In the launch wake of Tales of Monkey Island, complaints have surfaced about the Wii port’s framerate. A compromised port isn’t normally news, but one of Telltale’s programmers has responded (vi gamezine) to the complaints by drawing some unflattering comparisons to Nintendo’s Wii, and there’s no news like some juicy gossip. The programmer is registered [...]

Science Daily is reporting a recent research survey from the USC Annenberg School for Communication that reveals that minorities are underrepresented among video game characters. The survey took the racial composition from a year’s top 150 games and weighted it by each game’s popularity. Only 10% of game characters were female and 3% were Latino. [...]

Last week, we identified some roadblocks in the way of the fun when you’re playing an adventure game. They all tied back to the idea of searching through a complex problem space for a solitary solution. It’s time for a bulldozer.

When the Castlevania Movie succumbed to the gentle embrace of common sense and died, I made the terrible mistake of recommending that Konami blast the script into several pieces and then secret them in haunted mansions so they’d never be reunited. Well, it’s comeuppance time, because someone (I can only assume it was a Belmont) [...]

Well, there goes our annual acronym budget. The Entertainment Software Association has sued the Chicago Transit Authority over a January 1 advertising ban on video games with an Adults Only or Mature rating. As is usually the case whenever these things go to court, the ESA is citing violation of freedom of speech. However, before [...]

There’s lots of navel gazing about why adventure games keeled over in the first place. The problem is that most of these analyses amount to little more than unhappy augury about how the genre is doomed to niche status now that episodic gaming has returned it to some semblance of life. However, the reason that the unreflected game isn’t worth making is that there are lessons to be learned from past design mistakes. So it’s high time that whingeing about genre shortcomings be tempered with some attempt to mitigate them. However, it turns out that there’s a lot to say on the matter, so this article will be broken into two weeks. This first one will address the problems and the framework we’ll need for the solutions. We’ll hit the solutions themselves next week.

The June NPD numbers are out for console sales and things are grim out there. It’s another nail in the coffin for gaming’s recession resistance as console sales plummeted 38% relative to this time last year. Microsoft was quick on the spin, however, pointing out that the 360 enjoyed modest growth in the face of [...]

The Penny Arcade Child’s Play charity generally gets the most press around the holidays, but actually runs year round. This was especially apparent this past week when Brian Brinegar ran the second annual Mario Marathon and raised $28,835.76 for the children’s hospital charity. For those unfamiliar, Brinegar and colleagues played through every major Mario series [...]

Like an infatuated zombie pirate, The Monkey Island series has returned from parts unknown to perform unspeakable acts on your brains. It’s pushing eight years since the last installment, which was less well received than its three predecessors, so you may be wondering if this is a revival or betrayal of the brand.

Shortly after Blizzard tried to transfer their China licensing to a new third party, the national World of Warcraft servers went silent. This fracas has been ongoing for a month now, and the blogosphere has been doing some speculative math about it. It turns out that about five million of Warcraft’s eleven million subscribers are [...]