'MySims,' 'Rune Factory,' 'Drawn to Life': Save Cat-Bunnies, Farm With Monsters in Altruistic New Games
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Buddy, can you lend a thumb? MySims, Rune Factory and Drawn to Life give gamers a chance to play the selfless card.
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This summer's lineup of brain-teasing video games includes some brilliant titles that stretch your mind power to its limits, asking you to think laterally to beat the computer or just out-strategize your friends.
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Hobby and student game makers are getting a chance to make games for the Wii console.
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Video game makers are intent on winning the hearts and cash of those that prefer trivia, puzzles, mysteries, music or virtual zaniness to animated warfare.
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Get a peek at a pack of new flying games that will send your spirit soaring or make you sick to your stomach.
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Game designers work to distill the magic that gives a game broad, mainstream appeal. Susan Arendt reports from the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Plus: Full GDC coverage in Game|Life.
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Catch up with the latest news from the world of video gaming.
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Sometimes gamemakers produce interesting titles that prove just as amusing to cranky adults as to less-discerning youngsters. Other times they drop the ball, hard. Game reviews of The Golden Compass and EA Playground by Chris Kohler and Lore Sj&#246;berg.
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Updated casino games combining new technology and mechanical reel games.
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Henry Jenkins  and his observations on social responsibility in Chinese video game culture.
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Tycho:  Having already purchased two fifths of The Orange Box over the last few years, the level of value I have derived from it is "fantastic" but not "supernatural."  For Gabriel, who never finished the second Half-Life and never purchased the first episode, the aforementioned Box represents an intimidating and possibly even brutal level of content for one's holiday dollar.  It's hard enough trying to keep up with all the games that are coming out, but when you start putting more than one game on the disc the difficulty is compounded.   We're lucky, then, than the best thing on there can be completed in only a couple hours.     I've tried to make my rounds through the disc, but I kept coming back to Portal until I'd completed it.  I expect every part of this strange collection to be full of virtue, in the way that Valve's anomalous position in the games industry allows: self-funded development in their sky-high Bellevue commune until each product sings.  But Portal is strange, even for them.  Risky on every axis, we may now say that the "first person puzzle comedy" has now been proven out as a genre.  The gameplay is strong, but Portal's unique combination of hilarity and menace elevates it, resulting in a few perfect, indelible hours of gameplay.          My TeamFortress 2 experience so far on the console has been fairly uneven.  Coming from the PC beta, where I sometimes battled with stability concerns but the games played smooth, I'm now grappling with the reverse.  I love the play experience, as I've already expressed, and I'm rarely of the opinion that having more players automatically improves a game - so the differential between the PC and 360 platforms isn't as important to me as it might be to others.  No, the problem with TF2 on the 360 (and likely the PS3, as well) is that peer to peer hosting just ain't cutting it.  There are games that seem to manage it better, but with Vista PCs authenticating into the service now peer to peer games should be an option.  This needs fixed overnight.     I'll try to complete the second Episode over the weekend, interleaved with finishing the writing on my own game, which has become more difficult since completing Portal.  I'm starting to think that Precipice needs a greater concentration of synthesized ladies.      I would be abdicating my duty if I neglected to mention the EA thing, which is really the EA/BioWare/Pandemic thing.  I was under the impression that BioWare and Pandemic had merged precisely to give themselves leverage over monolithic publishers like Electronic Arts, but who knows.  The biggest fallout in the short term is that, beyond the first Mass Effect, a multiplatform release is almost certain.  Of course, I wholly endorse that kind of thing, but I imagine that Microsoft might hold a different opinion.  After spending years promoting the series, enduring delays, and now having spent months beating the shit out of it in test, it's fair to say that MS was investing in a larger trilogy - one that gamers would associate exclusively with their brand.
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"Come Out and Play Festival" to bring together out-of-the-box designers, techno-philosophers and utopian free spirits. Oh, and gamers too. Photos: Playing PacManhattan
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A selection of games that may some day be on every search marketers shelf.
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It's not all fun and  violence in video games, according to makers of a new genre of  games which claim to boost players' mental health and  self-esteem.
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The use of psychic powers adds a novel twist to the action in two new video games.
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Makers of online role-playing games aim to attract a diverse crowd--and break out of the fantasy-medieval mold.
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A game that eerily mimics misanthropic online reality lets you team up with social misfits from around the internet to blow away all those other pesky jerks. Commentary by Lore Sj&#246;berg.