April NPD Video Game Sales Every month around the second thursday the sales chart for video games and consoles are released for the previous month. They are released by the NPD group, the main company tracking video games sales in the US. Here are the top twenty games in the month of april (courtesy of Gamasutra http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=28566 ):
The United Kingdom has long been known as an international hub of yellow tabloid journalism. The News Of The World, one of the nation's largest tabloids, is famously in court right now because of the deplorable methods it used to acquire salacious information about interesting people. It appears, given their recent string of video game related reportage, that daily newspaper Metro has also had its fair share of morally dubious reporters on staff.
The Kinect for Xbox 360 and PlayStation Move might be fun to play with, but people do not look very cool while they're doing it. Air guitar is not particularly flattering (even if done on stage), and neither is air-anything else, as pleasurable as it might be. This is why I find it strange that a group of admen somewhere in the world think these kinds of commercials would appeal to anyone.
This German video is amazing. A joyously analog interpretation and deconstruction of the digital gaming experience. Malte Jehmlich is as primitive and inspiring as the the Vanuatu natives who devoted themselves to cargo worship after World War II!
There is an abstinence game being created by the University of Central Florida with $400k+ of taxpayer money. The game is directed at middle school girls to help them handle and cope with sexual advances.
Once there was Spin the Bottle. Then there was the embarrassing adult version of Spin the Bottle—on Wii. And then there was artist Hye Yeon Nam, who decided to skip all pretenses and go straight for the spit-swapping, no foreplay necessary. Hye Yeon Nam devised a method for controlling a bowling video game by French kissing. It works like this: "One person has a magnet on his/her tongue and the other person wears the headset. While they kiss, the person who has the magnet on his/her tongue, c...
An iPhone-controlled drone unveiled at the recently held CES is expected to revolutionize the world of video gaming. Called the AR.Drone (AR stands for augmented reality), this new product will literally bring video games to the streets.
While it's unlikely you'll encounter this caliber of insane pixelated madness in real-life, everyday New York City, you might be lucky enough to walk past a tangible "portal" of sorts. Below, images from Pixel Pour 2.0, an installation on Mercer Street in Soho.
Lol. Coming soon for your Super Nintendo!
So you can get your "Thriller" dance on - right in your living room.
I have no idea what this group is, other than I saw it in my Facebook feed. Sasha?
Video capture... how does it work? Apparently, I have no idea. What I thought would be a simple undertaking turned out to be a slow and annoying pain. I just wanted to capture video in high definition and to lessen the time it takes to setup, record, and upload the video.
Mario in Tetris! Pixel art-style! While the two blocky Nintendo properties are obviously a natural fit, it's hard not to boggle at the audacity of it all. The time lapse below condenses an hour and a half of playing—1,112 lines—into roughly 2 minutes. The cap doesn't quite come off, which is to say it never really goes on, but, just the same, it's a remarkable feat. SOURCE YouTube.
The used video game market represents a huge portion of retail game sales. It's the only avenue in which most people can afford to buy AAA games. But game publishers aren't exactly big fans of used game sales, since they only benefit from gamers buying new ones. GameStop and Best Buy are huge corporate interests, so EA and the rest of the big publishers out there have not been able to push them around on the issue of used game sales... so far.
Game Developer Magazine is a prominent periodical for game industry folk to read up on their craft. For those who don't work in games, it can be a little dry, but every year they release a Game Career Guide devoted to welcoming other people into their world. Best of all, it's free! You can view the newest issue just released here in your browser, or download the PDF version.
Well, I know JD wasn't too enamored with the game, but the GIFs available here are kind of adorable, in a nostalgic OMG 16-bit characters type way!
Joseph Ford's photography series couldn't have a more befitting name: If I Were President...
Replace that flimsy, plastic Guitar Hero axe with a soccer ball. These DIY freestyle-footballers play their full-sized, wall-mounted "Football Hero" with skill, achieving a 76 percent accuracy rating after only 17 games.
Google's got a nice new Easter egg for you. On YouTube, you can play the game Snake. Playing Snake on YouTube will only work in YouTube's new video player, and it only works for videos that don't have any extraneous stuff like annotations or ads. What are you waiting for? Get started now!
