By Nadia Oxford on Jul 27, 2011 in Culture
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Next time you’re shopping for cat food, take a look at the magazines that are typically peddled beside the cash register. What do you see? Probably a lot of smiling actors and actresses, talk show hosts, and generally a whack of pretty people with perfect teeth.
The media decorates the news, papers, and magazines with actors, but the names of famous directors are usually sandwiched somewhere in between the pages. Michael Bay, James Cameron, Ridley Scott,...
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By Nadia Oxford on Jul 26, 2011 in Business, Online Games, Social Games
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Online retailer Amazon has been showing signs of entering the social games market. Don’t everyone cheer at once, now.
This isn’t strictly new territory for Amazon. The company has been in the games market since 2008, when it purchased Reflexive Entertainment, the developers behind Big Kahuna and Airport Mania 2. As a corporation, Amazon has also been dabbling in digital game distribution, and even though its presence isn’t nearly as impressive as...
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By Nadia Oxford on Jul 26, 2011 in Culture, Nintendo, Nintendo 3DS
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We talk a lot of trash about the companies that make our games and our consoles. To be fair, though, we often do it while standing in line at GameStop with the latest console and digging around in our pockets for some change to pay for the cursed thing (usually after a five-hour wait in a cold, cold queue).
Why do we do it? It’s a natural defense. Our valuable leisure dollars go into console purchases, and the months building up to a console’s release...
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By Nadia Oxford on Jul 25, 2011 in Business, Nintendo 3DS, PS Vita
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With the constant declarations from mobile phone and tablet companies about how the age of the dedicated handhed gaming device is supposedly “over,” you would think that one of them would have the courtesy to send a carrier pigeon to Nintendo. Despite the doom and gloom and the prophecies of destruction, the company that made the Game Boy is still sitting in its chair, slowly putting together game after game and handheld after handheld.
LG is the latest...
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By Nadia Oxford on Jul 25, 2011 in Business, Casual Games, Facebook
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Planet Earth has a perpetual shortage of Awesome Cool Free Stuff. There’s just never enough of it to go around. Oh sure, there’s “Love,” but eh, that’s an okay start. “Peace?” Still not there.
Zynga’s Mark Pincus knows of something awesome that ought to be free to everyone: Video games. When filing Zynga’s initial public offering (IPO) at the start of July, Pincus’ letter to potential investors outlined...
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By Nadia Oxford on Jul 22, 2011 in Free Games, iPhone and iPad
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If you own an iPhone, chances are good that it goes everywhere with you. If you’re looking for some games to load on that puppy but are restricted by a tight budget, consider a few of the many free offerings on the App Store.
Needless to say, some of the free titles up for grabs on the App Store, are, well, bad. But even if you’re broke, you shouldn’t have to put up with sub-par games. Here are ten of the best free iPhone games that are well worth...
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By Nadia Oxford on Jul 22, 2011 in Free Games, Online Games, Social Games
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What Are MMOs? — An “MMO,” also sometimes referred to as an “MMOG,” stands for “Massively multiplayer online game.” An MMO is a game or virtual online world that hosts multiple players–sometimes dozens, hundreds, or thousands–at once. MMOs are played over an Internet connection, and players can typically interact with each other through speech and/or text.
An MMO can be played through a computer, a game console,...
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By Nadia Oxford on Jul 21, 2011 in Culture, Game Development, Marketing
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When kids squabble with one another, we scold them and tell them to “stop acting like children.” Truth is, adults are arguably more attracted to bickering and backstabbing than most youngsters. We sigh and look away, but then we open one eye and catch what we can.
For instance, even gamers who aren’t necessarily interested in Call of Duty or Battlefield can deny that following the often-heated banter between Activision and EA is intriguing. At E3...
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By Nadia Oxford on Jul 21, 2011 in Game Design, Sony
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From a ’90s point of view, the year 2000 looked technologically exciting. We dreamed especially hard about what the future held for video games: With sleek, silver CDs spinning in our consoles, it seemed like we’d taken a major step upward from the “old” ways and were content to let game cartridges decompose into a grey powder.
But we wanted to know what lay beyond CDs, and with the high-tech fantasies that arcades were throwing around in...
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By Nadia Oxford on Jul 15, 2011 in Disruptive Tech, Nintendo, Video Games
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Here’s a handy tip for starting an internet fight: Invade an online gaming community and ask, “What defines a hardcore gamer?” Three hundred posts later, you’ll have a lot of speculation, a lot of arguments, a lot of hissing and spitting, but you probably won’t have a solid answer.
Nintendo thinks it has a good idea of what constitutes a “core gamer;” namely, the player base the company cheesed off with the Wii and most of...
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Scott Steinberg is the CEO of 