How do we know that competitive gaming is a bit of a big thing now? PBS made a brief documentary about eSports. It looks at the growth of competitive gaming from small events in arcades to massive events watched live by thousands of fans and streamed online by hundreds of thousands more.
Monthly Archives: February 2013
It’s Not Looking Good For Gas Powered Games and Wildman
With one week to go in the Kickstarter fundraising campaign for its in-progress Wildman, it’s not looking good for Gas Powered Games and boss Chris Taylor. The Kickstarter has a fundraising goal of $1.1 million, an astronomical number for a Kickstarter campaign goal, and it looks like they will fall well short of the mark.
With only around $450,000 pledged against the $1.1 million target (amounting to 41% funded) as of last night, it looks as though the Kickstarter will fail and GPG will receive none of the money pledged as a result of Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing fundraising policy. With out that funding to complete the game, it appears as though Gas Powered Games will be forced to close its doors.
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A Look Back At 38 Studios’ Bankruptcy
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning was released one year ago today. While the game was generally well received by critics, the game sold very poorly. In its first month of release, Reckoning sold an estimated 330,000 units with only an estimated 1.5 million units sold by the end of 2012. That ended in the very public bankruptcy of developer 38 Studios, founded by former baseball star Curt Schilling.
To mark the one-year anniversary of the release of 38 Studios’ only game, here’s a look back at the failure of 38 Studios.
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Building Concensus: Dead Space 3
Seeing as metareviews, frankenreviews or whatever other term you prefer for the aggregation of reviews from major outlets on major (read: triple-A) releases are reasonably popular, I thought I’d launch one of our own for big releases that I’m not reviewing.
Today, we look at what some of the big publications thought of Dead Space 3. Does the new co-op campaign kill the game or can it live up to the first two games of the trilogy. Read the rest of this entry
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The Cave Review: A Domain of Evil It Is. In You Must Go.
The second-to-last week of January had a game I was very excited about. Strike Suit Zero was a gorgeous looking space sim. Having grown up on space sims, I was looking forward to a great space flight combat game. Then I actually started flying the titular Strike Suit ship and found myself quickly underwhelmed by twitchy controls and combat mechanics that didn’t work as advertised in the tutorial which resulted in a massive and frustrating difficulty spike.
Fortunately, there was a second big indie game release that week. Double Fine Productions released their much-anticipated The Cave. The developer is best known for their work on Psychonauts and they got a hand from popular games director Ron Gilbert whose resume includes the cult-hit Monkey Island series. Better than the team behind it was trailers promising puzzles, stories and dark humour. In other words, it ticked off most of the items on my checklist of things I like in games.
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Who Won the Super Bowl on Twitter? (Infographic)
So you spend three to four million dollars to get all of 30 seconds of ad time during the Super Bowl. What exactly does that get you? Well, it used to be that you had to wait day or weeks to see any effect those ads might have. Now, all you have to do is check Twitter for a real-time evaluation of the effect that the ad had on your brand. For some brands, the social media results were great. For GoDaddy, it might be best to give up on Super Bowl ads.
To see how the various brands did on Super Bowl Sunday, we have a handy infographic. Read the rest of this entry
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The Super Mario Brothers Theme Meets Heavy Metal
YouTube user 331Erock is best known for his epic metal covers of today’s biggest hits and famous movie music. But the one thing he might do better than those is his metal covers of classic video game music. He’s done Tetris, Metal Gear Solid, Skyrim, Legend of Zelda and many, many more. May favourite cover, by a wide margin, is this Super Mario Brothers cover which includes all of the major themes from the game.
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Catch Up on Dead Space with This Lore Recap
Dead Space is one of my favourite game series of this generation and has now reached the inevitable third instalment. I would have thought that DS3 would have been on Earth and wrapped up the trilogy but that’s not how you milk money from a franchise long after people forgot what the original game was about.
Anyway, if you need a quick refresher of what happened in the first two games, GamesRadar put together a recap of the story of Dead Space 1 and 2. Some artistic liberties may have been taken.
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How to Build an Aperture Science Lemon Grenade
Alright, I’ve been thinking. When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade – make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons, what am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager. Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the lemons!
Anyway, Portal 2 is one of my favourite games of all-time and Cave Johnson is probably the most quoteable man in gaming history. Johnson’s best quote in Portal 2 (though there are many to choose from) was the speech about lemons. Well, Jen over at EPBOT has constructed an Aperture Science (not actually) combustable lemon and even has some DIY instructions on how to build your own lemon.
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What to Expect from Mass Effect 3 Reckoning Multiplayer DLC
Between description leaks and datamining the 1.05 patch, we have some idea of what to expect when BioWare eventually launches their upcoming Reckoning DLC for Mass Effect 3’s multiplayer. Unfortunately, BioWare has gotten better at not tipping their hand in their patches. Read the rest of this entry
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