Apparently, you are looking at the President's penis. Read the rest

A few months back we bought a Nintendo Switch. The portable console gets shared between a 46 year-old dad and an 11 year-old daughter. The Switch sees a lot of playtime. Read the rest

Earlier this year, we were treated to a brief taste of Cyberpunk 2077 – the latest game from the developer of The Witcher, Projekt RED. It had me looking forward to the game, despite the fact that I currently don't own a single piece of hardware capable of playing it. With the release of this 48 minute gameplay video, I'm having lusty thoughts about investing in a new console or gaming computer, for the sake of getting my game on as a cyborg. Read the rest

This is a chair? The contraption looks straight out of Robocop. Read the rest

Donut County is a new video game in which you play a hole in the ground that tries to swallow up everything. The more the hole eats, the bigger it gets. It reminds me a bit of Katamari Damacy, the game where you roll an adhesive ball around to get objects to stick to it. Read the rest

Further proof that Anatidae are the meanest of birds.

It's a lovely morning in the village and you are a horrible goose.

Untitled Goose Game is a slapstick-stealth-sandbox, where you are a goose let loose on an unsuspecting village. Make your way around town, from back gardens to the high street shops to the village green, setting up pranks, stealing hats, honking a lot, and generally ruining everyone's day.

Untitled Goose Game is being developed by House House, published by Panic, and will launch on Nintendo Switch and home computers in early 2019.

Scheduled for release on October 9th, My Memory of Us is a game that tackles a game that tackles a difficult subject: the lives of Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Second World War. Engadget recently spoke with Mikołaj Pawłowski, the CEO of Juggler Games, about how a video game with such a dark backdrop will be presented in a way that respects the grim period of human history in which it’s set, while still making it something that folks might actually want to play.

From Engadget:

The story tells of a friendship between and boy and a girl in a Jewish ghetto in Poland, made during some of history's darkest days. You venture outside, exploring what you can of your world now full of walls, decrees and exclusion, completing logic puzzles and looking for small pleasures along the way. The animation, reminiscent of old Disney cartoons, gives the gameplay even greater poignancy. "The story of My Memory of Us is a personal one to us, as our grandparents faced similar oppression World War 2. This game is our ode to them and the millions of others who lived and died during this time," says Pawłowski.

To add to the gravitas surrounding the project, Juggler’s recruited one of the best-known voice talents on the planet, Patrick Stewart, to narrate the game.

Given Stewart’s involvement in a number of worthwhile humanitarian causes, including Amnesty International, I can only assume that the game will treat the delicate subject of the horrors and humiliations that Jews were forced to live in Nazi Germany’s ghettos with the utmost care and respect. Read the rest

The German Entertainment Software Self Regulation Body voted to end a blanket ban on swastikas and other Nazi imagery in Wolfenstein, allowing case-by-case decisions similar to rules for movies and other cultural works. Read the rest

Before Fallout 76 was a twinkle in Bethesda's eye, there were rumors of another Fallout MMO being whispered by gamers. Interplay, the company responsible for the now classic titles, Fallout and Fallout 2, had plans for a title called Project V13 – an installment in the Fallout franchise that would allow players to work together, online, to solve puzzles, finish quests and overcome overwhelming odds in the game’s post-apocalyptic universe. Other than some concept art (which later was used by modders to create some fabulous weapons and armor for Fallout 4), Project V13 never saw the light of day.

Mostly.

For a brief, shining moment (37 seconds, to be exact) there was hope. Project 13 was teased as Fallout Online. They even made a trailer announcing a beta for it.

From The Verge:

O’Green tells The Verge that the already post-apocalyptic Fallout Online was going to start with another apocalypse. By the time Interplay started serious development, it had settled on an American West Coast setting that would span parts of Oregon, California, Utah, Arizona, and Nevada, close to where Fallout and Fallout 2 took place. But around the beginning of Fallout Online, something would trigger an almost comically long series of disasters — potentially including asteroids, volcanoes, nukes, tsunamis, and a resurgence of the series’s powerful Forced Evolutionary Virus. “It wasn’t going to be completely torn down, but we were going to tear it up again a little bit,” says O’Green.

The idea behind the apocalypses was partly to create a world that was still believably chaotic after 200 years and partly to set up new storylines, some of which pushed the series’ science fictional limits.

Robberies, hunting, fishing, sitting around campfires, exploration and that's not even getting into the game's story. Every time I look at Rockstar Games' Red Dead Redemption 2, my need to play it gets so much worse.

I've still got my fingers crossed for a Switch port of the original Red Dead Redemption as well (I hear that the code for the game was something of a knife fight, back in the day, so I'm not holding my breath.) Even if that never happens, the sequel looks to offer be more than enough of the Old West for me to be satisfied by. Read the rest

The odds of seeing Nathan Fillion rock the role of Green Lantern in a live action movie are pretty slim at this point. The same goes for him gracing the silver screen as Uncharted's Nathan Drake. But the high quality of this fan flick ALMOST makes up for that. Behold: Nathan Fillion as Naughty Dog's Nathan Drake. For a fan film, the product quality (and the amount of money that would have to have been spent to pull it all together) is pretty damn high.

