Matt Clarius

Developer Chris Chung's Catlateral Damage is a free-to-play, browser-based game that indulges in one of a cat's worst habits: knocking everything it sees to the floor.

The "first-person destructive cat simulator" tasks players with pushing as many items to the ground as possible in two minutes. Pots, books, plants and more are all fair game for your kitty machinations. Watch the trailer above for a look at gameplay, or play it in your browser.

Catlateral Damage was created as part of the 7DFPS game jam held in August 2013. As of September 2013, the developer is planning for a full release later this year; the full game will include more levels and objects to swipe.

We call it a few different things. The backlog. The stack of shame. Maybe you don't have a name for it, and you simply watch it grow while feeling guilty about your buying habits.

Continue reading…

Planet Express delivery has introduced us to all sorts of creatures across many worlds over the years, but as of this September the adventures of Futurama have ended. A fan has now immortalized the characters in a (nearly) definitive — and absolutely stunning — image compiling "just about every character" from the series, according to DeviantArt user Unrellius. Reddit posters even say that Waldo makes an appearance — good luck finding him among the hordes of Slurm Worms, Trisolians, Neptunians, and Amazonians. It's an impressive collection of the labors of those like lead writer David X. Cohen, who, in an interview with The Verge, said that when looking back at the entirety of Futurama, "It staggers me even to just think we did...

Continue reading…

Futurama is over. No, really this time. After seven seasons, a few cancellations, and multiple visits to parallel universes, the long-running sci-fi animated series finally ended its run on September 4th, with the final episode "Meanwhile." Executive producer and head writer David X. Cohen has been along for the whole bumpy adventure, taking charge of the show following stints writing for Beavis and Butthead and The Simpsons. With the complete series now bundled in a big, expansive box set, we took the chance to talk to Cohen about mixing science fiction and comedy, the pitfalls of being canceled, and Futurama's legacy.

Continue reading…

Santa's finally lost his marbles and gone on a murderous rampage of the North Pole. Now you — professional cleaner and experienced scrubber of gory space stations — need to don your festive gloves, whip out your mop and clean up the bloody mess he's left behind.

Viscera Cleanup Detail: Santa's Rampage is a holiday-themed version of RuneStorm's first-person janitorial simulator. In the original version of the game, players had to clean-up space stations that played host to deep space battles and alien invasions. In Santa's Rampage, players will have to give Santa's workshop a thorough scrub by mopping away blood stains, tossing dead elves into the fireplace and rearranging furniture.

Santa's Rampage is available now on Steam for...

Valve kicked off its annual Holiday Sale on Steam today, with an ever-changing set of deals that will run through Jan. 3, 2014.

The sale comes less than month after this year's Autumn Sale, which went live just before Thanksgiving.

As usual, Valve is offering new flash sales every eight hours, along with daily deals and other longer-term discounts. Wallet-conscious Steam users looking for a discount on a particular game can add it to their wish list and set up notifications so they get alerted when that title goes on sale. While the promotion is running, Steam will also host a Snow Globe trading card metagame; users who collect enough of the special Snow Globe-marked cards can earn an exclusive badge which unlocks in-game content in...

Continue reading…

Shelly Muckberg

According to the Wall Street Journal and independent journalist Brian Krebs, retail giant Target was hit with a major theft of customers’ credit-card and debit-card data captured in stores during the Black Friday weekend.

The company has nearly 1,800 stores in the United States and over 100 in Canada.

"The Secret Service is investigating—we have no further comment as it is an ongoing investigation," Brian Leary, a Secret Service spokesperson, told Ars.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

House of Cards will soon be back. The series will be returning on February 14th of next year, and Netflix has just released an initial teaser to stoke fans' excitement. The slow, noirish shot may not reveal much, but its moody atmosphere should do plenty to remind viewers of why the show is so addictive in the first place. Deadline previously reported that the new season will have 13 episodes, just like its initial run, which should give fans plenty to watch come Valentine's Day.

Continue reading…

Etsy user Edberg Panganiban can turn your Animal Crossing: New Leaf characters into hand-crafted figurines.

