A new, and quite unexpected argument has broken out this week between videogame publisher Majesco and campaign group PETA, following the launch online of a flashgame parody of the popular culinary title ‘Cooking Mama’.

PETA are taking exception to the absence of vegetarian recipes in the game and are registering their disgust with a very well executed and fully playable protest. Cooking Mama : Mama Kills Animals invites [...]

Google, clearly feeling a little jumpy having not announced any new products for a few weeks, have pulled out the stops and announced two quite interesting ones in a single day.

Firstly, the gmail team are about to add themes to the web-interface of their wildly popular and economically brilliant email service. Whilst various hacks and lab extensions have been available to improve / augment / complicate the user-experience for [...]

A ludic footnote to a most networked of presidential campaigns has emerged in the form of Super Obama World. This lovingly assembled work pays solemn tribute to the man and his ideas through the medium of the browser-based flash game, itself perhaps the only form of digital communication the Democrats didn’t use during the election.

Unexpectedly, whilst nothing on the original, it’s quite good fun. Whilst not eschewing the [...]

It’s a key strike in the MS strategy to win back some ground from Google, offering a tight integration with the Windows ecosystem and laying the foundations for the upcoming introduction of Windows 7 next year. Despite the picasa/ flickr alternatives and file sharing servives, the overwhelming sensation is one of being connected - the ‘Live Profiles’ feature in particular representing a clear challenge to the current leaders of the [...]

Building on the clear enthusiasm shown to the recent Infocom suggestion, I thought it might be a welcome treat to point you toward a downloadable and very extensible piece of software.

As the text adventure, pioneered by Infocom and the likes of Scott Adams, became gradually less fashionable/commercially viable the genre of the narrative adventure game required some radical re-invention. As the videogame became more and more obsessed [...]

It was at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, March 2007, during a keynote by Phil Harrison (then director of Development at Sony) that two English developers shambled onto the stage and demonstrated their new game. Fifteen minutes later, Media Molecule and their debut project, LittleBigPlanet, were the most anticipated work on the Playstation 3.

The keynote talk was titled ‘Game 3.0’ which at the time seemed [...]

Ordinarily I wouldn’t put forward games that required a further plug-in, but this is well worth the effort.

Somersault is on the surface a simple bouncing ball game in which you guide a character through a course, traversing all manner of hazards to reach your goal. What sets it apart though, is the control scheme with which you drive the ball. Strokes of the mouse allow you to draw [...]

One of the least prolific but most loved studios to emerge in the last decades has been Double Fine Productions, formed in San Francisco by Tim Schafer after leaving his illustrious career at Lucasarts. Double Fine have so far only shipped one title, the critically acclaimed ‘Psychonauts’, but have developed a reputation for being one of the most personable, relaxed and downright fun places to work.

The Double [...]

LittleBigPlanet, probably the most anticipated videogame this year (about which we have talked before) has been for delayed a few weeks. Usually, such a stall would be down to last minute bugs found in the code or something rather mundane. No-one expected something like LBP to be delayed due to an outbreak of corporate religious sensitivity.

The problem was discovered in one of the pieces of music licensed [...]

A little history.

There was a time, not twenty years ago, when some of the most popular video games in the world consisted solely of text. Acts of startling imagination and brutal violence were executed on screen with a simple string of words: "hit the grue with the Elvish sword."

For those who are utterly tired of retinal over-stimulation, the ‘ancient’ world of interactive-fiction can provide some welcome respite. [...]