Feedback Loop: Long Live the Shooter, the Shooter is Dead

The dispatches from E3 seem to indicate that the shooter remains the same. How long can its dominance last? What comes next?

Is it High Noon for shooters? In his latest post on Brainy Gamer, Michael Abbott seems to think so. He compares the current generation of shooter games to Westerns in 1959, the last year before they started to disappear.

From Rockband to Monsters and Why These Devs are Happier for It

Bryn Bennett and Steven Kimura started working in the videogame industry around 1998 and have a history with notable companies (Irrational, Harmonix) and big games (Bioshock, Rockband). Now, more than 10 years later they’ve struck out on their own as

After Pressing Start: Bioshock's Elevator Pitch

If you go to an entrepreneurship lecture, you are sure to hear about an elevator pitch: the concept of communicating a value proposition to someone in 30 seconds. If you ever meet Bill Gates inside an elevator, you only have

We're smarter than you think

Over the years exploration has been rewarded with collectibles. Mario taking a separate path got him to a magical switch. Items you scoured levels to collect rewarded you with items that provided minor gameplay benefits. Exploration made you stronger or

Ken Levine doesn't want a new console just yet

It’s been said before that this generation’s hardware would live longer than its predecessors; the original Xbox lasted only four years before Microsoft rolled out the 360, which turns six this month. With no official word of its successor, it’s

Today's Episode is Brought to You By…!

This week on Bioshock 3, Abner Ryan, estranged great grandson of Andrew Ryan, visits the site of his father’s death, fighting through thousands of splicers to get there. And his beau, the beautiful Miss Wu, delves deeper into the mysteries

Spoiled Novelty: Mechanical Spoilers

Games aren’t new anymore. They don’t surprise us. The common thesis around the internet is that there’s nothing new in games because developers are creatively bankrupt. There are no new ideas because no one has any except for independent developers;

Ken Levine wants developers in the media spotlight

Bioshock creator Ken Levine’s been doing the media rounds promoting G4TV’s airing of the E3 Bioshock Infinite demo, and appeared on the Gamers With Jobs podcast to discuss the video, E3 and the difficulty in promoting a game in mainstream

The Potential of Movement

If there was a theme of this year’s E3, it was pure potential. Developers one and all offered us lots of what ifs and hypotheticals, a shining glimpse of what the future could be that they then greedily snatched back,

Backlash

Human beings have an interesting reaction to Things That Are Good. Instead of loving them and appreciating them for what they are, we tend towards finding flaws, looking at the things that don’t stick. We say we want something brilliant,