An anonymous reader writes “Notch posted the official page of Mars Effect today, saying through Twitter, ‘it’s a completely different game! Our takes place in space, and focuses on characters, and lets you land on planets!!’ He gives more detailed on the new website, noting the game will be based around hard science fiction (think Star Trek sci-fi) and puts characters in control of a character rather than just a ship. Similar to Minecraft, (more…)

Have you upgraded your hardware to play something beefier than 140-byte Tetris?
New submitter alokmenghrajani writes with “a detailed view of how we size-optimized a game of Tron to just 226 bytes.” It’s also optimized for Chrome, and very fast.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Video Game Characters Alphabet from Fabian Gonzales, which is colorful, entertaining and well designed.

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Simple, elegant yet surprisingly tough puzzle game. Touch the coloured bots to move them to the targets. Bots can push other bots. That’s it!

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Itesh writes “Following an established trend, a Federal Trade Commission undercover shopper survey found that video game retailers continue to enforce most vigorously the ratings governing age and content that were established by the entertainment media industry. Music CD retailers lag far behind movie theaters, as well as movie DVD and video game retailers, in preventing unaccompanied children under age 17 from purchasing entertainment intended for (more…)

A video showing off what may be the coolest game ever has hit the intertubes

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Just Cause is going to be one of those titles that get progressively better as they go. For those of you who have been playing since the first Just Cause, you will know exactly what I’m talking about. The changes that were made from first to second game are absolutely astonishing, yet there is still a lot of work to be done. It’s almost easy to assume that by the time we see Just Cause 3 hit store shelves; it will be the best release to date. (more…)

Eroge mastermind Romeo Tanaka is updating the Japanese adult visual novel Cross Channel (which saw a PC release in 2003, a PS2 update in 2004, and a PSP port of the PS2 game last year in Japan with the new subtitle Of All People) with a 360 version. This 360 update of the PSP game, titled Cross Channel ~ In Memory of All People ~ will feature “original post-game scenarios, additional CG images, additional voice, and more over the PSP version.” And (more…)

Check out these seven music videos that use the imagery of video games for a concentrated blast of awesomeness.

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Chelsea captain John Terry is confident he will recover from a minor injury in time to play against Bolton Wanderers at the Reebok Stadium on Monday.

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