Gaming addiction made the news again today. This time it was at The Daily Iowan, the local rag at the University of Iowa, and Fark.com. The news itself isn’t terribly interesting, a gaming junkie ends up at an addiction retreat, but the tone is. It’s hidden behind overwrought prose about the toll of addiction on [...]

I miss the coolest news while I’m busy giving PAX its due. You may recall World of Goo, a beverage-driven tower building game. We thought it was pretty spiffy when it came out, and so did about 80% pirates by volume. Despite that, developer 2D Boy gave us all a present for the game’s first [...]

We’ll be wrapping up our PAX coverage with preview impressions of the Assassin’s Creed 2 demo from Ubisoft. Creative director Patrice Desilets took on the role Ezio to kill his way through the streets of Venice so we could see some of the game’s upcoming features in action. Read on for some of the interesting new tweaks you’ll be able to expect from next month’s sequel.

I was just chatting with Andy Hull after this interview, and he said, “Every design decision matters more when there aren’t many to be made.” He’s in a position to know, because his game, What is Bothering Carl? targets young children. It makes his game the odd duck in a pool of ten odd ducks, but Andy’s insight is all the more interesting for being on the outside looking in. Read the full interview for how complicated it is to keep things simple, what it’s like to be stuck outside the mainstream, and a few ins and outs of running a one-man operation.

Nick Lee is one of the artists who worked on Trino, but he perks up like a designer when he chats about mechanics. This comes in handy when you want to talk about a shooter that undermines its most fundamental genre convention. Check the full interview for what makes a a shooter a puzzle game, Trino’s history, and some hints about the team’s future plans.

Tag made a big splash at the Independent Games Festival by taking home the best student game award, so it might come as no surprise that it was included in the PAX 10. We had a chance to speak to Tejeev Kohli, who had his fingers in programming, input, logic, and just about everything else in the game. Read on for the team’s future plans and their insight into the differences into PAX and the Independent Games Festival.

It is an internet-verifiable fact that robots make everything better. You can therefore imagine awesome it must be to play a robot in a robot city as he tries to save his robot girlfriend from robot terrorists. Machinarium is an adventure game that lives up to those expectations in almost every way.

Hey all. I just have a couple of quick announcements for you.

First off, sorry for posting the Monday article on Tuesday. We updated WordPress, and the happy surprises just keep coming. In that spirit, if you happen to see anything broken on the site, we’d like to hear about it. Maybe someday we’ll even figure out a way to fix it.

Secondly, Amanita Design was kind enough to send us an early review copy of Machinarium, so we thought that, seeing how today is the launch day for the game, we’d try being topical. You know, just to see how well it fits. This does mean an upset in the regular PAX update schedule, but if you were waiting for an interview or a preview with baited breath, you can just bump it a post forward in the schedule.

Speaking of which, you may want to look up a post.

Taking ten students from different schools and asking them to make a game in four weeks sounds more like the plot of a G4 reality show than a PAX 10 entry, but that’s exactly how Puzzle Bloom came to be. Jess Rahbek is the designer for that game, and he’s very focused on that job. Read on for a designer’s-eye view of non-gameplay elements, the future of Puzzle Bloom, and one of Jess’s personal projects.

Splinter Cell: Conviction is changing, and it’s taking the stealth genre with it. The new direction speeds pacing in a way that looks promising, but it may alienate traditional genre fans. Max Biland, the project’s creative director, gave a thirty-minute presentation on some of the new features in the PAX auditorium. Read on for the run down on the Mark and Execute system, Last Known Position, and a cute tweak to storytelling.