City of Steam Developers Release New Journal, Let You Blow Up Barrels

Mechanist Games has been hard at work on their upcoming post-Steampunk MMO City of Steam. We got a chance to play it a few months ago during one of the game’s Alpha access weekends and it’s pretty nifty. Well, the team has released a new Development Journal in which they explain their working relationship with the Unity game engine (which is popping up everywhere) and, well, barrels. Yep, barrels.

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Dexter Season 7 Premieres Tonight

Tonight’s the night. Grab your knives and plastic wrap, kids, because Season 7 of Dexter premieres tonight on Showtime at 9pm ET/PT.

If you caught the Season 6 finale (and if you didn’t, stop reading now because, you know, SPOILERS AHEAD), then you know that the show turned a major corner in the last few seconds of the final episode.

Season 6 of Dexter was pretty lackluster compared to past seasons, but the show redeemed itself with the revelation that…

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Why Do We Pay To Watch Scary Movies?

Irwin Yablans, creator of the “Halloween” films that forever changed the genre, says the answer’s easy.

If you’ll remember, we posted an article a few weeks ago where Irwin talked about the Halloween franchise changing the genre. Now he talks about why we are willing to cough up our cash to be frightened.

“When done right, a horror movie evokes an involuntary response involving fear, excitement, repulsion and fascination,” says Yablans, (www.irwinyablans.com), author of the new memoir, The Man Who Created Halloween. In it, he details his rise as a successful independent producer, sales chief for Paramount Pictures and head of Orion Pictures. His masked creepster Michael Myers, who debuted in 1978, spawned a wave of iconic horror characters, and a new way to do business in Hollywood.

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Tim Cook, “We Fell Short,” on Apple Maps

Apple isn’t a company that apologizes so this is really surprising news. After the uproar of people complaining of the new Apple maps in iOS 6, Tim Cook issued an apology saying: “At Apple, we strive to make world-class products that deliver the best experience possible to our customers. With the launch of our new Maps last week, we fell short on this commitment. We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better.” Read the rest of this article…

FleshEatingZipper Has A Minecraft Server, Pics And Invite Inside!

We at FleshEatingZipper are no strangers to Minecraft. We’d run a server before, but it wasn’t on dedicated hardware. Now that we’re capable of doing so, we now have a permanent server that we’ll be able to do crazy stuff with and guess what? We want you in here, too! Let me bring you up to speed with our progress and we’ll show you how to get in on this slice of sexy Minecraft action!
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Ghostbusters: Paranormal Blast Gets A Major Update, Wins Back Hearts (iOS)

I’d like to think that my review of Ghostbusters: Paranormal Blast had something to do with the most recent update released on Wednesday. XMG Studio Inc., the wonderful studio who developed my favorite portable Ghostbuster game, has finally done some justice to the coolest franchise ever.

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Call Of Duty: Black Ops II: Zombie Hunter: Awesome Sauce

It’s no surprise to see that Treyarch’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 has some zombies tagged along for the epic ride. I mean, it’s like their thing now. However, unlike the previous zombie modes, this years iteration takes blastin’ heads off to a whole new level.

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Robots And Pencils Prepped To Launch “Heartland”

I’m gonna be honest with you…I don’t know what to think about this one. We got notice today that Robots and Pencils is getting ready to launch a new title on iOS and that it’s going to be called heartland. These things, I’m totally ok with. Then I read on a bit more and discovered that it’s a ranch management game and my brain took a major left turn.

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New Minecraft Snapshot Overhauls Lighting System

The new Minecraft snapshot 12c39a didn’t add any new features per se but it did overhaul what I thought was the biggest issue in a long time, the lighting. What was wrong with the lighting? If you have to ask then you aren’t playing enough Minecraft. The issue was weird lighting shadows in the daylight that would be blacked out and wouldn’t update until you were psychically touching the blocks. Read the rest of this article…

Looper Review: Time Travel Done Absolutely Right

As a kid who grew up on Star Trek, I know first-hand the benefits and pitfalls of a time travel plot. Trek was often light-hearted about its implementation, almost to the point of using it as a silly contrivance, but other forms of the fiction dare to be more adventurous. If investigated too deeply, time travel can truly bury the audience in mind-fuckery. The most drastic point I can think of would be Shane Carruth’s ultra-indie flick Primer, in which the time you spend inside the time machine translates to how far back in time you go. That film explores how one manages paradoxes and the multitude of timelines you create when you make multiple trips, which is havoc for something as elegant as a narrative. While not quite the brain freeze that Primer was, thankfully, Looper engages that kind of deep, exploratory time travel with incredible flare and gobs of delicious violence.

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