Panganiban creates 3 1/2-inch tall resin figures in two categories: basic figures with simple designs and without accessories for $40 to $50 and "fine detail" figures with "intricate line work and patterns," accessories and more for $50 to $100 and above.

Check out the RezArmy storefront on Etsy to see a few figures already created. You can also contact him directly for custom orders. For more on the game that inspired the figures, be sure to read Polygon's Animal Crossing: New Leaf review.

Continue reading…

Indie platformer Stick It to the Man will launch Tuesday, Nov. 19, for PlayStation 3, Swedish developer Zoink announced via the PlayStation Blog.

Stick It to the Man follows Ray, an unfortunate fellow who wakes up with a magical arm attached to his forehead. Although his new appendage allows him to read people's minds, the power ends up being more trouble than it's worth. Adventure Time comic book writer Ryan North penned the game's script, which you can get a taste of in the trailer above.

Stick It to the Man was announced for PS3 in June. The game is a cross-buy title, meaning players who purchase it now will also receive the PlayStation Vita version in December.

Last year, Swedish artist Anders Ramsell released a teaser film for Blade Runner - The Aquarelle Edition, a loving, visually arresting take on the sci-fi classic that on its own took 3,285 watercolor paintings to create. The complete 35-minute film is finally upon us — and it took 12,597 paintings to pull it off.

This take on Blade Runner was clearly a painstaking labor of love, but it's so worth it. Ramsell took the audio from the original film, and lays it atop each of his pieces to create a "paraphrasing" of Ridley Scott's opus. As with the first short, the full film forces you to tease out the emotional force of each scene through the atmospheric score and swirling colors. Check out Roy Batty's famous "Tears in Rain" speech at...

Continue reading…

Following the midnight launch of Sony's PlayStation 4 across North America, users of the next-generation hardware are reporting difficulty in connecting their console to the PlayStation Network, prompting Sony Computer Entertainment to issue a statement asking for patience.

"The PlayStation Network is currently experiencing extremely high volume, some gamers may experience some difficulty connecting. We ask for your patience," a statement on the PlayStation Support site reads. PS4 users have taken to PlayStation's Facebook page, the official PS4 and PSN forums, Twitter and more, to share their PSN issues.

According to a post on the official PlayStation forums, Sony is aware of issues where some PS4 users are receiving an error...

Continue reading…

The latest episode of South Park gives its two cents about the consoles wars and upcoming holiday gift-buying madness, depicting its ragtag band of children embroiled in conflict over securing Xbox Ones and PlayStation 4s on Black Friday.

"Black Friday," which aired last night on Comedy Central, mixes elements of political fantasy series Game of Thrones with the battle for the living room and wraps it in the guise of the holiday rush. Main characters Cartman, Stan, Kenny and Kyle find themselves in the most heated debate of our time as we approach next-gen — Sony or Microsoft's new machine?

The show's characters seem split evenly down the middle, and there are some moments that capture the real heat and emotional depth of the...

Continue reading…

Firing up XCOM: Enemy Within, I wanted to try playing it differently than I was used to playing XCOM: Enemy Unknown. I wanted to test the idea that Enemy Within's additions and tweaks would force a player to experiment with new tactics.

Continue reading…

Capybara Games released a new trailer for its side-scrolling, time-bending platform shooter Super Time Force this weekend that attempts to explain how the Super Time Force itself is a force that sits alongside gravity, magnetism, black holes and karate.

The video, which combines hand-drawn illustrations with gameplay footage, introduces the game's four compound types and explains how they function on the Super Time Force plane. There's a compound whose main ability is dealing with explosives, there's one whose skill is blocking, there's the compound who specializes in charged attacks and compound D is for dinosaur.

"Apart, these compounds are erratic and dangerous," the trailer's narrator says. "When compounded into their super state,...

Microsoft is kicking off its Xbox One advertising in a big way today. The software giant may have struggled with messaging and confusing policy reversals at its unveiling earlier this year, but it’s wasting no time trying to correct the vision for its next-generation console. In a new advertisement, Microsoft has recruited Spock, supercars, and even zombies to push its Xbox One vision.

