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Typically I don’t publish my Culture Clash columns here until they’ve been run at the IGDA website, but honestly, in the last few months I’ve had no fucking clue what’s going on over there. So I present to you my latest – sort of, in that it was filed on June 10 and I haven’t …

It’s no secret that the Nintendo 3DS hasn’t exactly been lighting up the cash registers since it launched back in March this year. With its main USP still seen by many as an unwanted gimmick and under increasing pressure from iOS and mobile platforms, this particular $250 dedicated handheld was always going to be a difficult sell. Even judged by already tepid expectations, the 3DS has endured a rough start to its life on the market, struggling to sell units, and with only Super Street Fighter IV and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – both ports of existing titles from various points in the last 10 years – doing the business on the software front. When Sony matched Nintendo’s launch price for the shinier, more powerful and altogether more striking PlayStation Vita, Nintendo’s reaction almost became an inevitability.

Starting from 12 August, the 3DS will now cost just $169 in the US, £130 in the UK and 160 Euros in Europe.

Harbour Master, he truly is the best of us. Alliance fellow HM, steward of the delightful Electron Dance, has been playing the games that made us. The latest – Chris Crawford’s unforgettable 1981 SCRAM: A Nuclear Reactor Simulator, required plenty of manual-reading and reflection on the misapprehensions about nuclear disasters so prevalent in today’s world. Harbour Master’s …

Back in ’03, a small French game development company, Nadeo, created a racing game within a system designed to allow people to easily build and share a plethora of community-created content. This Trackmania was a platform with so many outlets. It had fresh racing gameplay distilled down to bare essentials. It had a track editor …

You! Yes, you there! With the bowler hat and the suitcase leaning against a lamp post sipping a fine cup of delicious Yorkshire tea. Have you played VVVVVV yet? No? Why not? Because you’re a bad person? Yes, that must be it. In fact right here it says you’re a terrible person. And we weren’t even …

Today I learned there’s such a thing as the Video Privacy Protection Act, a piece of 1998 legislation that apparently requires information about customers’ rental habits be kept secret by those doing the renting. Today it’s a thing because Netflix wants to integrate with FaceBook, and it can’t because of the law’s wording.

So because I don’t actually own an Xbox 360 (nor an Xbox, for that matter), I’ve always had to find other ways to play the (very few) exclusive games in their libraries that I cared about.  So it was that I find myself blitzing through Halo: Reach on my brother’s console during a recent trip …

I’m a little busy with stuff that pays the mortgage right now, so Steerpike will be quiet here at Tap for a while. Happens every year around this time. In the interim, though, I’d like to note that it is currently – according to my neighbor’s outdoor thermometer, at 7:58 PM – 113° in Ann …

Naughty Dog’s Uncharted series are some of my favorite games of this generation, or ever.  They are well-made, exciting, and have the sort of gripping storytelling and character development that so often eludes game developers entirely.  Their cinematic nature makes the series seem like a shoe-in for film adaptation, but the director attached to the …

Here at Tap, we occasionally are honored by guest editorials – from game industry celebrities, from people who are awesome, from others. This one falls into the latter category. You all know Armand K, one of our regulars, and a writer for Alliance of Awesome fellow BnB Gaming. No one really likes Armand; we sort …