T-Shirts: Life is a Lie

"Mr Meeseeks: Roses are red this life is a lie shirt"

Prints available for purchase from iFrogTee. US$26.99

No truer words have ever been spoken. If I went to the gym, this would be the t-shirt I would wear.

Interior Design: Portal-Themed Bedroom

"Portal-Themed Bedroom" by Randy Slavey of GeekDad

"Portal, and its successor Portal 2, took the brilliantly simple concept of a portal gun, combined it with a fantastic storyline that included a sadistic but hilarious antagonist, and created a game that is just as replayable today as it was eight years ago. It was no surprise that my video game obsessed son took to it like a Cheep Cheep to water. Years after that first test chamber, he is still a huge fan and has amassed an impressive collection of t-shirts, toys, and collectibles based on the characters and story. So when it came time to remodel his room for his thirteenth birthday, and he asked for a Portal room, my wife and I wanted to make sure it was something worthy of one of Aperture Laboratories’ finest young test subjects."

Illustration: Portal

"Portal Cover" by Tui Bui

Made for ColinandConnor's Portal: Survive! Live-Action Short.

Crafts: Portal Cross-Stitch

"Portal Tattoo Cross Stitch" by London-based LordLibidan

Patterns and kits available for purchase from Etsy.

"When I first saw this tshirt pattern I fell in love with it, so just had to stitch it. I had to do a lot of work with the image to get it into a nice pattern, and then had to edit the image some more in order to get it looking right, but I kept the feel of the original by only putting 6 colours in it. You can find Jimiyo's other works here."

Lego Creation: Sentry Turret

"LEGO Aperture Science Sentry Turret - Portal" by ZaziNombies LEGO Creations

"Standing at over 3 feet tall, complete with light-up targeting laser and dual mounted weaponry, we bring Portal's sentry turret to life entirely from LEGO bricks! Manufactured by Aperture Laboratories, the perfect security system for any LEGO house!"

Sweets: Gingerbread Companion Cubes

Gingerbread Companion Cubes

Photographed by Brisbane, Australia-based Rimon

"My girlfriend made these amazing gingerbread companion cubes."

Cards: Portal Christmas

"Portal Christmas Card" by Wolf-Shadow77

"my Christmas card to Valve! I'm gonna send it to them with a hand written letter yes i'm excited"

Gaming Round-Up: November 17, 2014

"Handsome Jacks" by Jim Stanley

Interview: Life online can be brutal, especially for women. In this For the Record segment, NPR’s Rachel Martin talks with game developer Brianna Wu, biologist Danielle N. Lee and writer Mikki Kendall, about their experiences being harassed and threatened on the Internet.

News: World of Warcraft's subreddit taken offline in protest, controversy flares

Review: If you’re a fan of old school D&D RPGs and Beamdog’s work on the recent Baldur’s Gate remake, you may want to check out the developer’s latest release, as they’ve now worked their magic on another classic of the 90s. Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition is now available on PC, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android.

Review: Reid McCarter’s review of Advanced Warfare at Kill Screen provides a sort-of summary on the franchise’s relationship with war and how the latest Call of Duty seems to almost finally recognize those problematic aspects.

Boing Boing ran a brief, but interesting piece this week about the history of social deduction games by Matt M. Casey.

Gaming Round-Up: November 10, 2014

"Portal 2" by AlexGarner

News: Game Industry Rallies Around First "Game Awards" which Airing in December

News: Shy people are better at making friends in online video games

Review: CoD: Advanced Warfare: "In This Future War, Soldiers Are Part Superhero"

ABC News offers a glimpse of What It's Like to Be a Video Game Athlete on College Scholarship. There are 35 students on the eSports team at Robert Morris University in Aurora, the first school to categorize playing video games as a varsity sport, even offering scholarship funds for the "athletes."

Action-Packed Video Games Really Do Help Us Learn Faster, Study Finds: A new scientific study shows that action-packed video games make us quicker and more efficient at learning certain tasks.

Adam Lacoste has been blogging his way through Fable, revealing there’s more going on in the game than the failure to meet Molyneux’s promises might have suggested.

Conan O’Brien trying and failing to cross a street in Call of Duty.

Posters: Classic Aperture

"Classic Aperture" by Beers of Play

Posters: Portal

Portal Posters by Granada, Spain-based Ari Martinez

Video: Portal Gun Duel

"Portal Gun Duel" by RackaRacka

"Its man VS man in this portal gun battle to the death.
Don't play with guns!!!"

Gaming Round-Up: September 22, 2014

"The poster for Halfway" by Pervandr

This is poster for game Halfway from Robotality.

