The Omen X by HP VR PC is nothing if not compelling. The company showed off a picture of the concept earlier today and let slip a smattering of details around the backpack PC, but not much else. No press release, no product page. It was a fairly usual announcement for HP. The hardware company’s VP of Consumer PC & Solutions Mike Nash agreed to shed a bit more light on the… Read More
I’m writing this from a slightly saddened perspective, revisiting my favorite SNES RPGs and realizing something: I’ve been spoiled by modern UX design. The sentiment is pretty universal. Read More
Microsoft is playing catch up when it comes to console sales. But it looks like the company doesn’t want to give up on dedicated gaming consoles. According to multiple reports, Microsoft is about to announce a new, slimmer Xbox One around E3 in June, and a more powerful Xbox One next year.
In April 2016, FCC filings showed that Microsoft was Read More
Minecraft, a game that skyrocketed to unprecedented levels of popularity among all ages because of its open-ended gameplay, infinite worlds, and limitless possibilities for creation and collaboration, is getting a deathmatch mode. Read More
A San Francisco startup whose technology can turn any video game into a tournament played for cash prizes, Skillz, has a new Chief Product Officer, ex-Electronic Arts’ mobile vice president Bill Mooney. Skillz quietly brought Mooney on in February this year. Earlier, at EA Mobile, he managed teams that were responsible for games in the Simpsons and Star Wars franchise. And before that,… Read More
To be fair, an omen isn’t necessarily a portent of negative things. If it was, we wouldn’t feel obligated to qualify it using words like “bad.” Still, the word carries with it some fairly ominous overtones, surely not helped by the 1979 film that carried the title, centering around a young antichrist.
And if HP is attempting to leave things open to interpretation… Read More
Sony continues to impress with the PS4 after the games console passed 40 million sales to date. Read More
Nintendo’s first smartphone application – the social game called Miitomo, which allows avatars to interact in a virtual world – may already be in decline, according to a new report. Following its launch earlier this year, it seemed that Miitomo found immediate success, shooting to the top of both the iOS and Android app stores. Nintendo also claimed in May that the… Read More
Niantic Labs, the game maker that was spun out of Google last year following Google’s move to Alphabet, announced today that its new title Pokémon GO is launching into beta in the U.S. Those early adopters who signed up to become “field testers” earlier in May are now receiving their invites to the game, in order to offer the company feedback ahead of its broader launch.… Read More
Funky physics and controls make mobile games fun. You tap against gravity in Flappy Bird, fling on a trajectory in Angry Birds and press to maintain momentum in Tiny Wings. So when two of Facebook’s top designers left to build their own apps, they wanted to bring a new gesture to gaming… and let worms, not birds, be the stars. Pinchworm sounds simple, but its the mapping of the controls… Read More
I played a lot of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty online when it launched. And by that I mean a lot. I inevitably drifted into watching streams of other players competing in order to improve my game. Eventually I stopped playing as much, and even stopped following the e-sports scene. But since then, professional e-sports has become a global industry, with revenues in the hundreds of millions… Read More
China’s Internet giant Tencent has been expanding its international reach in areas like games and advertising, and as part of that, the company is picking up its dealmaking in Europe. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the owner of the popular WeChat messaging platform is in early talks to buy a majority stake in Supercell — the mobile gaming phenomenon based out of… Read More
It’s hard to compete with PAX. While E3 is still considered as the most important gaming event of the year, video game publishers are slowly but surely spending less time and money for the Los Angeles event. The Entertainment Software Association wants to reverse this trend with a new side event called E3 Live< Read More
Let’s face it. Some tech conferences have lost their way. While TechCrunch Disrupt remains a firmly curated, media-driven, event, with hundreds of journalists attending, a couple of other conferences have really gone for scale. A minimum of 15,000 people, thousands of companies, echoing halls — and a lot of investors (and journalists) turning their badges around so they don’t… Read More
Razer, the billion-dollar firm often labeled the Apple of PC gaming, is finally opening its first concept store in the U.S. this weekend. Read More
Keita Takahashi, creator of the famously bizarre ball-rolling game Katamari Damacy, has a new title, but it’s not for the PS4 or Xbox One — you’ll need a Project Tango-compatible device to play this one. Read More
Glu Mobile, the maker of games like “Kim Kardashian: Hollywood”, “Deer Hunter”, and “Diner Dash”, is today unveiling another celebrity-branded game. This time, we’re taking a caricatured look into the life and times of pop queen Britney Spears with “Britney Spears: American Dream.” As with these types of games, the exact goal is unclear.… Read More
Who remembers Pokemon Snap? The game was released in 1999 for N64 as a rail “shooter”, and let you take pictures of Pokemon while riding through different courses. But while your path through each level was predetermined, the photographs were not. Meaning users had free control of the camera and absolute discretion in what they could photograph and which type of shot to use.… Read More
The team at Disney Research is up to its fun old tricks, this time finding some new uses for off-the-shelf RFID tags. Along with researchers from Carnegie Mellon, Disney’s laboratory wing has discovered a low-latency way to process RFID signals, making it possible to use the tags to turn cheap objects into simple wireless interactive controls that don’t require battery power.… Read More
The gaming community is one of the most vibrant and powerful groups on the Internet. The power of platforms like Twitch to unite gamers interested in watching streams of other people playing video games seems intensely foreign to those outside the community, but has quickly become a pretty dynamic arena for gamers to chitchat online. Read More
What if finding a job were as easy as playing a game? Scoutible thinks its smartphone games have what it takes to assess the aptitude and traits required for certain professions. The company launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York on Monday. With work experience at the White House, Goldman Sachs and a JD/MBA from Harvard under her belt, Scoutible CEO Angela Antony thinks she has what it… Read More
West Ham United has become the first football team in the U.K. to embrace e-sports after the club signed pro gamer and World Cup runner-up Sean Allen, aka Dragonn. Read More
Coffin Dodgers is named for the slang expression for the geriatric. It’s a racing game where instead of motorbikes, cars or skateboards, you are on a race against death on mobility scooters. Yes, it’s every bit as ridiculous as it sounds. Tasteless? Perhaps, but also a tremendous amount of fun. The game has been on Steam for a while, and is launching on Xbox One later this week and… Read More
I know we’re supposed to be all done talking about Flappy Bird, but I think it’s justified to bring it up when it appears in a research paper about why games like Flappy Bird are so hard — and so frustrating. Turns out the controls are fundamentally bad. Read More
