prices of upcoming games to CAD$75. The CAD$5 increasing comes within a year of prices hitting the CAD$70 point. CAD$75 (£38/€53) currently exchanges for $60, the standard US pricing. The change is likely due to to fluctuation in currency value, but since that doesn’t mean local wages go up, from a consumer perspective it’s just less cash in their pockets.

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Check out this granny's Banshee from Grand Theft Auto

When Cheri Parker's son, Austin, bought a copy of Grand Theft Auto using her credit card, she didn't think anything of it. Then, the 56-year-old grandmother received the V10-powered surprise of a lifetime. It seems that Austin's purchase automatically enrolled his mom in a GTA sweepstakes, unbeknownst to either of them. And that's how this North Carolina grandma ended up with the world's only real-life Bravado Banshee.

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West Coast Port Strike Impacting Nintendo's New 3DS Supplies

An ongoing labor dispute in ports on the West Coast of the United States is impacting Nintendo's ability to keep Amiibo and the New 3DS in stock, the company has confirmed.

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Why Nintendo doesn’t release Mario on the App Store

Recently, I read an interviews to Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata in the Japanese gaming website, which was very entertaining and interesting. There are lots of interesting facts I didn’t know on the article including Satoru Iwata himself has hard-core programing background and he actually was writing codes until he turns to 40 years old. However, as an indie iOS developer who makes living on the App Store, the most interesting part was that he clearly explained why Nintendo...

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