News: The D.A. in Marin County, California is giving away free ice cream for turning in your “violent” video games. I'd love to see a list of the games they end up accepting.

News: In probably the biggest news of the week, Microsoft successfully purchased the Minecraft IP from owner Markus Persson for the tidy little sum of 2.5 billion dollars. That should put to rest any speculation about Microsoft killing off their gaming division anytime soon.

News: The Video Game History Museum — a traveling collection of over 20,000 items representing 25 years of games — has found a permanent home at an exhibition space in Frisco, Texas. The exhibit should be open by next April.

Review: Ctrl+Alt+Del offers a very concise explanation of the genre confusion surrounding the latest time-sucking AAA game addiction, Destiny.  I have nothing to add, but if you check my post timeline, you'll see that there was a significant downturn in posts just about the time of Destiny's release.

Dan Stubbs writes about his attempts to create, what he calls, a “dynamic narrative system” in his horror game The Hit.  Elsewhere, Edward Smith suggests that, by designing a horror game that subverts standard game rules, P.T. submerges players in a truly nightmarish experience.

Gaming Round-Up: September 15, 2014

"While Sitting On The Friend" by Yury Krylou

Review: Destiny Is Great, raves Chris Kohler, if You Can Ignore Your Life

At The New Yorker, Simon Parkin profiles Zoe Quinn in the wake of the harassment campaign against her, as does Alex Hern at the Guardian.

Colin Campbell of Polygon considers the question of whether or not violent video games actually reduce real world crime?

Edge's Nathan Ditum examines how the growing overlap between cinema and games in the way that films like Edge of Tomorrow borrow the language and grammar of the video game medium.

Gamopolis is the name of a new podcast about games and politics by Daniel Ziegener and Yasmina Banaszczuk, who also wrote this lovely piece about kids growing up in post-apocalyptic worlds.

Hey Microsoft, Acquiring A Hit Game Is Stupid.  Josh Constine wonder why the world's most ubiquitous software company has learned nothing from Zynga, Rovio, King and Dong.

In a recent piece on Paste Games, “The Last of Us: How Sexism Survived the Apocalypse,” Ed Smith argues how one of the main characters, a middle-aged male named Joel, brings sexist tendencies and a “destructive masculine ego” into the post-apocalyptic game setting to restrict that of the other main character, the teen female Ellie. Haniya Rae of Paste argues that There's Nothing Sexist About The Last of Us.

Nathan Snow of The Spectrum calls Destiny "a turning point in the evolution of video games" while Peter Suderman of Reason.com reflects upon What Destiny Tells Us About the Future of Video Games.

A new study suggests an hour of video games a day makes kids better-adjusted.

Over at the Post Product Dev, Jim Crawford discusses the how and why of Making Games More Mysterious.  "You need to be careful that you don’t provide answers that are worse than leaving the question unanswered. Think about how you felt after seeing a magic show versus how you felt after you found out how the trick was done. Magic tricks imply bad secrets, by design. This is how they stay secret. If the secret was awesome then you would get a thrill from telling your friends about it, rather than a groan."

Shira Chess writes about moral panics, Slender Man and the “Tulpa Effect” at Culture Digitally.

Gaming Round-Up: September 8, 2014

"Portal 2" by JenPenJen

News: The Sims 4 might not support toddlers, but its replaced them with something even better—demon babies.

BioWare developer Damion Schubert suggests that gaming’s troll culture arose with early MMORPGs and suggests that the genre’s success only arrived when developers learned to mitigate user harassment.

Eurogamer’s Tom Bramwell writes about how he wishes more games were just a vertical slice; ie, shorter and more focused towards a particular experience.

At Geekwire, Mónica Guzmán talks about her vicarious experiences with Twitch game streaming, to perhaps explain the Amazon acquisition to a confused audience, and in the proess relate sweet stories of passionate gaming amidst family life.

Posters: Portal

Portal & Portal 2 Posters by Craig Drake

Part of the “Press Start III Turbo Edition" art show opening August 29th at Ltd Art Gallery.

Posters: Portal

"Portal" by Felix Tindall

Prints available for purchase from Society6. US$17.68

Music Video: Game Of Turrets

"Portal - Game Of Turrets" by Harry101UK
Via: Reddit

The video comes from YouTube channel Harry101UK, which has a collection high-quality animations from Portal set to the tune of original and parody songs. The Game of Thrones theme feels a bit like a requiem for the finale of the latest season of the show. The turrets are as disappointed as the rest of us that the season is over.

Posters: Portal

Portal Posters by UK-based Johnathan Crabtree

Posters: Portal Propaganda

"Portal Propaganda Red" by Garth Graham