Kiran Upadhyay

Have you always wanted to check out that StarCraft game you’d heard so much about, but somehow managed to go nearly 20 years without buying a copy? Good news! Nearly two decades after its 1998 release, StarCraft is now free. Legally! Blizzard has just released the original game — plus the Brood War expansion — for free for both PC and Mac. You can find it here. Up until a few weeks ago, getting the game with its expansion would’ve cost $10-15. The company says they’ve also used this opportunity to improve the game’s anti-cheat system, add “improved compatibility” with Windows 7, 8.1 and 10 and fix a few long-lasting bugs. So why now? The company is about to release a remastered version of the game in just a few months, its graphics/audio overhauled for modern systems. Once that version hits, the original will probably look a bit ancient by comparison — so they might as well use it to win over a few new fans, right? This is also good news for everyone who, like me, has want...

AHHHHHHHH. I feel like I’ve been waiting years for this. The first real footage of Star Wars Battlefront — an EA-made sequel to the wonderful first person shooter of the same name that LucasArts (RIP) made back in 2004 — just dropped at E3. Unlike previously released footage (which was made with the game’s engine but all pre-rendered) this clip is said to be ripped straight from actual gameplay running on a PS4. I’m perhaps more excited about this than I am about The Force Awakens. Okay, probably not — but it’s close. For anyone who never played it, Battlefront is what happens when you take the Star Wars universe and smash it into a first person shooter with epic, 40-person multiplayer battles. Hoth! Flyable TIE fighters versus flyable X-Wings! AT-ATs versus snowspeeders! Lasers! THE LAAASEEEERS. Fans have been begging for a new Battlefront game for over a decade now — but, despite a number of attempts, LucasArts just couldn’t get one out the door. After LucasArts got ...

On Christmas morning of 1996, the first level of Super Mario 64 was blowing the minds of millions of kids around the world simultaneously. It looks a bit rough around the edges nearly 20 years later — but it’s still truly excellent. And now it’s been remade in glorious HD. Now, don’t go looking for Nintendo’s official stamp of approval, here: it’s a fan-project, of sorts. It was built by Unity developer Erik Roystan Ross to show off his custom character controller — which, if you’re into Unity, you can check out here. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve replayed the original version of this level; even if I had an exact count, I’d probably be embarrassed to say. Let’s just estimate it at “hundreds”. Here’s what it looks like in action: The remake isn’t one-to-one, but it’s close. Close enough that navigating the level from that decades-old memory map was a breeze. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the visuals. But some things were removed for the sake of expediency, s...

If you're a game company looking to release an HD remake this year (and looking at the 2015 release schedule, there are plenty of you out there), then the Homeworld Remastered Collection is one of the better blueprints you could look to. As the name implies, this isn't just a remake of the Relic’s 1999 masterpiece Homeworld. The package also Includes a revamped version of the slightly less classic (though still quite good) Homeworld 2, as well as unaltered versions of both games for absolute purists out there who like their three-dimensional space strategy raw and low-res. Those who don't mind sacrificing historical accuracy for convenience will find familiar gameplay from a one-of-a-kind duology that’s prettier than ever. That much is clear just from replaying through the first few missions in both included single-player campaigns—the atmospheric heart and soul of Homeworld. What’s still unclear is Gearbox's new "unified" multiplayer, which encompasses ...

Apple has a new patent (via AppleInsider) that covers modular accessories for mobile devices like the iPhone, which include a physical gamepad with action buttons, D-pads and analog joysticks; a QWERTY hardware keyboard for typing; additional camera, speaker and microphone units; and even a full, secondary multitouch input like a trackpad. The accessories in the patent are described as using either hardware or Wi-Fi connections (i.e. Bluetooth) to talk to the main device. The accessories described in the patent would make for a range of iPhone add-ons that turn it into a modular device with a range of potential uses. You can imagine how iOS devices might be able to better fit the needs of niche users with these kinds of add-ons, including not only gamers but also users in specific industries, as well as creative professionals and those looking for more comprehensive on-the-go audio recording solutions. Some of the variations of the accessories even include provisions for adding o...

