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TCAF 2011 – Miguel Sternberg interview

While at TCAF this year, we spent a few minutes talking with Miguel Sternberg of Spooky Squid about the latest Torontron arcade cabinet, the High Roller. Also on hand was a playable version of his latest game They Bleed Pixels, a “fast paced, gothic, low-fi pixel art, platforming beat’em up” that will be coming out ‘soon’ on Xbox Live Indies.

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Konami’s E3 2011 Pre-Show events and how to win tickets

E3 Is probably the biggest video game exposition, and this year it takes place June 7th to 9th in Los Angeles. That doesn’t mean you have to miss out, as Konami is hosting a series of pre-shows live across 5 different cities, including Toronto. The venue for Toronto couldn’t be more apt, as the Real Sports Bar & Grill is adorned in a slew of HDTVs, inlcuding a display over the bar itself that stands about 15 feet high, and I’m not talking about a bunch of smaller panels with seams.

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Homefront: Thanks for playing our demo

Spoiler warning: Plot spoilers for Homefront. All four hours of it. Though I would love to expect a higher level of emotional engagement with my video games, when it comes to military-style first-person shooters, I don’t ask for much—probably because they almost always fail to deliver. You run through a bunch of corridors, shoot a bunch of dudes, pick up some new guns with one of seventeen different scopes, hit a slow-motion sequence, feel like a bad-ass. I’ve just distilled the essence of every modern Call of Duty game into…

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Kinect sells over 10 million, celebrates with a Guinness

According to a Microsoft press release, the Kinect for Xbox 360 has sold over 10 million units, and in its short 4 month history has also sold over 10 million standalone titles. It’s a pretty impressive feat, making it the Fastest-Selling Consumer Electronics Device according to Guinness (the Book of World Records, not the delicious stout).

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New Steelseries headsets, ready for your PS3 & iPad

When we looked at a couple of SteelSeries’ gaming peripherals last year, the Xai mouse and 6GV2 keyboard, we were very impressed by both their quality and the technology inside. We were also impressed by the fact that, compared to most ‘gaming’ gadgets, their design was understated — even elegant. Very Apple-like, you could say. Now SteelSeries has decided to broaden their audio options to ”meet Apple Performance Standards for Music, Mobile, and Gaming”. Updated versions of the 7H and Siberia v2 headsets, already available for PC gamers, are coming…

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Bulletstorm review – FPS meets arcade fun

Bulletstorm is a breath of fresh air for FPS games. The Duty Calls parody ad, complete with in-game cries of “boring” was a statement on the state of modern shooters, as if each were as serious a look at war as Platoon, Band of Brothers or Generation Kill. Of course, this Tom Clancyesque style of fiction has as much in common with reality as Plan B’s magical super subs, but that’s another story. Eschewing the gritty ‘realism’ of modern shooters for over the top science fiction is only the beginning,…

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Singularity: Equilibrium

Spoiler warning:This post reveals substantial portions of the plot, including the ending. In the wake of nearly every popular cultural phenomenon arrives a flood of imitators. Their reasons for existing aren’t always obvious, however; some imitators are obvious cash-ins, yes, and others are little more than tributes to the original. But some retreads have higher aspirations—inspired by, but not direct copies of. Maybe it’s an attempt to tell the same basic story in a different way, or tweak parts of the formula to make it more appealing to a certain…

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Hydrophobia: Annals of bad encounter design

Hydrophobia was maybe a bad choice of game to play right after Dead Space 2, because despite their many differences I can’t help but compare aspects between the two. There’s no way a budget XBLA game made by a relatively small developer is going to compete with a big-budget sequel with the might of EA’s vast resources behind it, but luckily for Hydrophobia most of its problems are ones of polish…

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