Line On Sierra: King’s Quest III, Part 1 July 3, 2013 - Line On Sierra / Shenanigans After a diversion into Space Quest , my chronological journey through Sierra’s Quest games returns to the flagship series. King’s Quest III is unusual among the games in this project because I’d actually played a…

MIXTAPE: You Lose for Playing June 17, 2014 - Mixtapes Execution , Jesse Venbrux (2008) Over the years, I’ve played or read about a lot of games that push the player to feel bad or conflicted about doing the things the game allows. The idea fascinated me when I first played Bioshock ; by the time I…

I appeared as a love addict on a live morning television talk show in Detroit in the late 1980s, when I was 28. The producer, whom I knew through my job as a New York City book publicist, arranged for me to fly out to be a guest, along with an author who had written a book on love addiction. In…

Line On Sierra: King’s Quest I, Part 2 January 24, 2013 - Line On Sierra / Shenanigans In Part 1 of my adventures in King’s Quest I , I dicked around, made a map, then gave up and started reading a walkthrough. In Part 2 I finished the game with liberal application of said walkthrough, and started…

Line On Sierra: King’s Quest II February 12, 2013 - Line On Sierra / Shenanigans Welcome back to Line On Sierra! Last time, I stumbled around King’s Quest I [ part 1 , part 2 ]. If you want to follow along, both games are available in the King’s Quest 1+2+3 pack from Good Old Games . OH HEY THERE.…

If I were going to date a typeface, it would probably be something like Franklin Gothic bold condensed. The font is undeniably masculine—sans-serif, solid, reliable. If it were a human, it’d be the type of guy who would fix my broken sink and play football in the backyard on Thanksgiving. I’m not…

Donald Trump this week repeated his pledge to build a 2,000-mile-long border wall, telling Stephen Colbert that it would be a "big and beautiful" project and that he's going to get Mexico to pay for it. (check's in the mail, gringo). Trump says the wall is the best way to keep out criminals,…

Line On Sierra: King’s Quest I, Part 1 January 19, 2013 - Line On Sierra / Shenanigans Between 1983 and 1998, Sierra On-Line released an absurd number of adventure games. Recently, GOG.com had a package deal on a major subset of them: the four classic series that shared the “Quest” brand. These…

Line on Sierra: Space Quest II August 5, 2014 - Line On Sierra / Shenanigans After a soul-sucking experience as a fussy cop who can’t drive , Line on Sierra returns to actual adventures in Space Quest II: Vohaul’s Revenge ! Since this is a Space Quest game, “adventure” means dying over and over in…

MIXTAPE: Fourth Wall Breakers September 22, 2015 - Mixtapes I’ve always been attracted to media that break the fourth wall. In movies and TV, this can be used to resist the traditional philosophy that the equipment that makes a film is ugly and uncouth and should be treated as a silent observer of a…

Line On Sierra: Space Quest I March 2, 2013 - Line On Sierra / Shenanigans King’s Quest may have been the flagship franchise of the Sierra adventure games, but as a kid it wasn’t my favorite series. That honor went to Probably because gruesome death jokes and Star Wars references were my primary…

Line on Sierra: Police Quest I February 8, 2014 - Line On Sierra / Shenanigans I’m not going to beat around the bush here. I’ve played a lot of games over the past few years. A lot of them were hard to get through for various reasons. But I am confident in saying that Police Quest: In Pursuit of the…

Elena Scotti/Fusion This week, I interviewed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Awards , an event that recognizes those protecting freedom on the Internet. We chatted by Google Hangout because Snowden remains in Russia, stuck in international limbo…

On Thursday, Joe West—the umpire you know by name because he is an umpire who wants you to know him by name—got into a ridiculous staring contest with Madison Bumgarner. The Giants tall tale character was upset with West's strike zone and West doesn't need an excuse to put himself in the spotlight,…

The House Always Wins: “Croupier” and the Thrill of the Invisible Heist by Daniel Carlson Croupier almost shouldn’t work. Directed by Mike Hodges from a script by Paul Mayersberg, and starring Clive Owen in one of his first leading roles, the 1998 film is a gray, uncompromising number that doesn’t…

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Drive through the sprawl of any big Brazilian city and there they are, the short-stay love motels beckoning with their neon lights and names like Magnata and Taj Mahal . Some resemble colossal medieval fortresses for trysts. Others evoke ancient Egypt’s Pharaonic excesses . But…

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl a video game by GSC Game World S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky a video game by GSC Game World S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat a video game by GSC Game World Mary Evans/MOSFILM/Ronald Grant/Everett Collection Nikolai Grinko as ‘Professor,’ Alexander Kaidanovsky as…

For all that it does well, it has failed to help artists take the next steps in connecting with fans Next week brings a major milestone for Apple Music — three months after launch, free trials will start running out and users will have to decide whether it is worth $9.99 a month to stick with the…

“When it comes to probing questions about their intimate life as computer-game players, most people don’t have much to say,” writes Michael W. Clune in his absorbing new memoir Gamelife . “They’ve never thought about it. Or they’ve repressed it. Or they’ve forgotten. Or they’re embarrassed. Society…