Give it a watch: there are far worse ways to waste 15 minutes of your day. Additionally, if you're so inclined, Kotaku has a great story on how the film came to be. Read the rest

As a teenager in the early 1990s, I never really had friends, so much as close acquaintances. I’d see people at school. We’d laugh, maybe skip class from time to time. But I’d never see them on the weekends or in the evening. No one wanted anything to do with me. I was a spooky kid much as I’m now a spooky adult. It was unfortunate, then, that I had a love of tabletop gaming. Battletech was an obsession. Giant robots doing battle with one another on alien worlds? Tanks on legs! What’s not to like? I bought the wee lead miniatures for the game. I painted them up in my mercenary company’s colors. I read the tech manuals for them and the game’s rule books, constantly.

Then, as I had no one to play with, I did nothing, with any of it.

In 1998, I peed a little when a game called MechCommander was released. It let you kit out and command a lance of battlemechs and fight! But it was a real-time strategy—the experience I wanted was that of a table top game. Turns in table top games take time. Rules have to be double checked, movement is counted out in squares or hexes. Nerd country. 20 years later, Harebrained Schemes has finally given me the gaming experience I’ve always wanted with Battletech. It’s a turn-based combat game set in the Battletech universe. There are tanks on legs, there is tech jargon. You can ‘paint’ your ‘mechs in whatever colors you please. Read the rest

Illustrator Versiris has a new series called Video Games Retold, and the first episode is a worthy entry for the story of Dark Souls. It's wonderful if you just want to revisit the game's themes, or even if you never played and want to know the story line. Read the rest

YouTuber thepeterson makes video montages that pull together clips from pop culture days of yore, highlighting what movies and TV shows the masses were watching, what they were listening to on the radio, and what video games they were playing. In the latest one, June 1998 is put into the spotlight. Prepare to take a (possibly nostalgic) trip down memory lane to see what was "in" twenty years ago this month.

(Tastefully Offensive) Read the rest

As an insomniac, I take my gaming seriously. When I get to a point in a cycle of sleeplessness where I’m too tired to work or keep track of where I am in the book I’m reading, I turn to video games to keep me from delving too deeply into the dark thoughts that creep into my skull in the middle of the night.

After waiting for over a year to see if it would prove popular enough with developers and players to make it worth picking up, I finally broke down and bought a Nintendo Switch – that I have an upcoming assignment that involves testing Switch accessories made it easy to pull the trigger, despite its steep price tag here in Canada. The last Nintendo console that I bought was the Gameboy Advance Micro. I still own it, 13 years later, and play it on a regular basis. After tinkering with the Switch for just over a month, I’ve got some thoughts on the major differences between it and my much-loved GBA Micro that I thought might be fun to share.

Cost of Ownership

The GBA Micro wasn’t cheap, back in the day. I remember paying around $200 for it in Vancouver, BC. But aside from the games I’d buy for it, that was it. There was no need to purchase anything else. The Switch? Not so much. After paying $300 for it or, in my case, $400 Canadian, there's still a ton of cash that needs to change hands to ensure a solid experience with the console. Read the rest

Bethesda released a teaser trailer for their next game in the Fallout series, Fallout 76, and man, I am so ready for it.

Having been around to play Fallout Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics in the late 1990s all I wanted was more Fallout. Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas definitely scratched that itch (New Vegas is one of the best RPGs of all time, and yes, I will fight you over it.) Fallout 4, I loved. It was a departure from the feel of the games that came before it, but it wasn't long until I got into the rhythm of the game. It's hands-down one of my favorite games of all time. Despite my love affair with the series, there's a VERY good chance that Fallout 76 will be an entirely different animal than anything that's come before in the franchise. A big clue to this is smack dab in the middle of the game's title: Vault 76. In Fallout 3, Vault 76 was listed in a Citadel computer terminal as being a "control" vault. It makes sense: with every other vault encountered in the Fallout Universe has been screwed with by Vault-Tec scientists, subjecting the vault's occupants to a wide array of social experiments. Vault-Tec would need a control vault to illustrate what sane, well adjusted vault dwellers who were left alone with everything they'd need to survive a nuclear disaster would look like. There's a good chance that anyone coming out of this vault would be healthy, mentally stable and well supplied. Read the rest

Pour another one out for Sony's PlayStation Vita. Despite being a powerful, capable handheld that's great for a bit of fun on the go or as a companion to your PlayStation 3 or 4 when you're at home, Sony's all but ignored the diminutive gaming console over the past couple of years. In 2015, Sony told gamers that they didn't think it was worth making a successor to the Vita.

Fair enough: mobile gaming is Nintendo's jelly. It still hurt to hear, though: I've always had a soft spot for Sony's portable systems (I may well be one of the few people that actually liked the PSP Go). But the death of the Vita didn't feel real to me until today. According to Kotaku, the production of PlayStation Vita game cards will soon be upon us.

From Kotaku:

Sony’s American and European branches “plan to end all Vita GameCard production by close of fiscal year 2018,” the company told developers today in a message obtained by Kotaku. The message asks that all Vita product code requests be submitted by June 28, 2018, and that final purchase orders be entered by February 15, 2019. Sony’s 2018 fiscal year will end on March 31, 2019.

As sigh inducing as this news is, it isn't the end of the world. Vita owners will still be able to download games from the online store baked into the PS Vita's OS. If Sony's support for the Vita is anything like it has been for the original PlayStation Portable, the digital titles that gamers bought should be available to download for years to come. Read the rest