High Scores And Egos: There's Always A Bigger Doodle 
The Last Moments Of GAME 
How Bad User Interfaces Are Ruining Video Games And Other Wonderful Things 
She Tried To Make Good Video Games For Girls, Whatever That Meant 
The Story Of Doodle Jump: Brotherly Love And Digital Snacks 
Sunday Comics: Dead Island 
Multi-national releases are a difficult process. Not only are there linguistic and cultural barriers to overcome, but very often content or simple monetary reasons can keep a game from entering one country or another. Even so, some games are desired despite their limited availability no matter where you are.
A lot of games set out to tell engaging stories. Some use a narrator, lots of cutscenes or branching dialogue systems. Others embed plot points in the environment. Success rates vary, of course. But what’s the worst storytelling in video games? Why, Gears of War, says Dead Space story producer Chuck Beaver.
Forget NECA’s official Dead Space figures, which make Isaac look like was born disfigured. Remember the Dead Space hero as he should be remembered, with this intricately-detailed, custom-made action figure.
If Dead Space is to be remembered for one thing, it should be its navigation system, where pressing a button triggers an illuminated “path” in the game world showing you your destination. I don’t know if it was the first game to do this, but it was certainly the first to do it so prominently/so well.
Opus Artz is a concept studio in London which specialises in production art for the video game industry. Among its artists are guys like Bjorn Hurri and Theo Stylianides, so yeah, we’re about to see some good stuff.
It looks like an extremely early build of Visceral’s Dead Space, but it’s not. The clip above is a full play-through of Noxious, the final project for the Game Development/Art class at Full Sail University in Florida. If you want try it for yourself, it’s available as a free download.
Sideshow is bringing out a limited edition statue of Dead Space hero Isaac Clarke, dressed in his workman’s duds from the first game, not his space policeman outfit from the sequel.
2011 saw its share of disappointments, but it was also a year that contained a good number of nice surprises. Some were games we just didn’t see coming — they snuck up on us and grabbed us with their excellence. Others were games that we thought were going to be terrible or at best so-so, but which would up being terrific.
