While skepticism remains high about how much success Kinect can achieve, Microsoft is proud to shove that skepticism in people’s faces. The company announced that they have sold over 2.5 million units of Kinect, with the potential of 5 million units shipped by year’s end becoming a possibility. Microsoft’s controller-less controller (that’s funny) is apparently doing better than many expected, especially with the Xbox 360 crowd assumed to be primarily hardcore first-person-shooter types. Even more impressive is the fact that Kinect is experiencing this growth while only having around…

My apartment hasn’t had cable for years, and I’m pretty strapped for cash most of the time – understandably, I’m a little behind in the advertising world. But hot damn, have commercials for videogames ever been getting high budget. This one for Call of Duty: Black Ops will either be the best commercial you’ve seen in awhile, or the worst. The cameos by Kimmel and Bryant (and… maybe there’s other stars in there too, I’m terrible with Hollywood) are great touches, and the guy at the end is, of course, gut-bustingly funny – but on the other hand, I have never seen an ad glorify war like this one does. It…

Waterloo Labs, a team of engineers at National Instruments Corp in Oregon, have unveiled the source code for their pet project ‘EyeMario’, which is more or less what you may guess on your second or third try – Mario Bros, as controlled by your eyes. It’s a really cool concept: electrodes hooked up to the user’s face measure the polarity of his or her freaking eyes and the relative position of them within their sockets to deduce what the user is looking at in-game. The result looks… well, suffice it to say that the on-screen action looks about as adept as my mother’s Mario skill. But that doesn’t stop…

I remember back in, like, grade 3, sitting on the old black and white Mac, playing text adventures at recess when I should have been outside making friends… ironically, I never really understood them (the adventures, not the friends), and mostly tried to input obscene commands. As far as I recall, many of them actually worked. I dunno what that says about the writers of these games as people. Anyway, point is, interactive fiction is the tits, and fellow Torontonian Jonathan Guberman has decided to take it to the next (previous?) level with The Automatypewriter. Cleverly-named until you realize…

I’ve never liked Electronic Arts much, DRM-hawking corporate bad guys that we hardcore gamers make them out to be. But this is a sad day, indeed. BusinessWeek has reported that Zynga, makers of Farmville, have surpassed EA in worth, growing to 5.51 billion, next to EA’s 5.22 billion. Imagine that. EA is a gaming GIANT, arguably the most prolific, holding some of the world’s most legendary franchises (The Sims alone is the best selling PC game of all time), and Zynga has been able to surpass it all by selling pictures of wheat and cows to bored housewives. I dunno what else to say. Seems the end times…

I once posted to Techi a video of the CyberMotion Simulator. It was pretty rad – you know, if you’re into that. I, personally, am all kinds of into it, but the CyberMotion Simulator has one grievous fault that hinders my ability to have, like, eight of them in my living room: its unnecessarily monstrous size. ‘But wait!’ you cry. ‘Unnecessary? It needs to be that large! The g’s! THE G’S!’ Honestly, I’d have thought that too, until I saw this little number what I’m ’bout to show you, here. Some truly dedicated gamers have seen fit to rig together their own home version of the CM Simulator, complete with…

Alright, alright, I admit it. The iPhone is a gaming machine. I’ve spent the last few years actively tearing down people’s insistence that Apple holds any sway in the gaming arena, but there’s really no denying it anymore – they do, if only for silly casual games as of yet. But it’s only a matter of time before real, actual factual games properly find their way onto the platform. But how the hell are we going to play them? Apple would have you believe that you need only tilt control and a touch screen to play games, but any gamer knows that’s an outright joke. What we need is a controller, or Steve? We ain’t…

Rejoice! The 3DS finally has a release date, and as you’re probably only here due to having read the above headline, I won’t insult your intelligence nor waste your time by repeating it. So I guess that holiday release everyone was predicting is out the window. But you can wait for a host of N64-era titles in 3D, right? Of course you can. You’re pretty fly. But what else has the 3DS got in store? Much, apparently. Not the least of the most important features is the ability to move all your old DSiWare from your DSi or XL to the 3DS – something I for one am especially excited about, if only because if Nintendo…

Cloudy days have befallen the PC as a gaming platform. Yet it wasn’t so long ago when things were different; A-list games were released for the PC on what seemed to be a monthly basis — consoles were second class. But now the world has their Xbox 360s, PS3s, PSPs, Wiis, and DSs. Subsequently, the PC had lost its touch with the gaming community and was in dire need of help. Could it be saved? Bland, mediocre, unimaginative, stagnant — these are all words that could have been used to describe the PC gaming industry as it stood in the past few years. Ironically, the same technology that helped create…

If there is a more ambitious case modder than Brian DeVitis, I haven’t heard of him. Not content with having his game consoles anywhere but in one place, Brian has taken the liberty of dismantling and reconfiguring eleven game consoles, a projector, and sound system into one box. And, naturally, that box is a life-sized R2D2. Of course it is. Making its debut at PAX ’10, the droid is a fully-functioning one-stop-shop for classic gaming and includes *deep breath* an NES, Super NES, N64, Gamecube, Genesis, Dreamcast, Atari 5200 and 7800, PSX, PSP, Xbox… and Windows XP, just for good measure. Power…