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Many gamers see the film industry as the premier model that video games should follow, and it's no surprise. Movies are seen as the most legitimate and profitable of all artistic visual mediums, which is certainly qualities practitioners of any new medium would desire. Big bud ...more

Augmented reality startup Nreal was a hit at this month's CES event, with some even calling the device a worthy challenger to the Magic Leap One. However, the company's path to success in the US may not be as smooth as it first seemed, as gaming giant Epic Games has lodged a ...more

The App Store has been around for almost 14 years now, and during that time, we must have seen over a million games come and go and stay and expand. But only a tiny fraction of those games have become blockbuster sensations because of the mighty App Store's reach on iPhone and ...more

Carpe Fulgur translates to something along the lines of "Seize the Lightning" in Latin. Sometimes that is enacted with golf clubs by idiots. But the three intrepid indie video game localizers who work under that name are trying to do it the right way: metaphorically. They are ...more

A mustachioed Italian plumber collects coins and battles bullets, plants, fish, mushrooms, and turtles in strange environments to save a princess held captive by a crazy, spiked-shell, bipedal tortoise. It's insane to think that Mario saved the video game industry—but he did. ...more

We love you. Yes, you, esteemed reader. Your attention is what keeps Indie Games Ichiban World going, and we'd like to thank you for that, every single week. How? With $10! No, we're not sending you money just for partaking in this World. That is not a sustainable business m ...more

Video games were blamed in the death of Chris Staniforth last May, but now things have gotten worse as video games take the blame for a more recent tragedy... Ten days ago, a man who'd lost his mind committed an atrocity, perpetrating more evil in one day than most can even f ...more

If you want to play a game in the Play Store before committing to actually downloading and installing it, you can do that with Google's Android Instant Apps technology. However, if you don't see a "Try Now" button on the app's Play Store page, you'll need to check your Android ...more

Since the beginning of last year, every six months or so the fine folks at Wolfire Games have gathered indie developers together to release a combo gaming pack called Humble Indie Bundle. Not only are the included games good, but the way one buys them is what makes Humble Indi ...more

With would-be unicorns Magic Leap and Niantic among its investments, Google is an active investor in augmented reality technology. This week, the search giant experienced both ends of the investment cycle, with an exit via Lyft's acquisition of Blue Vision Labs, and a funding ...more

Whenever you're on a FaceTime call, you can use SharePlay on your iPhone or iPad to screen share, watch TV or movies together, work out with each other, and even listen to the same music at the same time. SharePlay also recently received a new skill that turns FaceTime into a ...more

Normally, you'd have to jailbreak your iPad or iPhone to play any games that aren't available in the iOS App Store, like the now-extinct Flappy Bird game. But this isn't the case if you want to play some of your favorite old school Nintendo classics. There's a web app called ...more

Over the past few years, indie game developers have gathered together to release their products in the widely popular Humble Indie Bundle, a collection that gamers can purchase for whatever price they want. It's a win-win for both. Developers get more exposure for their games, ...more

Guiding internet users to useful content is one of the most lucrative businesses in the world. This process is called aggregation. Google and other search engines form the top of the food chain, aggregating all of the content on the web in response to queries. There are all so ...more

I can definitely say that my MacBook is one of my best friends, but I was still very disappointed when I realized that the only game my laptop came with was chess. For starters, I'm not very good at chess. I haven't even beat the computer once, which really grinds my gears. Bu ...more

There's more than one way to get free credits and discounts in the Google Play Store for apps, games, books, movies, in-app items, and other Play Store content. You may know a few of them — but some of these may surprise you. When it comes to spending on apps, games, and in-a ...more

If you have a PlayStation 5 and an Android phone running Android 12, you can stream and play your PS5 games right from your mobile device using PS Remote Play. While simply pairing your PS5's DualSense wireless controller with your phone will give you the basic controls to pla ...more

While Magic Leap turned heads at the Game Developers Conference with AR experiences at the Unity and Unreal Engine booths, news broke that the company was the winning bidder for ODG's patents. Speaking of GDC, Epic Games used its pulpit at the conference to announce a new fun ...more

The fight to wrest control of apps from Apple's revenue-focused grip just took a major turn in favor of Epic Games. On Friday, a court issued a permanent injunction against Apple that now allows developers to direct customers to outside payment systems. • Don't Miss: Epic Ga ...more

The war between horror movie monsters has been going on for the better part of the last century. We're talking vampires, werewolves, ghosts, zombies and mutant flying creatures, each of which has had their fair share of the limelight in film. But it comes and goes. Once movieg ...more

