Electronic Arts allegedly in talks to sell to private equity; would "do a deal for $20 a share". [
NYP] [
Int. Business Times]. The markets appear to think there's at least some substance to the rumour, as EA shares jumped more than 7% to $14 in early trades on Thursday morning and have remained at around $13.75. [
Google Finance chart]
posted by jaduncan
on Aug 18, 2012 -
40 comments
"For Iron Man 2, there was a massive set built for the Stark Expo. It was the largest blue screen ever used in a film. It was so funny being there and having Jon explaining that to me, realizing we had done the same thing years before." A comprehensive behind the scenes
interview with the creators of Nick Arcade. (
Previously)
posted by yellowbinder
on Jul 26, 2012 -
9 comments
PCKTKNFE is an entertaining little stop motion short about what happens when video game characters escape the confines of their consoles.
[more inside]
posted by quin
on Jul 23, 2012 -
5 comments
"
Two days ago I purchased one of only two
Nintendo PowerFest 94 cartridges known to exist. The purchase took 74 emails, 27 months, 6 phone calls, 5 failed meeting attempts, 1 sack of cash, and some additional twists and turns to finally complete."
posted by gilrain
on Jul 19, 2012 -
42 comments
Recently we learned about
Erdos-Bacon-Sabbath numbers. Continuing in this vein,
forum members at Select Button have been compiling Williams numbers, being characters in video games who can be linked to Nina Williams from the Tekken series of fighting games.
[NSFW forum images]
Mikhail Gorbachev is easy, he has a Williams number of only 2. Adolph Hitler has a Williams number of 3. Also, the guy from Doom, Voltron, Barack Obama and Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. God has a Williams number of 4. So does T. E. Lawrence and Tron. The Burger King has a Williams number of 5 as well as Sarah Palin, Sigmund Freud, Avatar Aang and H.P. Lovecraft. Homestar Runner has a Williams number of 7.
[more inside]
posted by JHarris
on Jul 1, 2012 -
27 comments
Nobody does this to men in the industry. Nobody says Cliff Bleszinski is wearing such a tight shirt today, and oooh I'd love to rub my hands all over him. At least not to the point where he's uncomfortable at tradeshows. Likewise nobody sexualizes male characters. Some may argue that Kratos represents an unrealistic image of a male, but there aren't massive forum threads dedicated to whether and how people would like to have sex with him. Kratos, Marcus Fenix, and their ilk, are the object of power fantasies, not sexual fantasies. There is a huge difference there. You want to be as cool and powerful as Kratos. Again, nobody wants to be Lara Croft all the time.
Video games and Male Gaze - are we men or boys?
posted by griphus
on Jun 29, 2012 -
124 comments
Atari, the first successful arcade video game company, would have been 40 years old today. The blog Arcade Heroes takes the opportunity to look back over 40 years of arcade gaming (from Atari and other companies) with flyers and video.
Part 1 (1970s & 80s) -
Part 2 (1990s to present).
(WARNING: huge pages ahead with lots of flash videos.)
posted by JHarris
on Jun 28, 2012 -
24 comments
"Legend of Grimrock is a party-based dungeon-crawler RPG made by a crack team of four experienced Finns in just ten months. It is also one of the finest, best thought-out games I’ve played in a long time. Here is a game defined by limitations – small budget, small team, goofy 2D tile-based movement – and yet it is a stunning success because it respects those limits and uses them to do more with less. There is a lesson here for studios both starving and bloated. "
An article on how
The Legend of Grimrock (released in April of this year,
previously on Metafilter) takes a simplified set of rules and turns them in to a finely crafted machine.
posted by codacorolla
on Jun 28, 2012 -
22 comments
Brother Brain is an artist who makes colorful, vibrant, seamlessly looping animations from classic video games. Click on an image for a larger version, and an annotation of the game that the image comes from.
posted by codacorolla
on Jun 7, 2012 -
17 comments
8-bitscapes : Artist Jamie Sneddon and photographer Kevin Rozario-Johnson take cityscapes and add in elements from classic videogames with delightful results.
[more inside]
posted by quin
on May 16, 2012 -
21 comments
There’s no nice way to say this, but it needs to be said: video games, with very few exceptions, are dumb. And they’re not just dumb in the gleeful, winking way that a big Hollywood movie is dumb; they’re dumb in the puerile, excruciatingly serious way that a grown man in latex elf ears reciting an epic poem about Gandalf is dumb. Aside from a handful of truly smart games, tentpole titles like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Call of Duty: Black Ops tend to be so silly and so poorly written that they make Michael Bay movies look like the Godfather series. Taylor Clark's Atlantic profile of Braid creator Jonathan Blow has prompted some strong reactions.
Are videogames dumb? Is hard to make them not dumb? Are most things dumb anyway?
posted by Artw
on May 6, 2012 -
179 comments
