by Owen Good on January 28, 2012
Minecraft‘s head developer has elaborated on how a racial slur made it into a “snapshot build” of Minecraft‘s PC version, noting that it was not pushed to all users. As such, Mojang, the game’s maker, won’t remove the offensive language until the next such update. More »

by Owen Good on January 28, 2012
Whether motivated by trolling or delusional wish fulfillment, some guy tossed up a page pretending to be a registration site for a Halo 4 multiplayer beta last week. 343 Industries, the game’s developer, quickly branded that as a fake, and the site was taken offline. That’s not good enough for Microsoft. More »

by Lawson Douvier on January 28, 2012
by Owen Good on January 28, 2012
Bastion, the critically acclaimed platformer that’s claimed or been nominated for a bathtub full of awards, isn’t available on physical media. Not unless you are serving your country in Afghanistan, and your base’s Internet service is terribly slow. More »

by Owen Good on January 28, 2012
Dark Reign Redux, a remake of 1997′s Dark Reign: The Future of War, a real-time strategy game for PC, just published on the Xbox Live Indie Games channel yesterday, without Activision so much as stapling a flyer to a telephone pole or putting up a card on a café barter board for its marketing. More »

by Sebastian Nordlund on January 28, 2012
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata has announced that the Wii U will feature NFC, or Near Field Communication, tech. That means the company’s next-gen console will have the capability to read and scan physical object and incorporate them into the digital world.
You’d think Nintendo is slightly losing its focus on what should be a gaming console, but the implementation of such a technology could very well work for games too. Just think Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure. In addition, it could be a viable way to purchase content off of the newly announced Nintendo Network, by simply having the tablet scan in credit card information, which it will be able to do.
The Wii U can “read and write data via noncontact NFC and to expand the new play format in the videogame world,” said Iwata, adding that the technology “will enable various other possibilities such as using it as a means of making micropayments.”
