Jay Allen

That tell-tale wedding of relentless hostility and ethical affectation is a peculiar youth subculture spilling out into the open web. Get ready for more of it.

The real-world story of the BattleTech series is more confusing and impenetrable than the space politics of its fictional universe. It’s seen several partial buyouts, more than three decades of intellectual property changing hands, and a confusing and largely confidential legal struggle over two countries' copyright and trademark laws. And it all started with anime.

Promoting a game by automatically embedding screenshots in social media sites is a common practice, particularly among developers whose games live on those social media platforms, as well as mobile developers.

However, Emma "Eniko" Maassen, of Kitsune Games, put a new spin on this for her indie roguelike MidBoss, a traditional standalone PC game.

Before The Matrix, there was this, starring Beat Takeshi and Keanu Reeves. Cyberpunk's truest vision lurks not in gnostic fantasy but in the cheap mediocrity of corporate power.

Someone made an excellent cyberpunk movie once. It crowned a form of science fiction that emerged in the 1980s, defining our now-familiar discomforts with corporatization, internationalization, and the dehumanizing effects of being able to talk to anyone, anywhere, at any time. But this wasn't that movie.

A bean-shaped rabbit is impaled on some sort of prehensile spike, but it's fine. "That was surprisingly survivable!" the rabbit shouts, before making a randomly-generated, completely inexplicable motivational poster to help you be inspired by their life experience.
Everything is Going to Be OK by Natalie "Alienmelon" Lawhead is a circus. It's brightly colored and clanking and shrieking and laughing and ridiculous and grotesque—it promises the sort of fun that comes with a tinge of nausea. Rab...

The Moon Fields is a multiplayer brawler inspired by Super Smash Bros. and the Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. It's still early in development, the but basics are already taking form. Controlling space and controlling momentum, awareness of both your own opportunities to attack and the risk of counterattack are all key to winning. But unlike most brawlers, The Moon Fields is the creation of just one designer.
Indie multiplayer games face a host of problems, among them finding enough play...

Pixel art has a certain timeless look, but that doesn't mean the tools and methods for creating it are trapped in 1993.

UK-based developer Cardboard Sword is developing The Siege and the Sandfox, a 2D stealth-based platformer in Unreal Engine 4 using Paper2D, and they've been posting a series of development diaries introducing other would-be developers to using these tools to make their own games.

One of the chief technical differences distinguishing The Siege and the Sandfox is their use of ...

Jake Birkett of Grey Alien Games has been making casual games for over a decade but it was his first collaboration with his wife, science editor and writer Helen Carmichael, that gave Grey Alien a crossover success. They mixed solitaire with the design sense of a historical costume drama to create Regency Solitaire, which met with critical acclaim after being released on Steam. However, this year's follow-up Shadowhand, a solitaire RPG about a highwaywoman that adds card-based combat, had a d...

Miitomo, Nintendo’s sophisticated new smartphone app, is a hybrid of free-to-play game and social network. By combining aspects of each, it becomes a disarming information gathering project. On its face, it makes a game of asking trivia questions about your friends and shares the answers with you. Under the surface, it uses the framing and rewards structure of a free-to-play game to encourage you to expose personal information to as many people as possible. I worry that Miitomo makes eroding ...

In Beacon, you are what you eat. Or rather, you are what you splice. In this roguelike twin-stick shooter, not only do you pick up weapons and equipment left lying around by the recently deceased, you also harvest their DNA and technology. Back at your pod you splice alien limbs or cybernetic upgrades from your defeated enemies into the next backup clone of the protagonist, freelance space prospector Freja.
Hopefully the resulting cyborg-alien hybrid monstrosity will have more luck than her p...

Since March 2017, MechWarrior 5 developers Piranha Games have been facing a lawsuit from Harmony Gold. They’re not the only ones: in the same month, Harebrained Schemes were also targeted by Harmony Gold for their turn-based BattleTech videogame. Mech designs in both games are being accused of infringing on Harmony Gold’s supposedly exclusive licensing rights to anime series Super Dimension Fortress Macross.

The Star Wars universe we see in the films is a dystopia. A corrupt, decadent Republic and its Jedi street judges whose dispassionate brutality would shock Mega-City One are replaced by an equally brutal - but at least functional - dictatorial Empire, which is in turn overthrown by revanchist militants. It doesn't make any sense why anyone might root for any of its "heroes"; their motivations and actions certainly aren't heroic.

Dujanah is searching for her family through a fictional Islamic country covered in video static haze. Her husband and daughter went out a week ago to bury the family hamster, but were killed in the middle of nowhere for no reason by one of the country's occupy...