It’s been almost seven years since Sony launched the Playstation Portable in North America, hoping to steal away the handheld dominance that Nintendo has enjoyed for decades since debuting the Game Boy. It seemed poised for success, offering better graphics and sleeker design than Nintendo’s bulky (and at the time really confusing) touch screen clam shell monstrosity, the Nintendo DS. But predicting the future is never quite so straightforward, and while the PSP wasn’t an abject failure (72 million units [...]
Virtual Insanity: Sorry for Party Gaming
With two weeks to go until Christmas, it’s pretty much a guarantee that everyone has at least one holiday party coming up. Perhaps, even, you’re the person in charge of throwing it. The general requirements for a Christmas party are pretty simple: finger foods, lights, drinks, and plenty of Christmas carols on the stereo. Not that we have anything against traditions, but these alone can leave parties feeling a little, shall we say, boring after a while (or maybe I [...]
Virtual Insanity: Gaming in the Third Dimension
I don’t know if Avatar takes sole blame, but the return of 3D has really taken off (or at least been forced upon us) since Cameron’s masterpiece hit theaters two years ago. Besides the countless cartoons, slasher flicks, low-brow actioners, and Christmas comedies about stoners that now dock you a $3 premium for their little polarized glasses, console makers have been trying to cash in on the 3D fad. Nintendo released their Nintendo 3DS handheld earlier this year, and Sony [...]
Virtual Insanity: Active Aggression
Virtual Insanity is a weekly column by Stephen, mixing editorial reflections on games in general with the latest news about the digital world. Have a game you’d like to see covered in the column? Let us know in the comment section. For those who have never heard of John Gabriel’s Internet Dickwad Theory (from the brilliant online comic Penny Arcade), allow me to enlighten you: A more philosophical way to look at it is through the story of the Ring [...]
Virtual Insanity: Playing Games and Shirking Sleep for Charity
If you would like to donate to the Children’s Miracle Network, you can do it here . Hello, world! In a way, this is the first official post in a new Popblerd feature called “Virtual Insanity”, dedicated to all things video games. I’ll give a proper introduction next week, with some of my history with video games and what to expect in each weekly installment. So for now this is more of a portent of things to come. But gamers out [...]
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