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March 5, 2014 Andy Cush

The premise of Mini Metro seems simple enough: design and build a subway system that will shuttle the citizens of your imaginary utopia from point A to point B in as safe and efficient a manner as possible. But then your population starts to skyrocket, and you don’t have enough train cars to keep up, […]

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March 4, 2014 Andy Cush

Remixing a Biggie Smalls song by playing Tetris. Using a joystick to update a website’s design in real time. Playing Mario with a synthesizer. They sound like scenarios from some hacker fantasyland, but Providence-based artist Chris Novello has done them all. Novello works with a homebuilt device called illucia, which allows him to treat programs […]

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March 3, 2014 Andy Cush

The rise and subsequent fall of Flappy Bird launched countless remakes, imitators, and artistic homages. Now, thanks to a competition for Flappy Bird-inspired games, here are 800 more. The variety of games on display, all of which draw from the ‘Flappy’ template in some way, is astounding. There are relatively straightforward recreations of the original […]

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February 25, 2014 Andy Cush

Anyone can be Pollock or de Kooning with Action Painting Pro, a game that has you create large-scale abstract expressionist works by navigating your artist-character through obstacles, collecting money, inspiration, and health. Here’s a clip of the gameplay. The painting you create is determined by the character’s movements, so each game generates a new work. […]

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February 14, 2014 Andy Cush

Inspired by these illustrations, the game developer Cocoalasca created Sesame Street Fighter, a delightful HTML5 game that mashes up, yes, Sesame Street and Street Fighter. You play as one of several character amalgamations, including Bert/Ryu, Ernie/Ken, and my personal favorite, Oscar/Blanca, beating up your opponent by being the first to correctly type a series of difficult words. Learning and violence! Fittingly, the […]

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February 13, 2014 Andy Cush

Nothing to Hide, an HTML5 game released yesterday to commemorate The Day We Fight Back, flips the usual surveillance paradigm on its head. In its George Saunders-ian universe, spying is so normalized that the state will kill you off stepping outside the range of a surveillance camera even for a second. As a teenage runaway, you’re […]

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Michael Rougeau

ANIMAL’s Game Plan feature asks video game developers to share a bit about their process and some working images from the creation of a recent game. This week, we spoke with Chris Cornell of Paper Dino about Save the Date, a fourth wall-breaking dating game that gets stranger every time you play it. There is […]

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February 3, 2014 Andy Cush

Geoffrey Guterl created a hack that allows him to control an XBox 360 with a MIDI keyboard. In the video above, he demonstrates, playing Tekken — and handily defeating his online opponent! — while playing piano. As you might expect, the music produced isn’t exactly Chopin;  the limited controls and repetitive nature of gameplay make for a […]

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January 31, 2014 Samer Kalaf

When it comes to sports video games today, none is more recognizable than the Madden series. The gameplay of recent versions looks like an actual NFL game, but it wasn’t always like that. Technology has come a long way since 1988. The Museum of Moving Image in Astoria recognized Madden’s progress over a quarter-century with […]

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January 30, 2014 Michael Rougeau

ANIMAL’s Game Plan feature asks video game developers to share a bit about their process and some working images from the creation of a recent game. This week, we spoke with Kent Hudson of one-man studio Orthogonal Games about The Novelist, a thoughtful game in which players must find a balance between one character’s career and his […]

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