If you haven’t seen them yet, the videos are mesmerizing. A content creator with long, straight hair sits at her kitchen table, rapidly stringing together nonsense catchphrases, over and over with the same cheerful expression and tone. “Yes yes yes. Mmm, ice cream so good.

So, we all love the latest Zelda game (Tears of the Kingdom - TOTK), and so do the critics. But now that we and the game journalists all have hundreds of hours of playtime under our belts, have any thoughtful, well written critical takes on Nintendo's latest masterpiece been written? I know at the beginning there were a few knee jerk reviews that tried to stand out. I am looking for well written, thoughtful, but ultimately critical takes on TOTK. People who have more to say than just gushing about Ultrahand. People who have perhaps done a thoughtful comparison with BOTW at a design level, and come out with some negative feedback on the game overall.

This is not because I don't like the game - far from it - but I would love to read some balanced analysis before I venture my own (potentially critical) takes on the game.

Thanks

This paper discusses the emergent gameplay practice known as speedrunning, or the process of completing a game as quickly as possible without the use of cheats or cheat devices, and its relation to games as narrative spaces.

We’ve seen our fair share of bizarre VR experiments over the years, but this one might just take the cake.

What is a game? It's a debate that rears its bemusing head every now and then as developers push the boundaries of the medium, and this month it has been brought back to the fore by a group arguably less qualified to give a concrete definition: lawyers.

I was 10 when Super Mario Galaxy came out, and I’m 22 now on its rerelease. There was all sorts of confusion before it came out, about what really was the situation surrounding motion controls, which were described as both mandatory and optional by various outlets.

Video games are often blamed for unemployment, violence in society and addiction – including by partisan politicians raising moral concerns. Blaming video games for social or moral decline might feel like something new.

In 2016, Marshall University professor Jason Morrissette was playing Batman: Arkham Knight. While sneaking around the shadows, Morrissette stumbled upon a soda machine. Like many games, Akrham Knight doesn’t feature any real-life soda products; that’d cost money.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Ripple, and Litecoin have soared in value over the past year, thanks to continued interest from a range of investors.

Film, television, and literature all tell them better. So why are games still obsessed with narrative? A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories, like the ones that play out fictionally on the Star Trek Holodeck.

The dating sim has been experiencing something of a reexamining of late, finding itself in the broader public eye as iterations upon its core tenants are warped, distorted, and pushed past their typical use cases.

According to urban legend, a landfill somewhere in the small city of Alamogordo, New Mexico, bulges with millions of copies of the worst game ever made—a game that many observers blamed for the North American video-game sales crash of 1983. Atari’s bubble burst because of a little alien.

Jordan wanted to build an unpredictable trap. An 11-year-old in dark horn-­rimmed glasses, Jordan is a devotee of Minecraft, the computer game in which you make things out of virtual blocks, from dizzying towers to entire cities.

A strawberry Christmas cake, sexy pants, a pool table, three red jet planes, a hippy bandana, a dog sled, a jetpack, a pair of Adidas trainers, a Tudor throne, a bullet stopped in mid-flight, an iced frappé, an entire shopping mall.

This sims mod lets you wear a bathtub as a hat which will still function as a bathtub, and the people in that bathtub can also wear it as a hat which will still function as a bathtub, and the people in that bathtub can also wear it as a hat which will still function as a bathtub, and the people in that bathtub can also wear it as a hat which will still function as a bathtub, and the people in that bathtub can also wear it as a hat which will still function as a bathtub, and the people in that bathtub can also wear it as a hat which will still function as a bathtub……. >>>>>>>>> ‪#‎BATHCEPTION‬

If it exists in the real world, you can be someone has figured out a way to build it in Minecraft. A Minecraft builder has created a word processor, complete with keyboard and monitor, entirely in the game. And it isn't just for show.

The code that puts a first-person-shooter avatar and reticule on top of random uploaded videos doesn't appear to be publicly available. That's probably a good thing because it makes everything much more stomach-churning.

I hate being in the ocean. Shallow beaches, I can handle, but the deep sea terrifies me more than spiders, snakes and birds who can talk put together. So a game where you do nothing but drown in open water is not my Game Of The Year candidate. But Sortie En Mer isn't supposed to be fun.

illucia.com twitter.com/paperkettle illucia dtr is a patchbay controller for connecting computer programs. Life Sequencer is a game in the illucia suite - it uses falling blocks to build step sequencer patterns (it is also remixable by Conway's Game of Life). Also, it doesn't actually make any sound - it just makes data using OSC. You can then take that data and send it to any computer programs... like Ableton Live or Max. Behind the scenes (not shown in the video), Ableton and Max have some audio samplers running. As I play Life Sequencer, it builds step sequencer patterns. I then patch the data from the step sequencer into the music samplers (so that the sample playhead moves around based on the block patterns in the game). I use cables to select and layer samples, and then I speed up the playback and audio pitch with illucia's knobs. Eventually I patch in some sample rate reduction (and a special glitchy mode on Life Sequencer) right as I trigger the Conway's Game of Life pattern remixer. The Conway algorithm eats through most of the existing blocks, and then I start placing more blocks to build a new pattern. The illucia patchbay then becomes a physical controller for exploring these strange connections & reconsidering the inner lives of computer programs.Cast: paperkettleTags:

On March 28, 2011, Kurt J. Mac opened a new game of Minecraft and started to walk — and he hasn't stopped. Nearly three years later, he's traveled seven hundred virtual kilometers in hopes of reaching the end of the Minecraft world, a mysterious place called the Far Lands.