gaming

Game meant to be played in 2,000 years gets buried in desert

The cathedrals of Europe took centuries to build, surviving political upheavals for the benefit of future generations. Can a board game created today also last that long?

That's what game designer Jason Rohrer was shooting for when he unveiled A Game for Someone, winner of the Game Design Challenge at the recent Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco.

Rohrer, who has created titles such as The Castle Doctrine, designed A Game for Someone for a challenge titled "Humanity's Last Game," which it won.

Rohrer's new board game is meant to be played not by anyone alive today, but by people some 2,000 years in the future, assuming our species survives that long. To that end it has been buried somewhere in the Nevada desert, Polygon tells us. … Read more

Speed up your gaming and Internet experience with GameBoost

Is your older computer struggling to keep up with the latest and greatest games? GameBoost claims to save you from having to boost your hardware by giving you more performance through software tweaks. However, any changes the trial version makes aren't noticeable at all. In fact, the program doesn't boost your computer's power or speed one bit.

The trial version of the program offers most of the performance tweaks for 29 days. The "fastest" performance upgrade isn't available unless you buy, though. GameBoost requires some administrator access to work, which makes you think it … Read more

EA treading into social networking territory?

Gaming company Electronic Arts has come out with something totally new -- a free music and photo social networking app called Vue.

No, it's not a social network focused game. It's simply a social network.

The question is -- why did a gaming company create a social networking app? It's not yet entirely clear. According to Venture Beat, it is a "low-budget exploratory project" started by EA Partners group.

The premise of Vue is to find songs on music services like Spotify and Rdio, pair them with personal photos, and then share the package with … Read more

iRunner Review

Gameplay In iRunner, you play a stuffed doll who speeds through various worlds to collect items and power-ups while getting progressively faster. Controls are simple: players tap the "jump" or "slide" buttons in response to oncoming obstacles such as pitfalls, spikes, and hanging light bulbs. Collecting four costume gift boxes triggers a short animation sequence that transforms your character into a superhero while adding a bonus multiplier to your score. As you reach each checkpoint, your character starts running faster as well.

The top panel displays your score, a battery icon, and the number of presents … Read more

Disney shuttering LucasArts, moving to licensed games model

Disney has shut down LucasArts, the video game arm of the Lucas entertainment empire, laying off its staff and ceasing its development of two forthcoming "Star Wars" games.

"After evaluating our position in the games market, we've decided to shift LucasArts from an internal development to a licensing model, minimizing the company's risk while achieving a broader portfolio of quality Star Wars games," LucasFilm said in a statement. "As a result of this change, we've had layoffs across the organization. We are incredibly appreciative and proud of the talented teams who have … Read more

'Game of Thrones' sets record, gets fourth season

We might get to see winter come and go on the continent of Westeros, after all. Despite all appearances on Sunday's season premiere of the HBO hit "Game of Thrones," things are just beginning to heat up beyond The Wall, as well as in Winterfell, King's Landing, and the rest of the world created by George R.R. Martin in his series of novels and adapted for TV by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.

Just two days after the premiere of season three of the TV version, Entertainment Weekly reports that HBO has ordered a fourth season of "Game of Thrones," which drew 4.4 million viewers on Sunday (not including the million pirated downloads). With those kind of numbers on a subscription channel like HBO, the reaction to the network's decision to renew the series has resulted in one of the largest collective utterances of "well, duh" ever heard.… Read more

'Game of Thrones' sets piracy record, report says

"Game of Thrones," the wildly popular fantasy drama on HBO, has set an all-time record via BitTorrent, according to data collected by Torrent Freak.

The site, which tracks the world of BitTorrent and piracy, was tracking uploads and downloads of the first episode of the latest season of "Game of Thrones." It found that just a few hours after the first torrent was shared on the site, 163,088 people were sharing just one torrent. The so-called "swarm" of people sharing the torrent outpaced the previous titleholder, "Heroes," which had 144,663 … Read more

Computer beats human pro at Japanese chess

Humanity lost a little more ground to machines last weekend, in case you're counting down the days to when Skynet takes charge of the planet.

A computer defeated a professional Japanese chess (shogi) player for the first time in a public match, Kyodo News tells us grimly.

A program called Ponanza, developed by Issei Yamamoto, took down 30-year-old Shinichi Sato on Saturday in the Shogi Master Versus Machine Match.

Sato was doing well until he made mistakes midway through the game. … Read more

Audio-based virtual gaming aims to help the blind navigate

A video game that uses audio cues and computer-generated building layouts has proven to be better at improving a blind person's spatial awareness of that place than does actually walking them through it, according to new research out of Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.

The findings could have implications for how visually impaired people -- and possibly those without impairments -- best learn to navigate unknown territory.

"It is a tool to build a map of a place you have never been to before," Lotfi Merabet, the neuroscientist whose team developed the software used in the study (which appears in the Journal of Visualized Experiments), told Reuters. "The video game not only allows you to build a map in your mind, it allows you to interact with it mentally in a way that you wouldn't be able to if you were taught explicitly by walking through it."… Read more

Name your own price for six (really) good Android games

I feel like I'm on bundle overload these days, what with some new software or game collection cropping up on an almost weekly basis.

That said, when I see a good one, I gotta share. And if you're an Android user, this is definitely a good one.

For the next week or so, the Humble Mobile Bundle offers six surprisingly good Android games for whatever price you want to pay. Well, sort of.

It works like this: There are six apps on the table. Four can be had for any amount: a penny, a dollar, whatever. If you … Read more