Amanita Design has lovingly crafted Machinarium’s art, but does this pretty adventure game play as well as it looks?

Dear readers, I’ve not forgotten about y’all… it’s just that nothing was really worth writing about. Until now….

But first, I want to tell y’all what I did over the holidays. I made my first visit to the San Diego Zoo. OMG, I loved it! The animals, the park, the air…everything was great. So, I’ve been thinking, “why isn’t there a zoo game on Facebook?” It turns out, there is one (and a few others that are really poorly developed). Apparently, I was just a little behind the craze. Zoo World, developed by RockYou!, has reached over 13 million monthly active users in just six months. Well, I’ve been playing Zoo World for a few weeks now. So far, Zoo World has been an okay game… but the game is a little too simple so it lacks excitements… I mean, nothing really stands out.

War! Huh! What is it good for? John attempts to answer the age old question.

From globalgamejam.org

Attention game developers, the second annual Global Game Jam will be kicking off next weekend, January 29th – 31st. Game developers around the world will be coming together to make games over the course of three days.
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Game tutorials can be bad: walls of text, help icons hidden in far off corners of a player’s screen. It doesn’t have to be this way. Industry veteran Sheri Garner Ray discusses how to teach even players reluctant to try new things.

In this day and age, emergent gameplay and narrative are two of the hottest things in games. Today we’ll look in-depth at each of these two terms and explore both how a player can experience them and how a designer can create these two experiences.

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Five hundred games! That’s a ton of content for the little Wii that could. So, what does Nintendo offer up for this milestone? Well, Super Smash Bros. (N64 – 1,000 Wii Points) for starters and Ninja Gaiden (NES – 600 Wii Points) for dessert. Another title of note is Dragon’s Lair (Nintendo DSi – 800 DSi Points). Not a bad start at all. Of course, there’s plenty more that has made its way to Wii Shopping Channels everywhere and you need only to make the jump to see it all.

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Want to make video games with other aspiring developers? Live in Austin? Check out Game Jam.

Sony launches the PSP’s Digital Comics store. Read on for the press release and impressions.