The folks over at Sony gave a little teaser of what could be, introducing Playstation Now at this year's CES event in Las Vegas. According to the PlayStation blog, PlayStation Now will function as a streaming game service. "With PlayStation Now, you will be able to stream pop ...more

In 2008, Audiosurf came out on Steam, creating the psychedelic music game genre. If you haven't played it in the intervening three years, you're missing out on one of the coolest things in video games. The player selects any MP3 on their computer, then the game builds a unique ...more

Reading the augmented reality news lately has felt a bit like reading a John Grisham novel, as the business side of things has dripped with legal drama. This week alone, a patent infringement case involving Meta Company (or what's left of it) approached its climax. Meanwhile, ...more

Chrome has some built-in Flash support, which is great, but sometimes it just doesn't work—and it doesn't work for everything. Unfortunately, the Flash Player plugin was discontinued by Adobe back in the days of Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0), and you can't get it on Google ...more

Mystery is a tricky thing. Used correctly, it can give onlookers the impression that wondrous and perhaps valuable things are afoot. However, once the veil of suspension of disbelief is removed in any significant way, that same mystery can quickly turn into not just skepticism ...more

Most of us have, at one point or another, found ourselves glued to our smartphone in a trance-like state, totally unaware of what's around us. Well, Apple has a way to curb overuse with an awesome tool for iPhone starting in iOS 12. It can help nudge us away from our phones to ...more

When you're playing a game on your iPhone, the chances are good that you'll come across an ad you have to watch before you can continue — especially on free games. While it may be annoying to be forced to wait for 10 seconds or even up to a full minute, it can be even more fru ...more

Microsoft believes its Mesh platform can help developers build immersive AR apps more easily. We spoke with a member of the Microsoft team to learn more about the platform. Meanwhile, one of the companies appearing on stage during Microsoft's AR event where Mesh was unveiled, ...more

Voicing your displease with a shoddy third-party app or professing your love for an album you've just bought is normal, which is why we have ratings and reviews. You hate something, you write something. You love something, you rate it. But feelings change over time, so your ra ...more

San Francisco-based 6D.ai is preparing to launch a beta of its AR cloud platform that's capable of constructing a real-time dense mesh from crowdsourced data for use in 3D mapping and multi-user AR experiences. The technology captures environmental data from a smartphone's ca ...more

Some may say riding tandem is reserved for girly girls, seniors and little kids, but anybody would be hard pressed to call brotherly X-Gamer duo Colton and Caleb Moore sissies. At first thought, executing a two-men-clutching-each-other-on-a-snowmobile-backflip might be constru ...more

Our Thrillbilly-Tricycle-Flip hero is back, and never fails to astound. Travis Pastrana is both an X-Games gold medalist and star of MTV show Nitro Circus. The daredevil kicks ass at supercross, motocross, freestyle motocross, base jumping and rally racing. This time Pastran ...more

The game has undergone many transitions over the years, since its days as LEXIKO (1931) to its briefness as CRISS CROSS WORDS to its current and amalgamated, renowned brand of SCRABBLE. There has been many editions of the word board game along that historic metamorphosis, and ...more

Mobile gaming has exploded in recent years, with experts predicting 2.4 billion global mobile players by the end of 2019. It already accounts for 47% of the worldwide gaming market, besting console and PC. No wonder we've seen the rise of gaming smartphones, a class of phones ...more

Like the press covering film and many other specialized fields, video game journalists use all sorts of jargon to convey to their knowledgable readers as much information about a game as quickly as possible. For non or newbie gamers, this can be extremely confusing. Those of ...more

Watching the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament without cable used to be easy. As long as you had an internet connection, CBS and Turner (TBS, TNT, and TruTV), which co-broadcast March Madness, let you watch all 67 games online free of charge. Even though restriction ...more

For a long time, video games manuals were serious business. Especially for strategy games and RPGs on the PC, the manuals would often run to a hundred or more full-color pages in length. They explained in vivid and well-written detail the history of the game world and every fa ...more

The NPD Group is a market research firm that issues the most trusted sales numbers for video games. They just released their second quarter 2011 report, and the trends it reveals confirm much of what we here have been speculating here at Indie Games Ichiban (and what we've bee ...more

Sitting in the dentist’s waiting room, I found I couldn’t browse the internet on my smartphone anymore. My eyes were tired from reading and there were no headphones to listen to music. There are no magazines at this dentist’s office, just an old TV playing Russian music videos ...more