My mother’s address book is one of the small visual details of my childhood that I can perfectly conjure, although I am sure no photograph of it exists. Fake-leather-bound, filled with her formal, spidery script, it was, to me, barely legible, with addresses crossed out and replaced with new ones as…

Sam Smith’s “Writing’s on the Wall” — the theme to the next James Bond film, Spectre — finally hit the Internet today, and opinions are mixed. The Guardian referred to it as sounding like an X Factor song, which is the worst thing you can say about music in England short of claiming the song in…

Getty Images Speaker John Boehner, who recently compared his job leading the House's Republican majority to collecting garbage and being in prison , announced on Friday that he will be resigning his speakership and his seat in Congress at the end of October. As the New York Times first reported ,…

Atomic212 Every time Apple releases a new iPhone, excited consumers all around the world wait in line for days , braving wind and rain and obnoxious tech reporters in order to be among the first to purchase the year's hot gadget. This year, however, a woman sent a robot to wait in line for her .…

How a meeting with David Bowie and a chance reunion with the band marked the start of his solo career by Aidan Levy It had been exactly one year and eighteen days since Lou left the Velvets. The moment was indelibly etched in his consciousness. This was his own private 45, and it sent him spiraling…

The most fanciful thing about ABC’s muppetational but seldom celebrational The Muppets is that the late-night talk show behind whose scenes it takes place has a female host. In this regard, I support its vision. I support nothing else about The Muppets except the pilot’s use of the great Jere Burns,…

Stephanie Keith / Reuters In 2006, a blogger named Charles Lavoie argued that every New Yorker cartoon—from bears-waiting-in-an-elevator to two-old-businessmen-playing-with-dolls—could be aptly captioned “Christ, what an asshole!” Lavoie was correct: They totally could. He documented the rewritten…

History was in open rebellion in Dumbo the other day. Cars had fins, and men wore boxy suits. Pacing up and down the block was a tall septuagenarian named Lenny Shiller, from Midwood, Brooklyn. He was on the set of Steven Spielberg’s new movie, “Bridge of Spies”—about a U.S.-Soviet prisoner swap at…

Yogi Berra died last night at the age of 90. We’ll get to Berra the quote machine shortly. First, let’s start with Berra the baseball player. Because, man, could he play. It’s enough of a grind being a catcher in today’s game. But the demands placed on players in Berra’s era were especially cruel.…

If there were an award for feeling most conflicted about porn, I’d take the cake, or maybe the creampie. Despite peddling sex and other bodily wares in various capacities for almost a decade, I’m not so keen on porn, at least the mainstream stuff. It feels reductive and hollow—an apologist for the…

Harman, the manufacturers of the pre-eminent monochrome film brand Ilford have been bought out by a UK-based investment company Harman Technology, the manufacturers of the Ilford Photo range of monochrome photographic products, has been purchased by Pemberstone Ventures Ltd for an undisclosed…

1 On ParkLife ’s Kaytranada -curated stage Sango is dropping some heavy bass. He’s probably not aware of how much he’s shaking up the Portakabin that’s acting as BadBadNotGood ’s dressing room for the afternoon. It’s still fairly early in the clearing of trees that boasts the best line-up of the…

There’s one tiny detail in Resident Evil 2 which illustrates, perfectly, what I love about the game. On the balcony overlooking the main hall is the operation switch for an emergency ladder, which the player can choose to activate. It creates a shortcut between the ground floor reception and the…

Yesterday, Nintendo celebrated the 30th anniversary of Super Mario Bros. release in Japan on September 13th, 1985. The anniversary of the game release in the United States won't be quite as simple, because nobody knows exactly when Super Mario Bros. made its way here. In 2012, former games…

“It’s the fucking Catalina Wine Mixer!” screamed a middle-aged man in an oxford shirt as I entered the main lawn on which the first-ever official Catalina Wine Mixer was being held. “Pow!” someone screamed back as they passed. Yes. This would be where wings take dream, I thought. The main lawn on…

On Oct. 9, 1986, Air Force One delivered President Ronald Reagan to Iceland, where he met with President Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union. The Reykjavik summit, as it was known, marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War. The Boeing 707 that was the primary Reagan-era Air Force One is now…

In a 1997 segment on the short-lived tech TV show The Site , host Soledad O’Brien sits at a bar in front of a laptop computer, talking to Dev Null, a full-scale human avatar with frosted fuchsia tips and a soul patch. Motion-captured from the show’s second host backstage, he swivels from side to…

by Joe Berkowitz and Hallie Bateman Some people say they have no regrets. I regret things about this morning. (Also yesterday morning. Pretty much any morning.) Show me a person with no regrets and I’ll show you someone who hasn’t considered all the possibilities. It’s this kind of…

A dispute in California over whether Uber’s drivers are employees or contractors shows that labor laws that were passed decades ago just don’t work in the smartphone world. But it’s not just about the workplace. This litigation is becoming a Rorschach test for people’s views of the sharing economy…

WIRED Sixteen days into my social media sabbatical last month, I cheated. I was looking for an email address I couldn’t find, and I knew the guy I wanted to reach was active on Twitter. I logged on and tweeted at him. Presto, he got right back to me. So did another friend, with a one-word dm:…