I’m Canadian so I get to bring you the following news: GoPro is partnering with the NHL and NHLPA to incorporate GoPro footage into live broadcasts of professional hockey games. The team-up marks the first time GoPro is partnering directly with a major pro sports league, and will use the company’s recently introduced Live Broadcast Solution built in tandem with Vislink. The live broadcast fun kicks off during the 2015 NHL All-Star Weekend, featuring GoPro cameras actually worn by on-ice players to provide real-time HD footage of the game from their perspective. GoPro plans to provide capture of HD content throughout the entire 2015 season, though, so you can expect more unique perspectives on all the action from regular games and play-offs, too. Sports broadcasters are clearly looking to incorporate more contemporary camera technology into their programming, with ESPN announcing earlier this week that it will start using drones in its Winter X Games coverage, and in fact the same...

Paulina Raguimov never expected to get paid to make video games when she walked into her high school’s career fair at 16. She played them, sure. But when she walked up to the JumpStart booth to chat about the internships they had available, she had absolutely no experience with making games. “I didn’t even have a resume, I had only just become eligible to get a job at all,” she told me last week. Despite that, she liked what she heard and applied for the position. When she got to the interview, they didn’t ask about her lack of experience or place too much emphasis on her grades, instead focusing on her interests and personality. “I got lucky,” she says. “I was the worst student until I got the job.” Raguimov’s first role at JumpStart was as a production intern. Her responsibilities included quality assurance, the job that sounds appealing when you’re 12 but in reality is incredibly dull: endlessly playing games to find their bugs. She was taught to use bug-tracking tools and ...

In 2013, the Internet Archive kicked off a major effort to store and host hundreds of classic video games for free play via your Web browser, and after a late 2014 addition of classic arcade games, the site's Software Library exploded over the final week of 2014 with its biggest update yet: 2,334 MS-DOS games, all playable through a standard browser. "Some of [the games] will still fall over and die," longtime IA curator Jason Scott wrote on his personal blog when announcing the new game selection on Monday, but our cursory tests have shown off remarkably functional MS-DOS games in our web browser; they all run via the Em-DOSBOX emulator, an offshoot of the same emulator that powers many antiques sold at archival games sites like GOG.com. Keep that mute button handy, as we encountered some awful sound emulation quirks in classics like Jazz Jackrabbit, but thankfully, the games' speed and functionality remained intact. Scott also took the opportunity to ask gamer...

GameAnalytics, a free analytics platform for games developers, has leveled-up its funding. The Copenhagen-headquartered startup, which also has a sales office in London and a development hub in Berlin, has closed a $5.5 million Series A round. The new funding comes from previous backers — Sunstone Capital, CrunchFund (Disclaimer: TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington is a Partner), Jimmy Maymann (CEO, Huffington Post) and René Rechmann (President, Maker Studio) — alongside new investor, Beta Angels, and the company’s newly-recruited management team. It brings the total raised by GameAnalytics to $8 million. Those changes in the startup’s management sees the recruitment of a new CEO, and a number of other executive hires. Replacing co-founder Morten Wulff in the top job is former Managing Director of Aol, Luke Aviet. Meanwhile, another ex-Aol employee, Nick Roveta, who held the role of Head of Product and Partnerships at the U.S. tech/media company (and owner of TechCrunch), becomes G...

The first Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer features all kinds of things that make my diehard Star Wars soul quiver and dance, but the crossguard on the dark side lightsaber spotted in the teaser, while initially cool, increasingly isn’t one of them. It looks ultimately very impractical, and I couldn’t help but to offer some engineering tips for the weapon’s designer. Let me explain: While the design looks like it was inspired by the kind of guard you’d see on a claymore, for instance, which prevents an opponent’s blade from sliding down yours and, say, cutting off your fingers, it seems unlikely to serve that function. The emitters extend from the hilt, as you can see, which presumably means they’re vulnerable to the opponent’s blade, which, per Star Wars lore, can cut through pretty much anything (except for Mandalorian iron, Force-imbued weapons and some other noteworthy materials). The whole point, however, of not using metal for the sword itself is that lightsabers can cut...

