Scribblenauts, the inventive DS puzzle game released in the west in 2009, has won the Game Designers Award at the Tokyo Game Show's Japan Game Awards.
Here’s an FPS which lives up to its name, if nothing else. It is indeed hard, and, in being so unforgiving, the messy drudgery of its combat and cheap instant deaths often see you blasted back to the last checkpoint. If only they had called it Rewarding Progress and extrapolated the design from there.
Videogame designer Jenova Chen was driving when he first noticed the grass fields. Arriving in America from the modernist steel-and-glass sprawl of Shanghai, he’d never seen anything like the verdant landscape beside the interstate highway in California. He stopped his car, grabbed his camera and started clicking. “It was like the desktop wallpaper of Windows XP,” he remembers. “Green grass fields stretching to infinity. I saw a windmill farm – something I’d never seen before in my life.
Rock Paper Shotgun has spotted that Portal is free on Steam. It's a limited offer, set to expire on September 20, and is part of Valve's educational initiative, Learn With Portals, which aims drive student interest in STEM subjects - science, technology, engineering and maths - by getting them to create Portal levels.
Translator Mato Tree's examination of the differences between the US and Japanese versions of Super Mario Bros is fantastically deep and entertaining, comparing the names of objects and enemies in each version and answering such questions as, why is the "But our Princess is in another castle!" text in English in the Japanese edition? Essential stuff. (Via GameSetWatch)
Burrito Bison belongs to a genre so freshly-minted that, as far as I’m aware, it’s yet to be formally named. You could call it a How Far game for the time being – a little like Canabalt, and a lot like PopCap’s hick Facebook glory, Pig Up!
Organisers of the IndieCade festival, the annual celebration of independent games held in Culver City, California, have announced the 36 titles that have been selected as finalists.
A hundred-strong global jury whittled down 446 submissions to 36 finalists whose developers hail from all over the world. Each game will be playable at the festival, which will also feature talks from indie luminaries, networking events, and previews of upcoming games.
Sony has revised its online terms of service, adding a new clause which prevents disgruntled users binding together and launching a class-action lawsuit against the company - unless it agrees to it.
New release NHL 12 takes the number one spot on the latest weekly Nordic chart, which combines sales data from Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
The ice hockey title holds off competition from fellow new entries Dead Island, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine and Resistance 3, which occupy the next three positions on the chart, while Deus Ex: Human Revolution slips to number five after two weeks at the top.