• 8 Reasons I Quit Playing Facebook Games

    8 Reasons I Quit Playing Facebook Games

    Two years ago, I ranted about the need for more challenge and chance in social games. Since then, the entire gaming industry has drastically changed. If I sound like a broken record on that note, it’s because in a fast-paced, high-tech market, it’s always true (and thus worth reiteration). It seems ...

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  • How Not to Play Location-based Games like an Idiot

    How Not to Play Location-based Games like an Idiot

    Welcome to the wonderful world of location-based games! I see you’ve just downloaded a copy of Traveler’s Quest, or Dokobots, or CodeRunner, or perhaps you’ve got yourself on foursquare for the first time. That’s great! You’re about to discover what geotagging and GPS-enabled mobile devices can add to gaming and ...

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  • Abandoning Facebook: CrowdStar Joins OMGPOP, Kabam, Funzio in Mobile

    Abandoning Facebook: CrowdStar Joins OMGPOP, Kabam, Funzio in Mobile

    CrowdStar, developer of popular Facebook games like Happy Aquarium and the "Girl" series (Modern Girl, Social Girl, Top Girl and It Girl), announced today that they will stop developing games for Facebook, according to an interview with All Things Digital.  Peter Relan predicts that 90% of Crowdstar’s revenue will come ...

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  • Don’t Be a Cheapskate: 4 Reasons Pay-What-You-Like Backfires

    Don’t Be a Cheapskate: 4 Reasons Pay-What-You-Like Backfires

    Pay-What-You-Like.  You’ve sometimes seen it called Pay-What-You-Want.  You’ve seen it while leaving your local museum or hippy café as a big box that says “Donations.”  You’ve also seen it for Radiohead’s In Rainbows or with Humble Bundle, the collection of indie games offered for however much you’d like to pay ...

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  • Cats Wearing GUNNARS: Zooey

    Cats Wearing GUNNARS: Zooey

    Meet Zooey O'Leary. Zooey is sporting a pair of GUNNAR Optik's Attache Phenom glasses, and looking good doing it. If you've been following our Dogs Wearing GUNNARS series, you may notice something a bit off this week. Zooey is a frisky first - special edition feline! You can call her a "domestic ...

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  • Hardcore and Back Again: Video Games in a Nutshell

    Hardcore and Back Again: Video Games in a Nutshell

    The SNES was a young kid's dream (in the early 90's). Every game felt brand-spanking new, because it was. When video games first came along, "copycats" were neither a logical thing to consider, nor an option. Video games were casual. They were made for mainstream audiences. And back then, even the ...

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  • 5 Apps to Make You Smile

    5 Apps to Make You Smile

    These are a few of my favorite digital things... This list is hardly comprehensive, nor is it in any particular order. Enjoy! 1. Timehop - This gets top billing because too few people know about it (and more should - it's neat). Basically, Timehop answers one question, every day, via email. "What did ...

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  • The Time Has Come: Pokemon and Me 15 Years Later

    The Time Has Come: Pokemon and Me 15 Years Later

    Last year, when my mind was busy with summer vacation, I came home to an unsettling sight. Roxy's tumor had grown exponentially. Her arm was swelling up to a point where she couldn't even lift it. All attempts to remove the tumor would only make it grow back with a ...

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Atari Gets a Whole Bunch of Downloads

10. May 2012

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Atari Gets a Whole Bunch of Downloads

I don’t necessarily think it’s surprising that people enjoy Breakout and Asteroids. We’ve known this for a while. Still, for those games and a few others in Atari’s catalog to rack up over 10 million downloads in a single year… okay, that’s impressive. I’ll give you that. TriplePoint client Atari may now safely boast, with that figure [...]

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The World is Drawing a Lot Less of Something

9. May 2012

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The World is Drawing a Lot Less of Something

How many idle games do you have clogging up your Draw Something queue? According to the app’s data on AppData (by way of Kotaku), I’d guess about a third of your games are sitting idle. In the last month, roughly 5 million players (about a third of its nearly 15 million users a month ago) have [...]