If you aren’t heading to the movies today, you still won’t miss out on the Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer – it’s available now over at iTunes to watch. The highly-anticipated sequel to the sci-fi trilogy from the late 70s and early 80s (and maybe also a decade or so ago, if you happen to count those) comes out December 15, 2015, so know that when you’re watching this trailer you still have to wait over a year before the Force actually awakens. Is this fair? It is not fair. But take heat, since it seems like only yesterday we found out about this project to begin with: You’ll be back in the loving embrace of the fictional Star Wars universe before you know it. Brb getting in line now.

A new patent published by the USPTO yesterday details an invention by Nintendo that would allow it to emulate its mobile game consoles, including the Game Boy line of devices specifically, in other settings, including on seat-back displays in airplanes and trains, and on mobile devices including cell phones. The patent is an updated take on an older piece of IP, so it’s not an entirely new idea, but it’s still very interesting to consider that Nintendo could have renewed interest in the idea of running its own back catalogue on many different kinds of screens. The patent talks specifically about emulation, which is the technique by which a hardware platform is mimicked by a software application on a different type of hardware, in order to run versions of the games for said platform without requiring either the console itself, or physical cartridges. Generally, it’s been used by fan communities to play their favourite games of old on PCs, Macs and mobile devices, but in this patent ...

Today Rockstar Games unveiled some new footage of Grand Theft Auto from the version set for release on the PS4 and Xbox One on November 18 and the PC on January 27. The biggest reveal: There’s now going to be a mode where you play as if it’s a giant open-world first-person shooter. This mode will be customizable, so you can play from a first-person perspective while walking around on foot and while driving but not while hiding behind cover during a gunfight. This new perspective will give you a better view of the improved graphics throughout the game, including denser pedestrian population and traffic, a farther draw distance, and more complex weather effects. PC gamers with high-end rigs get the best visuals, as the PC port supports cranking the resolution up from the console’s max of 1080p all the way up to 4K. It also changes how you’ll experience the story, as events that take place in a mission happen around you rather than from the zoomed out view you got in the original (s...

As part of its continuing mission to catalog and preserve our shared digital history, the Internet Archive has published a collection of more than 900 classic arcade games, playable directly in a Web browser via a Javascript emulator. The Internet Arcade collects a wide selection of titles, both well-known and obscure, ranging from "bronze age" black-and-white classics like 1976's Sprint 2 up through the dawn of the early '90s fighting game boom in Street Fighter II. In the middle are a few historical oddities, such as foreign Donkey Kong bootleg Crazy Kong and the hacked "Pauline Edition" of Donkey Kong that was created by a doting father just last year. The site's new arcade offerings are the work of curator Jason Scott, who has previously archived thousands of classic console and PC games as part of the Internet Archive's software collection. Like that previous work, the Arcade collection is built on top of JSMESS, a version of the open-sou...

Looking for a nice little burst of nostalgia on this fine Saturday evening? Don’t feel like going through the process of installing MAME and lurking for ROMs, but still want to get your classic arcade on? Back in December of last year, the Internet Archive (in their effort to backup the entire digital world, one bit at a time) launched a “Console Living Room” that offers up browser-friendly emulators for a pretty shocking number of consoles from the 70s/80s. Want to play some Atari 2600? Here you go. Sega Genesis? Yup!) This weekend, they’ve introduced a whole new category: The Internet Arcade. 900+ classic arcade games, no quarters required. It’s all a part of the JSMESS project, an effort to emulate as many systems as possible… in Javascript, of all languages. As they put it, they want to make “computer history and experiences” as embeddable as “movies, documents, and audio”. Do they all work seemlessly? Nah — you’ll almost certainly spot a bug or two. Many are missing sou...