Microsoft lays down its vision for Xbox One

The 90-second spot debuts online today and similar TV campaigns will kick off in the US on Sunday ahead of the Xbox One release on November 22nd. Although Microsoft took the opportunity to launch its first Xbox One commercial to NFL fans last month, this latest ad is focused on the combined gaming and...

Continue reading…

Ninja Theory's Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, first released in 2010 on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, is now available for purchase on Steam and the PlayStation Store as part of a "Premium Edition" re-release.

The new release includes the original game — an action adventure game set in a post-apocalyptic retelling of classic Chinese tale Journey to the West — as well as downloadable add-on Pigsy's Perfect 10 and three character skins: Ninja Monkey, Classic Monkey and Sexy Trip.

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West Premium Edition is available for Windows PC and PlayStation 3 for $19.99.

Continue reading…

Next month Marvel's Thor: The Dark World will be hitting theaters, but it's already time to start looking ahead to what next year holds. This first trailer for Captain America: The Winter Soldier gives us a look at Chris Evans in the title role, along with Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow, Samuel L. Jackson as the venerable Nick Fury, and Robert Redford. We liked the footage we saw earlier this year at San Diego Comic-Con, with directors Joe and Anthony Russo mentioning 1970s spy thrillers as a particular stylistic point of reference. If you're intrigued by what you see here, you'll have plenty of time to go through it frame by frame: the film won't be released until April 4th, 2014.

Continue reading…

I challenge you to name a game that isn't improved by adding mechs. Tetris? Maybe...

After the X-Com series of strategy games wound down in the late '90s, players had to wait well over a decade for the excellent 2012 reboot, X-Com: Enemy Unknown. Now, players have barely had to wait a year for more alien-attacking content from 2K Games in the form of the upcoming expansion X-Com: Enemy Within.

After spending a few hours playing through a preview build representing roughly half of the new content, it's clear that this isn't the kind of full-on sequel that some other studios might crank out annually. Much of the content in Enemy Within will be very familiar to players of Enemy Unknown; you'll see reused maps and enemies, primary story events, and even many cut scenes. It's not exactly a chore to play through this content again since each playthrough gains some variety through randomization and player choice, but returning players will experience a little déjà vu.

The first major difference you'll notice is the introduction of a new resource type: an orange goo called Meld. You collect Meld by finding and approaching two canisters that are placed randomly on many mission maps. Each canister is equipped with a countdown timer measuring how long it will take to reach it, and it becomes inert and useless if you don't reach it in time (these timers start counting down even before you actively find the canisters, so search sweeps gain a new urgency almost immediately).

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Putting aside the shock and disappointment of seeing a soldier you've almost certainly named after a close friend totally chomp it — the Oregon Trail effect, if you will — was it really all that hard to replace them? Your pal Eric, loyal Sniper, stayed a little too close to that burning Jeep a little too long, and met his demise; why not just name the next Sniper you come across Eric, and kit him out like his predecessor?

Watching your team get killed certainly took an emotional and strategic toll in XCOM: Enemy Unknown; but it wasn't the end of the world, given how easy your troops were to replace. In XCOM: Enemy Within, the stakes are considerably higher. Thanks to new customization features, your troops will feel less...

Continue reading…

Registration for PAX East 2014 badges will begin tomorrow, Oct. 23, on the Penny Arcade Expo website, the convention's organizers announced today.

According to the PAX Twitter account, interested parties should start checking the PAX site as of noon ET tomorrow. In a few follow-up tweets, the organizers noted that three-day badges for PAX East 2013 (photo above) sold out within one day when they went on sale last October, although single-day badges remained available for months. In addition, the organizers confirmed that hotel registration for PAX East 2014 will also go live tomorrow, at the same time as the badges themselves.

Asked why they tweeted a heads-up about registration — something they had not done in the past — the...

