On the eve of the release of Diablo III, I’ve been hearing chatter about the great Diablo series from office colleagues who I didn’t even realise were fans. It turns out, for example, that Greg from finance not only loves Diablo, but he used scam people in it. Today, the man who pays me is reformed (thank goodness!) and wants to warn you about the kind of shady dealings that occur in games like these.
The future is black, announces the trailer for Call of Duty: Black Ops II. The next iteration of the popular first-person shooter hardly needs any marketing campaign: immediately after the official announcement, the gaming press diligently started to operate as an extension of Activision’s PR department. Small and big media scrambled to produce the most comprehensive list of features, talking polygons and frame rates, revealing plot fragments, speculating on new gameplay additions that may or may not rejuvenate the trite shooting genre.
Editor-in-chief’s note: I was annoyed when I heard that ‘an exhibition exploring fascinatingly bad games‘ being held at New York University on Friday would include GoldenEye a Nintendo 64 game I loved when I was in college. Earth Defense Force and Big Rigs I could understand. They’re so bad, they’re good. But GoldenEye? WTF?
As both a game developer and a gamer, I am sad to see the guitar controller fading into obscurity. Guitar controllers are a fun and unique interface to control games, but unfortunately, it seems as though their time may have passed. I reject that.
As part of an ongoing discussion on Twitter and on The Border House with Mattie Brice about Kotaku‘s openness towards minority sexualities (or perhaps just minority issues in general), I asked her to write a piece we could put on the site explaining why she doesn’t feel welcome around here.
This weekend I had the good fortune to attend NYU Practice, a fantastic in-depth conference on game design. I was repeatedly surprised at how clever the solutions were to the presented challenges. The lessons were both insightful and, more importantly, applicable as a game designer working for a social games startup. The NYU Game centre really hit the ball out of the park, and I can’t wait to attend next year.
