Warp Zoned Presents
Video Game Canon- BAFTA Games Awards: All the Winners from 2003 to Today
- Clair Obscur Completes the Sweep by Winning “Best Game” at 2025-2026 BAFTA Games Awards
- Boss Fight Books to Get a New Look for Richard Moss’s “Age of Empires”
- GDC Awards: All the Winners from 1996 to Today
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Wins “Game of the Year” at 2025-2026 GDC Awards
Warp Zoned Presents
- Video Game Research Library
- We Pitched a Museum a 1993 Game Hint Line (And They Actually Said Yes) – Yarn Spinner (2026)
- The History Of The Word “Metroidvania” And How It Spread – A Critical Hit (2025)
- Creator of Hit Game Shovel Knight Is at a ‘Make or Break’ Moment – Bloomberg (2025)
- Shadow of the Colossus: An oral history – Design Room (2025)
- In 2005, games started rewiring our brains – The AV Club (2025)
Most Recent: Top Story
The Cross and the Controller: BioShock Infinite and Social Exclusion
Joshua Wise is the founder of Crossed Purposes. Crossed Purposes is a website which engages pop culture and theology through reviews, discussion and a weekly podcast. It looks at video games, books, movies, television, and music from a number of different theological disciplines including Systematic, Historical, Liturgical, and Biblical.
BioShock Infinite, Irrational Games’ second BioShock adventure,1 is a masterpiece of world-building and a penetrating insight into the extremes of American civil religion, the nationalization of religious traditions, and the vicious cycle of isolation, division, and insular identities. (more…)
Dead Island: Riptide Hands-On Preview: Wasting Away in Zombieville
Dead Island: Riptide is a sequel to Dead Island, which was released to middling reviews and disappointment after a strong advertising campaign in 2011. Deep Silver’s marketing for the sequel has already stirred up controversy with their plan to include a “bloody torso” statue in the UK special edition. The game itself will be out this month, and was playable on the show floor at PAX East. The developers were showing off a cooperative mode, allowing you to work together with other players to fortify an area and keep the zombies out. But between collision issues, terrible graphics, and hysterical ragdoll phyics, the game was a jumbled mess. (more…)
Posted in PC, Previews, PS3, Top Story, Xbox 360
Tagged Dead Island: Riptide, PAX East 2013
Watch Dogs PAX East Impressions: Hack the Planet, or Maybe Just Chicago
Ubisoft didn’t have Watch Dogs playable on the show floor at PAX East, but the game still had an enormous presence. The publisher showed a special behind-closed-doors presentation of the game, which included a special Watch Dogs lanyard as a giveaway (and if you were wearing it on the show floor, you may have gotten a surprise visit from a Frag Doll with a free t-shirt). I would have much preferred being able to play the game myself, but what I saw on the screen was a somewhat impressive, if disappointingly short, display of the capabilities of main character Aiden Pearce. (more…)
Posted in PC, Previews, PS3, PS4, Top Story, Wii U, Xbox 360
Tagged PAX East 2013, Watch Dogs
The Games of April 2013
The Warp Zoned crew seem to all be operating on the same page for April. Injustice: Gods Among Us, Pandora’s Tower, and Star Trek are all popular here! But what else will we be playing through the April showers? Read on to find out! (more…)
Warpback: What We Played in March 2013
Warp Zoned couldn’t be more divided this month, as half of us tackled our backlogs with a vengeance, while the other half dove into the piles of games not out yet that were on display at PAX East. Read on for blasts from the past and postcards from the future! (more…)
Shadow PAX: The Hidden Games of PAX East 2013 You Probably Didn’t See
It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you first enter the PAX East show floor. With over 200 exhibitors showing off over 500 products (at a minimum), there’s no way to see it all. In fact, it’s possible to seclude yourself in your own little piece of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center and not realize that entire other worlds exist within the greater PAX East experience.
The “Three PAX Theory” is the belief that PAX East is actually three different conventions all smashed together. On the north side of the show floor, you have “Triple-A PAX.” That’s where your Nintendos and your Microsofts and your Ubisofts create massive booths, and a game like The Last of Us has a four-hour line. On the south side is “Indie PAX,” which houses the Indie Megabooth and a huge number of small developers who operate booths that are barely big enough for a TV and a few pins. Finally, on the extreme south side of the BCEC is “Tabletop PAX,” where it’s all dice and cards and there’s nary a video game in sight. I wish I had come up with it, but all credit for the “Three PAX Theory” must go to Jake “@jakeninja” Vander Ende.
However, there’s also a fourth side to PAX East that a lot of people don’t see. It takes place in the dark corners of the convention center and in gamer gathering places all across the city after the Expo Hall closes for the night. I like to call this “Shadow PAX.” (more…)
Posted in Features, Mobile, PC, Top Story
Tagged PAX East 2013, Tabletop Games
The Last of Us Hands-On Preview: Tension and Fear Win the Day
I wasn’t sure what to think when I first saw trailers for The Last of Us, Naughty Dog’s first non-Nathan Drake game in six years. It certainly looked like a Naughty Dog game, with the same style and graphics, but this was set in a post-apocalyptic world, one in which humans had been infected by a strange fungus, which left the victims zombified. The remaining survivors of humanity lived in terror in a wasteland. While the Uncharted games had dabbled in science fiction (remember those crazy mutants from the second game?), this was the studio’s first real deviation from reality. I was doubtful that they could pull it off, mainly because the market is so saturated with these types of games, and in the end, not many of them are that great. But from what I saw in the half hour demo at PAX East this past weekend, Naughty Dog just might succeed. (more…)
Posted in Previews, PS3, Top Story
Tagged PAX East 2013, The Last of Us
Shovel Knight Hands-On Preview: I’m Diggin’ It
Being in the vicinity of Shovel Knight, the first project from Yacht Club Games, seems to make horrible puns just emerge from the ether. During my PAX East playtime, a nearby developer assured me that while the current build was only ten percent complete, the team was beginning to “dig in” towards the game’s full potential. The developer actually hadn’t realized the double meaning of his words until someone else pointed them out to him. He apologized for the terrible wordplay and admitted that it had been happening all morning.
But a game like Shovel Knight requires this kind of pun-tastic sense of humor. (more…)
Posted in 3DS, PC, Previews, Top Story, Wii U
Tagged PAX East 2013, Shovel Knight