With each new console generation it’s pretty much a given that a certain few titles will arise early on that, while certainly fun in their own right, are more or less designed purely to show off what the new hardware can do. What isn’t so normal is for one of these kinds of games to much later be backported to the previous generation, and even rarer is seeing a handheld even get in on the action. But as of December 23, that’s exactly what’s happened with Resogun, the flashy arcade shoot ‘em up from Finnish indie developer studio Housemarque. Even better, it’s a participant in Sony’s cross-buy program too, meaning if you already own the game on the Playstation 4, you already own the new PS3 and Vita versions too, available to download at your convenience. But is a scaled-back next-gen game really worth your time and hard disk space, or your $15 if you’re a complete newcomer to the title? Counting Pixels Resogun on the PS4 was all about HD graphics, particles, and particle physics. Pixel...

At the beginning of the year it was announced that a new section would be opening on this site: ThinkBoxly Projects. While the first release ended up not being the planned vision for Projects (that version is still in the works), what the new page has accomplished is paving the way for ThinkBoxly to become more than just a tech blog, but a showcase for everything I do. Of course, the sort of projects originally on the page aren’t the extent of that vision either, but all that starts to change, now. That’s right, there’s a new project added to the roster of ThinkBoxly projects, and this time it is a completed product, published and ready for use. It also addresses a certain niche crowd I’ve been hoping to address around here for a while: programmers. In this case, specifically those programmers out there who use YoYoGames’s GameMaker: Studio IDE. Now, although I’ve been using GameMaker since version 5 (hi, Mark Overmars!), it’s only much more recently that I’ve delved into GML (that’s G...

It’s already been a long, hard wait for Oculus’s virtual reality headset to hit the consumer market, but brace yourself, because it’s about to get even harder. It’s been said in VR circles that Oculus is the first pillar of VR—that being the sense of presence in a virtual space. It’s your eyes and ears, your very head. And while we’ve seen some pretty creative inventions attempting to be the second pillar, it’s been pretty obvious that these are mere iterations along the path to a more practical, more streamlined future. Well, now Oculus’s slow aptitude to get a product out to market is starting to make a whole lot more sense. Take that as a pun if you will, it wasn’t intended. But another ‘sense’ is precisely what it appears Oculus will be getting integrated right into the headset very soon. The addition comes courtesy of a new startup that took to Kickstarter to promote their first product, the Nimble Sense. Nimble Sense is a depth-sensing camera capable of creating a field of 3D poi...

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when I say ‘Christmas music’? Chances are good that it’s at least half a century old, if not significantly more, even if the particular interpretation you think of happens to be the creation of a contemporary artist. And indeed it’s true—Christmas has become an inconsistent mesh of the old and new over the past decade or so. Various tech products now top the charts as the hottest gift items under the tree, but that tree itself is planted firmly by the river of tradition. One might even get lost just imaging walking in a winter wonderland without Google Maps these days. Well, now Straight No Chaser, creators of the legendary acapella version of the 12 Days of Christmas , are back to make their mark upon the holiday season again with ‘Text Me Merry Christmas’, a new song for a new generation saturated in smartphones. Oh, and Kristen Bell’s in it, too. Because, you know, I’m pretty sure she starred in some little movie about winter a while back, i...

Remember when CES and E3 were all us tech fanatics had to look forward to every year? Now it seems like every company has their own press conferences and shows. Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, Activision—all throughout the year now we get these smaller displays focused on just one company at a time. But up until now there hasn’t really been anything on the Sony side, or more specifically, the Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) side. Enter Playstation Experience, an annual event which debuted this past weekend doubling as a celebration of PlayStation’s 20th anniversary. And oh boy, what an event it was. Riding high off the unstoppable momentum of the Playstation 4, Playstation fans have never been more proud to be Playstation fans. Heck, there were even a number of former Xbox fans in attendance who were proud to be Playstation fans. Not to say that Microsoft isn’t doing well at all—in fact, the Xbox One has grown into quite the worthy purchase—but with Playstation Experience (or PSX ...

Alright, videogame reviewers, fair’s fair: you get to say “I told you so” on this one. In a few days Bungie’s latest console offering, Destiny, will turn three months old, and while it hasn’t lost relevance like Titanfall (arguably the biggest other release this year) it is steadily becoming more and more inaccessible and lackluster as weaknesses that were present from the start are finally coming to bear in some pretty serious strokes. If you recall, I was initially pretty hard on all the folks who couldn’t just sit back and enjoy Destiny, because indeed it was enjoyable…for a while. The game started off strong, dropping me into this vast new universe to explore as a fresh new character to grow and develop as a Guardian. But then not only did it fail outright to exposit on this universe in any meaningful way, after a while my character hit level 20 and the game switched from a pretty enjoyable XP system to one of the worst loot mechanics in modern gaming. Even then Destiny’s fatal fl...