Play This | The Verge

Final Fantasy fans, now is the time to get into Magic: The Gathering

2025-06-23T09:34:08-04:00

The Final Fantasy Magic: The Gathering set is here, and there's never been a more perfect assemblage of Magic cards. The set features cards taken from every mainline Final Fantasy title, including the two MMOs, so there's something for every generation of Final Fantasy lovers. And while Magic has featured other video game crossovers in the past (hello, Assassin's Creed and Fallout!), with the way this set is constructed, from card mechanics to art, you can tell this one is a developer favorite, sure to appeal to the massive chunk of people who love both games.

But what if you don't inhabit the center circle in the Venn diagram of Magic an …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Excalibur is a fan wiki for the best ’70s TV show that never existed

2021-06-30T11:27:50-04:00

J.J. Guest and G.C. Baccaris" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22691155/s1e8.png?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />

Does anybody else remember Excalibur? You know, Excalibur: the British TV show that ran for two seasons in the mid-1970s, mixing Arthurian legend with Aleister Crowley mysticism, interplanetary exploration, an undead (sorry, spoilers!) villain named Poseidon, and a deeply troubled production history? If so, that's a little weird because it never existed - but if enough people remember it, maybe that could change.

Excalibur is, in fact, an interactive fiction project made by J. J. Guest, G. C. Baccaris, and Duncan Bowsman. It's a detailed "fan wiki" for the eponymous (and fictitious) BBC series, and clicking through it reveals layers of in-s …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Familiars.io is a simple, Pokémon-style multiplayer game that you can play right inside Twitter

2020-12-11T18:48:37-05:00

Familiars.io is a minimalist monster-catching game that went online last year, and right now, you can play it inside Twitter. As developer Nigel Nelson tweeted this afternoon, he ported (or in his words, "smuggled") the entire game to an embedded Twitter card. That means that you can play it directly through Twitter's web interface or mobile app.

The game is built around Pokémon-style exploration and combat in a shared, lo-fi setting. You can wander around capturing enemies to expand your team of familiars, then use them to fight other players (or simply walk around saying "howdy," if you prefer.)

just smuggled my ENTIRE GAME into this "vi …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Build an aquarium in your web browser with Orb Farm

2020-05-19T11:47:31-04:00

Many of our worlds have gotten smaller in 2020. Tiny spaces - a well-tended box garden, a stocked-up kitchen - have become more important and more satisfying. Orb Farm is an entire little world in a glass jar in your web browser, and it might be one of the most soothing things you try all day.

Orb Farm was inspired by Life in Jars?, a YouTube channel dedicated to self-sustaining jarred ecosystems. It's a simple pixelated ecosphere that you fill with grass, fish, and water fleas, plus all of the bacteria and natural resources they need to live. The simulated days and nights pass as your little animals dart around stone formations and driftwo …

Read the full story at The Verge.

PowerWash Simulator is an oddly satisfying game that lets you clean filthy houses

2020-05-11T14:07:05-04:00

Sunday morning, I woke up feeling productive and decided to pull the hose out and give the house a good wash, cleaning the gunk and grime that littered the front porch and blasting away dirt stains that had changed the color of the roof. It was relaxing, particularly because I was not doing this hard labor myself - I was in front of my gaming PC, playing a demo of PowerWash Simulator by FuturLab.

The game has you assume the role of a professional with your own power washing business. You'll need to clean an entire exterior of a home, from the front door to the porch. Even the garage door and its accompanying driveway need a good washing.

A …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Play Mackerelmedia Fish, a strangely adorable ode to dying websites

2020-04-25T11:00:00-04:00

Have you installed the latest version of Mackerelmedia Fish? No, not Macromedia Flash. Mackerelmedia Fish. The piscine rich media plugin, created by experimental game designer Nathalie Lawhead, used in projects like the hacking tool Haxatron 2000. A relic of an era where social media hadn't eaten the internet, amateurish weirdness was the norm, and visiting a website might involve clicking through an endless series of arcane installation screens. The website is still online, but if you click the wrong link, you may be eaten by a grue.

Lawhead, known for projects like Tetrageddon Games and Everything Is Going To Be OK, explains a little more …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Super Mario becomes a surreal physics experiment in this free browser game

2018-04-09T10:11:47-04:00

Part of what makes Super Mario games work is how they feel. The tight controls give you a handle on everything Mario is doing, whether that's jumping across a ledge or stomping on a bad guy. It feels precise. Jelly Mario, a free browser game from developer Stefan Hedman, most definitely does not.

Instead, Jelly Mario takes one of the most iconic video games and completely upends it by messing with the physics. The game in its current state consists of the first two levels of the original Super Mario Bros. But instead of hopping around with balletic grace, Mario floats about like a confused jellyfish. You play using the arrow keys, but they …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Join me in playing this addictive block-sliding game

2018-02-10T07:30:47-05:00

Slidey | Photo by Vlad Savov / The Verge

It seems like every year around this time - the down period between the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona - I find a new mobile game to consume my spare minutes and hours. In 2017, it was the dangerously involving Egg Inc., and this year it's a beguilingly simple block puzzle title called Slidey.

Slidey is a member of the vast and diverse genre of games remixing the classic Tetris formula. You are faced with an endless supply of squares, which arrive in single, double, triple, or quadruple blocks, that you need to marshal into complete horizontal lines to delete them from your screen. The entire g …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Frost is a chill new iPhone puzzle game to zone out to

2017-10-27T11:22:23-04:00

There's a certain breed of game that just fits perfectly on your phone. Games that look beautiful, with pleasing visuals and serene sounds, that can lull you into a trance while you zone out with some headphones on. Think titles like Alto's Adventure, Kami, or Monument Valley. Now, you can add the iOS-exclusive Frost to that list: a minimalist pleasure about controlling swarms of glittering light.

As with the best puzzle games, the core goal of Frost is pretty simple. In each level there is an orb (or a few) of a specific color, and your job is to guide a like-colored swarm inside of it. Early on, it's fairly basic stuff. The initial swarms …

Read the full story at The Verge.

A game about AI making paperclips is the most addictive you’ll play today

2017-10-11T07:40:27-04:00

Liz West / Creative Commons" data-portal-copyright="Image: Liz West / Creative Commons" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9437403/161806459_d6179345ab_b.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" />

Say hello to the one thing you want in life. | Image: Liz West / Creative Commons

There's a well-known thought experiment in the world of artificial intelligence that poses a simple, but potentially very scary, question: what if we asked a super-intelligent AI to make paperclips?

This may not sound terrifying at first, but as Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom (who first described the parable) explains, it all depends on how well we've trained the AI. If we've given it common sense, it might ask us: "How many paperclips do you want?" If it doesn't know to ask, it might just make paperclips forever. And, if it's a super-intelligent AI that we've accidentally forgotten to program with any human ethics or values, it might deci …

Read the full story at The Verge.