Games Archive

It's Day 0 of E3 2015. This is the time when all the giants of popular gaming make their big announcements, competing for your attention and future gaming dollars. Today is also a big day for YouTube, which doesn't make games, but will soon be introducing a dedicated YouTube Gaming service. It too will be competing for the attention of millions.

The goals of YouTube Gaming are as grand as YouTube itself. Google wants its new website and app to become "the biggest community of gamers on the web" and the destination for live-streamed game video, whether it comes from professional tournaments or amateurs playing just for fun. If that sounds exactly like Twitch, that's because it is. Having lost out to Amazon in the pursuit to acquire Twitch last summer, Google has spent the past year building up its own alternative, and that's what we have to look forward to in the coming weeks.

The first wave of Steam Machines, console-like computers designed to run Valve's Steam software and its thousands of PC games, will be in some pre-order customers' hands on Oct. 16 and in stores on Nov. 10, Valve announced today. The Steam Controller and Steam Link will also hit on Nov. 10.

Could Nintendo really switch to Android?

Japan’s most respected business newspaper, the Nikkei Shimbun, today raised the possibility that Nintendo’s mysterious upcoming system - codenamed NX - may be based on Google's Android operating system. The report is curiously sourced to a single anonymous insider, and takes the form of a column, not a typical news story; moreover, the Nikkei has a spotty record with Nintendo in particular.

But that doesn't make the proposition any less fascinating, and it's one I've been considering myself for some time. Although it would be an unusual move for the Japanese giant, which is famously hesitant to cede control over any aspect of its products, there are a lot of reasons why it might make sense - and why it wouldn't contradict Nintendo's own philosophy.

A God In Ruins is a novel by the author Kate Atkinson, following on from a previous novel by the same author entitled Life After Life.

The book is 24 cm high and 16.2 cm wide. Across the main surface appears a predominantly brown background, depicting wooden boards. Upon them lies or hangs a rabbit, that is possibly dead, but could also be alive.

When the game was first opened up, all players were given the same default avatar: a bald white man. With the most recent update, Rust's lead developer, Garry Newman, introduced different avatars of different racial origins into the mix. However, they did so with a twist - unlike typical massively multiplayer online role-playing games, Rust does not allow players to choose the race of their avatar. Instead, they are assigned one at random.

The year was 1973. They were high school seniors in a work-study program with NASA, tasked with testing the limits of the Imlac PDS-1 and PDS-4 minicomputers. Their maze program flickered into life with simple wireframe graphics and few of the trappings of modern games. You could walk around in first person, looking for a way out of the maze, and that's about it. There were no objects or virtual people. Just a maze.

But Maze would evolve over the summer and the years that followed. Soon two people could occupy the maze together, connected over separate computers. Then they could shoot each other and even peek around corners. Before long, up to eight people could play in the same maze, blasting their friends across the ARPANET - a forebear to the internet. Two decades before id Software changed the game industry with Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, Colley, Palmer and MIT students Greg Thompson and Dave Lebling invented the first-person shooter.

One particularly tricky problem encountered during the development of Star Versus was detecting screen wrap. The solution involved discovering a neat trick that exploits the NES's 6502 processor.

The strangest thing about Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is how it's over a decade and a half old and I'm not sick of it. I don't just mean it's old but I still like it: I mean I still play it regularly. I don't think I ever really stopped. I can hardly remember when I didn't play it. I have no idea how many times I've finished it.

A completely clean-room implementation of Minecraft beta 1.7.3 (circa September 2011). No decompiled code has been used in the development of this software.

I miss the old days of Minecraft, when it was a simple game. It was nearly perfect. Most of what Mojang has added since beta 1.7.3 is fluff, life support for a game that was “done” years ago. This is my attempt to get back to the original spirit of Minecraft, before there were things like the End, or all-in-one redstone devices, or village gift shops. A simple sandbox where you can build and explore and fight with your friends. I miss that.

We're going to remove the payment feature from the Skyrim workshop. For anyone who spent money on a mod, we'll be refunding you the complete amount. We talked to the team at Bethesda and they agree.

We've done this because it's clear we didn't understand exactly what we were doing. We've been shipping many features over the years aimed at allowing community creators to receive a share of the rewards, and in the past, they've been received well. It's obvious now that this case is different.

A work-in-progress cut of All Work All Play, a documentary that focuses on the rise of e-sports and some of the best competitive teams in the world, just premiered at the TriBeCa Film Festival. All Work All Play profiles a few professional League of Legends teams as well as the programming director of the Electronic Sports League, Michal "Carmac" Blicharz. The film attempts to bring the viewer into the world of competitive gaming while constantly making comparisons to other professional sports by highlighting team changes, grandiose spectacles, intense crowds, and broadcasters.

The day Mariina Hallikainen received a communique detailing first day sales stats for Cities: Skylines, she was very happy.

The numbers were wildly ahead of all projections. She decided to splurge on a decadent and indulgent treat.

She ordered a strawberry cream cake.

Bithell has become one of a growing number of prominent indie game developers known by name after releasing a hit game. New platforms like Steam and iOS have made it easier than ever for a single developer to create a successful game, and sometimes those games really blow up - developers like Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson have become fast millionaires solely off of a single title. But after the elation of a hit game comes a sudden realization: you need to make another one.

Nintendo finally confirmed today it will be making the leap to mobile game development as part of a new partnership with DeNA.

According to a statement released by the companies today, new Nintendo IP will be developed for smart devices and specifically optimized for this platform. In other words, rather than porting games created specifically for the Wii U or the Nintendo 3DS you can expect entirely new titles on mobile.