The holiday season is fast approaching, and for mobile gaming studios it’s make or break time. How can you earn one of the coveted spots in Apple Store’s Top 10 list without exhausting your marketing budget? Below are five steps to help you develop an effective strategy for getting your mobile game apps noticed by consumers this holiday season. Before we get started, just a brief warning. As the holiday season advances, expect to see lots of mobile ad companies promising you a spot in the Top 10 list in any and every country you desire. Beware of such claims – they may be scams. Many, of course, are quite legit, but you should always question their sources and methodologies before turning your burst campaigns over to them. Step 1: Soft Launch — Test and learn By now you should have your contours of strategy in place (i.e. OS release, app title, countries to launch in – all benchmarked by market). Plan a soft launch for early November. That means you need to choose the right ic...

The Civilization series has repeatedly roped me in for disappearances that span hours and even days, and the newest instalment, Civilization: Beyond Earth continues that storied tradition. The civilization building and management simulation keeps a lot of what has worked about the series, and adds substantial new gameplay elements – this is no warmed-over expansion with some sci-fi facepaint, nor is it even just a sequel to the excellent Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. Instead, it’s a thoughtful extension of the Civilization series into a future era, with meaningful changes to mechanics that make sense in the context of the story. As for that story, the premise is basically that Earth has collectively put together a large expeditionary force, drawn from the people of various nations, to seek out and colonize new worlds. The colonizers hail from a wide range of backgrounds, and instead of being divided by nation as they were in previous Civilization games, they’re sponsored by differen...

Buying a game company is like buying an aging baseball player. You’ll need a miracle to get another hit. And while they might have plenty of fans, they probably aren’t making a lot of new ones. Mojang hit a grand slam home run with Minecraft, but that doesn’t mean Microsoft should pay $2.5 billion for it, as it’s reportedly going to announce this week. There’s no guarantee it will produce another blockbuster; players will eventually move on from Minecraft, and I doubt anyone is going to buy a dopey Windows Phone just to play a slightly different version of the pixelated sandbox game. Have we learned nothing from Zynga, Rovio, King and Dong? Zynga and King IPO’d on the strength of their hits FarmVille and Candy Crush Saga. Both have sank hard since, as gamers inevitably get bored and look for new titles to play. Zynga’s share price has steadily sank to $2.92 from its $10 IPO, and King’s share price has plummeted to $13.19 from its $22.50 debut. Rovio had the world in its pocke...

Earlier this month, Sony announced that it has already sold 10 million units of its PlayStation 4 game console since its launch last November, a record-setting figure for the company’s hardware. In an interview with Eurogamer published yesterday, Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios President Shuhei Yoshida admitted that the company doesn’t really know why its console is doing so well in today’s gaming market. That sounds like a good problem to have. When sales are high, something is working, so why rock the boat, right? But as Yoshida points out in the interview, not knowing why people are buying its console now could have serious implications on Sony’s strategy going forward. If it turns out that all of the “core” gamers – those who consistently buy the latest releases in series like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto — coincidentally decided to all buy their preferred next-gen console at once, then it’s hard to predict where sales will go from here. When the core mar...

If you're a PC gamer of a certain age, the name Sierra On-Line (or Sierra Entertainment) revives memories of some of the most classic point-and-click adventures of the late 20th century. New corporate owner Activision is set to reactivate those memories today, reviving the brand as "Sierra Games" and promising new games in the King's Quest and Geometry Wars franchises. The new Sierra name will apparently serve as an umbrella for a number of independent studios to reinterpret some classic gaming franchises. The newest King's Quest entry is being developed for 2015 by The Odd Gentlemen, best known for esoteric puzzle platform game The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom. Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions, meanwhile, is being worked on by mobile/portable developer Lucid Games for this holiday season. No platforms have been announced for either title. “Sierra’s goal is to find and work with gifted up-and-coming indie developers working on their own amazing projects or w...