Continue reading…

Blade Runner fit its futuristic aesthetics and philosophical questions about the nature of humanity into the trappings of a hardboiled detective story. For YouTube user Chet Desmond, though, it just wasn't quite hardboiled enough. Desmond has recut the movie into a stylized trailer for a 1940s noir film, giving us a quiet, sepia-toned version of Deckard's gritty world. Alternate trailers are a dime a dozen, but the accompanying music — and the sound work in general — is really what pulls this one together.

Continue reading…

Soda Drinker Pro, the "first-person soda" title from indie developer Will Brierly, will launch with Oculus Rift support Nov. 2, the developer recently announced.

Soda Drinker Pro is a drinking simulation that "mixes the accuracy of Microsoft Flight Simulator with the soda of soda." The game will launch with more than 100 levels for players to sip soda in as they explore.

Soda Drinker Pro, which is being developed for Windows PC and Mac, is currently collecting votes on Steam Greenlight. If Greenlit, Brierly will add an additional 100 levels.

Brierly's latest game, Escape Sponge — created during Indie Speed Run Game Jam — is available to play now through your browser.

Continue reading…

This was approximately what my face looked like when trying to make sense of Beyond's story.

In 2010, Heavy Rain changed the way I looked at game narratives. For all the problems with its characterizations and story structure (and there were quite a few), the game was notable for a free-flowing narrative that responded and adapted to player choices well past the point that other games would have forced a "Game Over" and a reload from the last checkpoint. Few other games before or since have combined such cinematic storytelling with so many meaningful choices, with consequences that echo heavily through the game even to the point of allowing for the death of one or more of the multiple protagonists. The result of this sprawling-but-never-out-of-control narrative structure was a game that gave a real sense of tension to even small decisions, one where I frequently paused and carefully considered my options before choosing what to do next.

I rarely if ever stopped to consider a choice in Beyond: Two Souls, Quantic Dream's much-anticipated, PS3-exclusive follow-up to Heavy Rain. Instead, I mainly sleepwalked through a seemingly endless sequence of practically preordained story beats, struggling to care as I was dragged through a clichéd plot with no sense of meaningful agency. This would be somewhat acceptable in a game where tight gameplay is the focus and where the story acts as nothing more than a glorified excuse to set up the next action scene. For a game as story-focused and gameplay-free as Beyond, though, it's downright unforgivable.

A mess of a story

Beyond is the story of Jodie, a "special" young woman (as we're told many a time), and Aiden, the invisible, ghostly companion that she sort-of-but-not-really controls (the game stresses that Aiden makes his own decisions, but Jodie is frequently seen directly controlling him). Their story is told in a series of disjointed flashbacks to Jodie's memories, jumping backward and forward in time in a way that slowly fills in a complete backward-looking story arc where we see her as an emotionally abandoned young girl, scientific test subject, (somewhat hard-to-believe) elite CIA agent, and incredibly predictable savior of the world.

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

It's difficult to describe Enemy Within's new tools and tricks without first introducing the narrative addition: EXALT, an underground paramilitary organization with "misguided sympathies" for the alien invaders, as lead designer Anada Gupta described it to Polygon.

EXALT members are intent on acquiring the same alien technology and artifacts that are critical to XCOM's efforts, but want this technology to help them assume what they feel is their rightful place as rulers of the world. The arrival of the alien menace was seen as an opportunity for them to rise up — and since they have already been waiting for years, maybe decades, to make a move, they don't mind if a couple million people have to die to make their dream a reality.

G...

Continue reading…

The beta for vorpX, a stereoscopic 3D driver that enables Oculus Rift support to more than 90 DirectX 9 and 11 titles, is now available for $40, the developer announced on its website.

Games compatible with the product include Skyrim, Crysis, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Fallout 3 and more. The full list of supported games is available here. According to the developer, a demo will be released in a few weeks.

Those who purchase the beta will receive free updates until vorpX version 2.0 and users are free to install and operate the software on two machines at once.

vorpX can render games in two 3D mode variants. Z-buffer offers high framerates and low latency as it doesn't render two distinct views. Geometry 3D is twice as taxing...