Unwinnable

Remember those completely unrealistic hacking sequences in 90s movies? If you like them, you’ll love PWN, by Erik Asmussen. Sam Machkovech got to talk to Erik about his competitive hacking game at the Unwinnable salon.

For more on PWN, visit the Erik’s site at 82 Apps or buy it now from the iTunes store!

Remember when Elvis’s hip shake was the most scandalous thing about music? Us neither. As soon as music could be recorded and reproduced, it pushed up against the polite boundaries of society. For over 130 years, music has used its unique ability to shock in order to question authority (“Fuck the Police“), religion (“Dear God“) and politics (“Maggie“), but no other subject has had so many taboos shattered by song than sex. So, for Sex Week, we’ve collected the sexiest, dirtiest, perviest songs we could find and mixed them together into two of the naughtiest hours of pounding drums, penetrating guitars and moaning vocals that your ears will ever hear.   (more…)

Richard Hofmeier’s Cart Life – a realistic and sometimes brutal portrayal of street vendors struggling to make ends meet that swept the Independent Game Festival awards during this year’s Game Developers Conference – is a deeply affecting game. Hofmeier isn’t interested in his indie limelight, however, and made sure everyone attending GDC knew it with a spraypainted endorsement of Porpentine’s Twine game Howling Dogs over Cart Life’s space at the IGF pavilion the day after the awards. Team Unwinnable’s Sam Machkovech interviewed Hofmeier at Unwinnable’s secret game salon following GDC to get a feel for Hofmeier’s thoughts on Cart Life, GDC and sharing the wealth. (more…)

On April 4, 2013, film critic Roger Ebert passed away after a long battle with cancer. His career as a critic spanned over forty years and three mediums – in print in the Chicago Sun-Times, on television with Siskel and Ebert at the Movies and on the internet with both his blog and his endlessly entertaining Twitter account. He edified a massive audience in his time and inspired countless writers to try their hand at criticism. In fact, there is no critic in the world today who had as far a reach and as much esteem as Roger Ebert. His loss is a terrible one. (more…)

When I sat down in a giant San Francisco theater on Tuesday night to catch the world premiere of Battlefield 4 gameplay, I feared a mess of smoke and mirrors. A long introductory speech, full of corporate bullet points about sales and so-called enthusiasm about DLC. Phony, pre-rendered gameplay, ending all too abruptly with a drool-coated promise of more itty-bitty leaks to come. (more…)

The Critic and the Cloud

With GPS records, computer stats and timestamps in hand, they will eventually strike. They’ll comb through the complaints and the cries until they find a mismatch, and then they’ll issue a statement.

The critic never drove to that point, they’ll say. He did not traverse the highway mentioned in the third paragraph.

And he most certainly did not toggle the hardest difficulty setting. (more…)

The Next Gen Food Chain

Last night, Nvidia announced its first-ever dedicated gaming device, currently code-named Shield. It looks like a slightly oversized Xbox 360 controller with a 5” clamshell screen on its top and it runs a “vanilla” version of the Android operating system.

You might expect such a bulky, open-source gizmo from an industrious hacker – the kind of person who’d squeeze a screen onto a Gamecube controller or turn a toaster into a Nintoaster. What the hell is a company as big as Nvidia doing making one? (more…)

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