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Epic Celebrates Epic Anniversary with Epic Music

9. May 2012

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Epic Celebrates Epic Anniversary with Epic Music

I hope you like game music and nostalgia, because I’m about to make your day pretty epic. Epic Games is celebrating its 20th anniversary, and as a swell gift for all of their supporters past and present, they’re giving out 20 music tracks from their vast library of hits — completely free. Anybody old enough [...]

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Facebook + NBA Jam = …Bubble Safari?

8. May 2012

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Facebook + NBA Jam = …Bubble Safari?

Okay. So, Mark Turmell, the guy behind legendarily awesome sports-mayhem-game NBA Jam, just put together a Facebook game for Zynga. Everyone who predicted the game to have nothing to do with either sports or farming, but to instead be a new take on match-three bubble shooters, raise your hand. None of you? Well, me neither, but [...]

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Bigpoint and Square Enix Spin Up Gameglobe

8. May 2012

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Bigpoint and Square Enix Spin Up Gameglobe

If there’s ever been something missing from action-adventure games, it’s… well, I don’t honestly know. But now, if I ever figure out what that is, I can put it there. By way of MMOBomb, we’ve received news that publishers Bigpoint and Square Enix have teamed up to unveil Gameglobe – a browser-based action-adventure game that comes [...]

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Team Meat is Not On Team Freemium

7. May 2012

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Team Meat is Not On Team Freemium

Freemium games may not be a business plan that’s for everybody, but it’s definitely not a plan that works for Edmund McMillen of Team Meat — they of the epic carnage-driven platformer that is Super Meat Boy. The Meating folks are working on a mobile version of SMB, and would like to let the world know that [...]

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Kickstarter Game Backers: Better or Bust

4. May 2012

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In a world where start-up investors outnumber the staffs they fund, it seems we, the people have taken back the power. Actually, for video games, Kickstarter (and its crowd-sourced funding service brethren) are giving “we the people” the first real power or say-so we’ve ever had, during the development process, before games are too far along for [...]

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Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Kick Starters

2. May 2012

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Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Kick Starters

Saving the kingdom from peril, defeating zombie pirates, surviving hostile alien worlds… these were the pursuits that defined the games of our youth. Oh, and cruising the sleazy streets in the hopes of getting laid. It’s that last one which we’ve all apparently remained nostalgic for, if the latest successful gaming Kickstarter is any indication: [...]

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Here’s the Stori of a Lovely Platform

2. May 2012

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Here’s the Stori of a Lovely Platform

Years from now, when your mobile app has sold its billionth copy, your friends will say, “Oh, man. That’s awesome, but how did you ever get started? Where did you come up with the money?” And you’ll be all, “It was AppStori.” And then they’ll say, “App Store-y? Like, it was similar to the App [...]

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8 Reasons I Quit Playing Facebook Games

1. May 2012

1 Comment

Two years ago, I ranted about the need for more challenge and chance in social games. Since then, the entire gaming industry has drastically changed. If I sound like a broken record on that note, it’s because in a fast-paced, high-tech market, it’s always true (and thus worth reiteration). It seems social media and video [...]

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Social Gaming, Real Money Gaming, and How They Play Together

30. April 2012

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Social Gaming, Real Money Gaming, and How They Play Together

What can social game designers learn from games played for real money? AJ Glasser of Inside Social Games attended the Global iGaming Summit last week and pondered that very same question. Glasser notes that the two platforms are (perhaps inexorably) coming together, though they’re not without their differences: A social games player wants to feel [...]

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Magic: The Gathering Creator is Making Location-Based Game, Map Monsters

30. April 2012

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Magic: The Gathering Creator is Making Location-Based Game, Map Monsters

Via Kickstarter, we’ve learned that Richard Garfield, the creator of famed allowance-eater Magic: The Gathering is working on “a free-to-play location-based adventure game.” Entitled Map Monsters, the upcoming title attempts to use location gaming as a secondary mechanic, rather than a primary one: players will not be obligated to actually go anywhere to catch the many monsters [...]

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