By now, you've hopefully seen and enjoyed some of the fun Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild production anecdotes to come out of Nintendo's 2017 Game Developers Conference presentation. A couple of them -- the team's delightfully lo-fi pr...

The easiest time to ignore licensed games is when they're released in step with whatever (typically bad) movie or children's cartoon they're based on. Even when they're based on a good one. Did you know there's a John Wick game? Do you care...

Ah, World War II. The good ol' Dubya Dubya Dos. It's been such a long time since unstable right-wing reactionaries preaching ethno-nationalism wrested control of a major world power, threatening the stability of the entire world, that we're...

I don't understand The Sexy Brutale. I played for an hour while chitchatting with design director Charles Griffiths. After that hour, I felt like I was almost there, like everything had almost clicked. But then the demo ended and I was left...

The impetus behind Dandara was to create a mobile metroidvania that didn't use a virtual keyboard. Thus, a character that doesn't run around, but instead aims jumps, ping-ponging between platforms. And as it turns out, that method of getti...

I only know Doctor Fate from his brief appearance in the Young Justice cartoon, but I enjoyed playing him during my hands-on with Injustice 2 here at the Game Developers Conference. For a game as dark and gritty as Injustice -- Superman is ...

During an Unreal Engine 4 presentation at this week's Game Developers Conference, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford came on-stage for some tech talk about what's powering "the next Borderlands game." As you can see in the archived footage, he's q...

This year's Game Developer's Conference (GDC) is happening in San Francisco right now, and the team behind the upcoming The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild gave a talk where they showed off some of the work that went into making th...

Game development takes a long time, so it isn't uncommon for games to change styles dramatically over the course of pre-release life. Zelda games, in particular, have a history of this, with Twilight Princess originally being envisioned as ...

Rain Games gave us an exclusive demo for its upcoming action-adventure title World to the West. Set within the same world as its previous game, Teslagrad, it looks to tackle a different classic style of gameplay similar to how its predecess...

As I climbed stairs to the top of a blinding white pyramid with The Simpsons' elevator to nowhere on my mind I finally reached a narrow lookout point and triggered my mission: kill three targets from on high. All three congregated beneath t...

There are some combinations that just make sense and are easy to see: chocolate and peanut butter, phones and cameras, Sonny and Cher. Then there are those combos that you didn't know you wanted until some brave soul put them together: baco...

Donald Trump's "Muslim Ban" is hurting more than just families and US foreign relations. A few indie developers are finding themselves unable to attend the 2017 Game Developer's Conference (GDC) because of the executive order. As such, they...

The polls have opened for the audience portion of the 2017 Independent Games Festival Awards and the Game Developers Choice Awards. Have an opinion about last year's best games? Vote! (Here for IGF, and here for GDC.) You'll just need a val...

This is going to be an especially hard year to name winners at the Independent Games Festival. The list of finalists is out, and even just looking at the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, I feel like we're being to asked to name our favorite chil...

You wouldn't know it by looking at me, but I've played a video game or two in my day. No, my life isn't all pining over closed Wendy's and listening to Fastball. I've been known to "get down" with the interactive entertainment from time to ...

The next Paranormal Activity isn't a film. It's a virtual reality game -- one I felt compelled to check out when I spied its demo booth GDC. I just had to know what the heck it was like. I have a dopey soft spot the "found footage" gen...

I was a few minutes late for my appointment with Lorne Lanning, twisted father of the Oddworld series. My last appointment had run long, so I made my way to the same hotel where I saw Starr Mazer DSP, embarrassed that I had kept him wa...

GDC, like most gaming conventions, is a chaotic endeavor where there's virtually no chance that we'll cover every game that we want to. Steven, Brett, and I all walked an average of ten miles a day as we dashed across San Francisco from app...

It's easy to forget that a fair amount of iteration has come to the Lego video game series over the past decade. All the titles -- there are upward of 20 now -- are similar in that they're whimsical, lighthearted takes on popular subje...

If you're going to make a metroidvania, getting your acronym (SotD) as close to the gold standard (SotN) is a good a start as any, I suppose. Song of the Deep is the surprise, GameStop-published (the store and Game Informer magazine owner, ...

Maybe my Bad Journalist seams are showing a bit here, but I cannot pin down exactly what I think Below is. When I saw it at PAX East in 2014, it looked Dark Souls-esque in both combat style and its unforgiving nature. Despite writing a...

It's been three years since Jonathan Holmes squealed over C-Wars, "a post-apocalyptic ARPG + RTS + OMG." And it's not even out yet. Take that, Kickstarter backers! On the other hand, the game does exist in a playable state, so there are mo...

Around this time last year, a first-person puzzle game called Pneuma: Breath of Life released. Although it was built around an interesting conceit, I didn't find myself too enamored with it. The puzzles mostly failed to grab me, and I ...

Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or download it here. This week's Podtoid is coming to you straight outta GDC, where ya boys Steven Hansen, Zack Furniss, and Brett Makedonski overdosed on virtual reality, avoided the indie...