If Solid Snake is your idea of the quintessential stealth operative, you haven't heard of Operation Acoustic Kitty.

Spell Tower creator Zach Gage can't answer this interviewer's question, so he forwards it to his mom. Just in time for Mother's Day this Sunday.

CHALLENGER APPROACHING! GameStick, OUYA, and Nvidia Shield not enough new microconsoles for ya? Say hello to GamePop, another cube-shaped Android device that connects to your TV. The catch: Instead of downloading single games, you pay one monthly fee á la Netflix for unlimited play. Hypothetically, this is a good idea. But so was New Coke, so....

Need a quick fix while finishing off the work week? Give João Brant's My Peculiar Car a try and hope for a saxophone-horn future.

Yesterday Double Fine founder Tim Schafer dropped in on Reddit for the ol' Ask-Me-Anything. The results? A totally unconfirmed unoffical announcement that Brutal Legend 2 is coming! (One day, maybe.) (Also: Say hi to Tim at our conference this Saturday!)

Only three months left to catch David Bowie Is..., the exhibition of the Star Man's costumes and cameleon skin at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. If you can't make the trip, pop Omikron: Nomad Soul into your Dreamcast.

And finally, KS contributor Filipe Salgado, echoing William Faulkner, wrote a lovely ode to all games for Bit Creature. The take-home point? "Play. Just play." We couldn't agree more.

Love you, Mom!

There’s an iPhone app that lets you dress up Drake!!!!!? Good work Drew!

It seems the curator Paola Antonelli of the Applied Design exhibit at the MoMA (who’s also part of our fantastic Twofivesix lineup), has changed up the control schemes of the games on display, in some cases radically, so that players initimate with the mechanics will recognize them for what they are. Brilliant. 

“We had a friend at Apple, John Draper, who was known as Cap'n Crunch, develop a phone board for the Apple II. We didn't put it out but, 12 years before modems would do this, it could listen to the phone line and know if it got a ring, or a busy, or a dial tone.” Steve Wozniak on collabing with the infamous phone phreaker.

Do not, repeat, do not! watch this footage from The Forest if you’re in bed, about to go to sleep, or if you live in Kentucky and have creeps for neighbors. 

Stop calling games IP people! Words of wisdom from our ex-ed Joe.

The Sim’s creator Will Wright’s next game will be deeply personal and intertwined with people’s everyday lives. That sounds a lot like his hypothetical game about memories from GDC. 

Electronic Arts has decided to back away from the licensing of real guns in all its games, after some controversy arose about game publishers being in bed with gun manufacturers. Let’s hope always-on DRM is next.

ERVAK for 2 is basically what’s going on in Alexander Shulgin’s head all of the time. 

With art by the standout graphic designer Richard Hogg, who’s obviously very good at drawing varicolored Horus eyes, the long-awaited PS4 game Hohokum is looking divine!

Lastly, Cello Fortress makes us feel incredibly uncultured for all those hours we spent futzing around with a plastic guitar. 

That’s all!

Another Wolfenstein game is coming. Add us to the list of people who didn't think cybernetic Nazis would have such long legs.

You know that portable gaming system you sometimes use to call people? Here's the story behind its default ringtone.

To keep away the nightmares, why don't you design and make this snazzy interactive night-light from our friends at Sparkle Labs? Use the code "KILLSCREEN" for 20% off!

Speaking of light sources, Antony Evans and his team has successfully Kickstarted a project to create synthetically bioluminescent plants. They plan to give the recipe away for free. Glowing Plants for everyone!

In the latest Harper's, poet Tony Hoagland considers how poetry may rekindle American education and the culture at large. Maybe we're crazy, but in a section on "the ethical notion of choice," his use of William Stafford's "Travelling through the Dark" reminds us of Telltale's The Walking Dead. The poem begins:

Travelling through the dark I found a deer

dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.

It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:

that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

To read about other dead things, check this excellent interview with G. Andrew Stone, programmer of Game-Maker, a piece of DOS game-design software from 1991 that missed widespread relevance by a decade or so.

Gaming in Color is looking to bring more attention to the growing population of LGBTQ gamers and game designers. The trailer is below and you can find more info here.

Gamer Theory author McKenzie Wark has a new book out, The Spectacle of Disintegration. Glean some smarts from this wide-ranging conversation about 3D printers, smartphones as surveillance agents, and remix Twitter bots like @KimKierkegaardashian.

Special-effects mastermind Ray Harryhausen died yesterday at the age of 92. He did with clay puppets what many of today's effects artists struggle to achieve with overpowered computers. We salute you, Mr. H.

Be good.

The earth is under attack.  Carlo Zapponi charts our planet's history of witnessed meteorites, and the results look like a game of Missile Command gone wrong.

You know that 2D platformer you made about getting the shingles? Darius Kazemi argues maybe a journal entry would have sufficed, in this adapted version of a talk Kazemi gave at an event for Boston independent developers this spring.

Heads rolled during the Exile Game Jam in Denmark this past weekend, where one trio led by Andre Berlemont used the Oculus Rift VR goggles to create what they called a Guillotine Simulator. (Last time I was in Denmark my then-girlfriend figuratively decapitated our souring relationship... Coincidence?)

Apparently there's a horrible new trend called "trunking" that involves animals and it's too upsetting to describe any further? Cleanse your mind with this neat little Twine game called Trunked from Toronto-based horror comic writer Ian Daffern.

Grammy-nominated composer Austin Wintory (Journey) also wrote the music for recent indie heist-a-lot Monaco, which our Jason Johnson gave high marks. Read about the process on The Creator's Project for insight into "nasty jazz."

Fans of videogames and tabletop games can smash the two together with this cute, lean Kickstarter project by Octopus Apocalypse called Pixel Dungeon Paper Miniatures. Any studio with a mollusk in the title is a-okay with us.

And for the next two weeks, Kunstburger Gallery in Nuremberg, Germany plays host to "Printing Miiverse," an exhibit of digital art from the Wii U's social network. If only the same was done for Mario Paint circa 1993.

Happy birthday, Ty!

“I have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting and telling too many jokes, I will leave behind more memes than many. They will all also eventually die, but so it goes.” Roger Ebert on 21st century mutability.

“I find myself in possession of what is possibly the most pathetic skill: being really good at a competitive game that I made myself and that virtually nobody else plays.” Michael Brough on the vastly under-appreciated Glitch Tank.

 “The more interesting side of the equation is what you can do when you incorporate physiological signals into the gameplay itself. . .We’re missing a whole aspect of experience. What is the player’s emotional state?” Mike Ambinder, Valve’s experimental psychologist on the coming wave of neuro-games.

Because levels created with an analog synthesizer are much much cooler than the ordinary kind, there’s the unbelievable Ming Mecca videogame console. Yours for only $399.

This Artificial Intelligence from Denmark designs its own card games. It also enjoys sunsets and brisk hikes in the mountains.

The fuzzy origin of the QWERTY keyboard has become clear. The Atlantic reveals the scrambled arrangement was simply a matter of user convenience. 

How do you reinvent the atrophic slide presentation? With a hilarious motion-controlled videogame.

Oh yeah, Eternal Darkness returns!

Later!