Facebook games are ostensibly all about connecting their players. Yet, in many ways they exist on an isolated island. That's one of the reasons traditional gamers and game franchises have avoided Facebook in the past. And all of the breakout hits so far on Facebook have been c ...more

Give an 18-month-old a shoe, check back 10 minutes later, and it's a very big maybe he will have it on his foot. But give him your smartphone, and in a mere five minutes, he can take 100 pictures of the carpet, send weird messages, and delete essential apps. Imagine what your ...more

The OnePlus 7 Pro is an outright beast. From the highly rated display with minimal bezels to the 90 Hz refresh rate, there's no denying this phone is great for gaming. Although not explicitly marketed as a gaming phone, it seems OnePlus unintentionally created one by cramming ...more

When the Steam Link app was first introduced in 2018, I was impressed. As long as you were on the same network as your PC, you could play your Steam games on your phone. But now, it's even more impressive. By enabling a few extra settings, you can play your Steam library on mo ...more

While the portability of mobile phones makes gaming convenient, it isn't a perfect playing experience. With touch controls, small screens, and limited specs, smartphones lack the comfortability of dedicated gaming devices. But with a few tips, you can enjoy games as if you wer ...more

To most gamers, video games are largely devoid of place. In the post-arcade era, the only real world locations most associate with video games are GameStop and the couch. But there's so much more to them than that! Games have been around for more than half a century and have ...more

The relationship between developers and publishers in the video game industry has always been awkward. Many great game developers such as Bizzare Creations, Clover Studio, and Bullfrog Productions have been disbanded due to corporate shenanigans involving their publishers and ...more

One of the biggest advantages iOS has over Android as a mobile platform is how readily and fully it has embraced mobile gaming. There are over 200,000 games available in the Apple store, compared to approximately 100,000 in the Android Marketplace. As an Android-using gamer, t ...more

Most employed in the game industry have two-word job titles that start with “game”—game designer, game producer, game critic, game tester, etc. Usually, they’re one or the other, even though some can be both a game designer and a game tester or game critic and game tester. And ...more

It's a hell of a lot easier to make money selling an indie game now than it was four years ago. But it's still a rough game. Blitz Game Studios is a large UK developer producing everything from casual iOS games to Dead to Rights: Retribution. In 2008, they started a division ...more

Every Friday here at Indie Games Ichiban, I will feature a sampling of reviews from the mountains of indie and vintage games that have crossed my internet connection in the past week. Each week will have some sort of theme, this week being old school turn-based strategy games ...more

As the COVID-19 virus continues to spread, counties, cities, and states are closing down businesses, events, and schools that aren't absolutely necessary. Some companies around the US are recommending or requiring employees to work from home during the coronavirus pandemic. If ...more

If you want to play games that aren't in the iOS App Store, Apple makes it pretty tough for you. Usually, the only solution is to jailbreak your iPad or iPhone, but that's something most avoid because it will void the warranty and may cause potential bricking issues. In some ...more

In case you haven't noticed, I absolutely adore video games. Most of my friends don't, so to get my fix of knowledgable video game conversation I have turned to podcasts. They're free, they feature the smartest people in games journalism, and can be enjoyed while doing just ab ...more

During E3, many major game developers announced plans to bring console and PC franchises to mobile. These titles are designed for more serious gamers with competition in mind. All of this points to a shift in mobile hardware priorities — soon, gamers will need gaming phones ju ...more

Arcades have long faded away from popularity, but their legacy is being kept alive thanks to emulators and the avid fans who grew up loading quarters into all of those coin-op games. Although nothing beats an actual arcade environment, my favorite emulator from the early 2000s ...more

The UK print media has been yellower than the middle traffic light for a long time now. The News of the World scandal has cast that into particularly sharp relief of late. The Sun, one of the biggest newspapers in the United Kingdom, demonstrated it again last week when they r ...more

Most stateside gamers have probably never heard of Level-5. If they have, it's more than likely due to the charming and maddening line of Nintendo DS puzzle games, Professor Layton. Some might even remember Dark Cloud and its sequel from the early days of the PlayStation 2, an ...more

Pong, one of the simplest video games ever created, has managed to evolve in some crazy ways over time, from the original basic 2D version and colorful Breakout sequel, to the PlayStation game with power-ups and 3D graphics, and now Cyberpong VR—a virtual reality game on the H ...more