YouTube keeps coming up with new awesome Easter Eggs to put in their video player, and we love them for it. This one might be the best yet, especially if you're connection isn't great and you find yourself waiting for videos to load a lot. You now can play Snake, the oft-adapted PC classic, in the player window for any YouTube video without ads or annotations. This video will show you how to get started quickly and easily. Now you can waste even more time on YouTube then before!
Less than four months after Snapchat introduced its Snappables platform, Facebook has met the challenge with its own AR gaming feature that surpasses the originator.
Razer, the company known for PC peripherals and laptops, is joining the smartphone industry with a new device. Rumors have been swirling since they announced an event on November 1 at 4 PM EDT, but now, we have our best look yet with a leaked promotional video before the actual announcement.
Google, like Apple before them, no longer supports mobile Flash, but clearly there's plenty of Flash content still available on the web. From games to videos, it can be frustrating to get the most out of your mobile browsing experience without Flash functionality.
Google may have decided to back HTML5 for YouTube, but much of the internet still relies heavily on Adobe Flash content. While the Chrome browser for Android is unable to play Flash-based content like Amazon Instant Video streams, some third-party browsers will.
It's always fun to get an unexpected glimpse of the future, especially when that peek is so close you can actually feel the excitement of the new emerging dynamic.
Chrome has some built-in Flash support, which is great, but sometimes it just doesn't work—and it doesn't work for everything. Unfortunately, the Flash Player plugin was discontinued by Adobe back in the days of Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0), and you can't get it on Google Play.
It isn't a new gadget, but the EyeClops Mini Projector still makes a great stocking stuffer for Christmas Day. It's great for kids to play with, but for techies— it's sure to be something fun to hack and mod this holiday season.
The side-scrolling space shooter (Think R-Type) is one of the oldest and most basic of video game genres, which makes it a great place to start for novice game designers. This video will show you how to make such a game, called "Schnoopter", in Unity3D, an excellent free online game design engine. If you've never used Unity before, you should watch this series for a guide to the absolute basics.
There's a million web games spread throughout the internet now, and if you like to play them, you probably want to play them all the time. And if you play one flash game, you probably play another, maybe 10 or 20. But what if you don't have an internet connection one day? What if you can't play those web games anymore? Well, you can, and all you have to do is download them to your computer. Watch to see how to download and play web-based flash games on your computer without web access.
Watch this video series to learn how to program a game with C++. This series covers the entire game design process and builds skills that can be used in any game design.
If you've made a game using Unity3D and want to present it in the best way possible, you're going to have to use the engine's GUI tools to make some snazzy 3D menus. This video series will show you how to do so.
If you've already watched our videos on basics of Unity3D, the awesome free 3D game design engine, and want something more meaty to dig into, watch this video series for a guide to making C4KE, a charming little 4-player action / strategy romp designed by the creator of this video for a game design contest.
If you've ever wanted to make your own video games and not known where to start, try Unity3D. It's a game development engine for the PC that has a free basic version and allows you to create pretty good 3D games easily. This video series will teach you the basics of Unity, including object creation and scripting.
The concept of video game etiquette is foreign to many people, including a disgraceful number of frequent gamers. The combination of anonymity and role-playing in online games can lead people to be dicks in all sorts of obnoxious ways, making a fun activity distinctly less fun for everyone. Watch this video to learn about proper online gaming etiquette in the context of Call of Duty Black Ops. These lessons extend to most games, however, and practicing them will results in people liking to pl...
In this video, we learn how to install games to the Xbox 360 hard drive (Xbox 101). When you install a game to your console, it can have a lot of positive effects. The first one is: the disc won't spin constantly. This means less stress on the console, making it happier. Next, it will have a better overall performance and make the games load faster. Your system will also run quieter than before! You can install any game by going to the game details and then installing your choice of game. Usi...
You can create basic 2D games with Objective C and the frameworks that the Apple iPhone already has, but the cocos2d framework allows developers to make their games much better, with animations, sprites, cool menus, special effects and more! Most game developers for the iPhone start out using cocos2d because it's a powerful tool, and best of all— it's free.
Looking to create your own mod or write a game to round out your design portfolio? By using the free Reality Factory software, you can create levels, weapons, monsters and everything else that goes into writing a video game. This tutorials shows you how to create an FPS game using this freeware.
