Is it the puzzles? Is it the collectibles? Is it the chance to watch your Sim take a shower? Just what makes a game attractive to girls?

Discuss it in Talkback!

I have a friend who’s addicted to The Sims. Okay, that’s a lie. I have multiple friends who are addicted to The Sims. They spend hours at their computers, or at their respective consoles, totally hooked. Even after months or years of addiction, they’re still... Read more...

Jonny takes a look at the role of touch-sensitive input in DS games and how the feature can be used effectively in game design.

Four months into the life of the Nintendo DS, and one month before the launch of the competing PSP system from Sony, I’m going to go out on a limb here: touch input sucks for video games. Or at the very least, it’s being poorly utilized in the first generation of Nintendo DS games, and we’ve... Read more...

What aspects of gaming are still open to innovation by developers? Rick explores the possibilities ...

It’s becoming well-known in the industry that we are quickly approaching a level of graphics fidelity that will put us into a negative trend which Masahiro Mori called the “uncanny valley”, a level of detail where humans look real enough that we are disturbed by the sight of them. We’ve seen... Read more...