Most Recent: Features

October seemed like a blur here at Warp Zoned. We were so busy trying to keep up with everything that it passed us by in no time! We did snag a few good games, though, while still maintaining our card and board game obsessions. Oh yeah, and we also played some old games as well, from chewing bubble gum with the Duke to leaving a football field covered in blood. Read on to find out all the gory details of what we played in October. (more…)

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends, come inside, come inside… because it’s getting cold out and there are games to play. There are men in costumes fighting scary clowns, zombies in the center ring, and an angry bunch of mutants all under this vaulted big top. There’s also racing cars and dark souls and Kinectimals with bears, on my! Great Scott! The future certainly looks full of great games… (more…)

September has come and gone in a whirl of shiny new video games! So what did most of the Warp Zoned staff spend their time playing? Why, old games, of course! For the most part, we were jamming out to a lot of games we had piling up, or took advantage of Nintendo’s generosity/embarrassment. Read on to find out what we were playing in the month of September. (more…)

A new study at Ontario’s Brock University has turned the old adage, “playing violent video games causes violence,” on its head. A paper published in the American Psychological Association’s journal Psychology of Violence entitled, “The Effect of Video Game Competition and Violence on Aggressive Behavior: Which Characteristic Has the Greatest Influence,” concluded that it was the competitive nature of a video game that led to aggressive behavior, and not the level of violence.

Researchers Paul Adachi and Teena Willoughby conducted two experiments. The first involved 42 test subjects playing either the violent action game Conan or the nonviolent racing game Fuel. Participants rated the games similar on competitiveness, difficulty, and pace of action, so the only difference was the level of violence. Test subjects’ post-gaming aggressiveness was measured by which of four hot sauces they would serve to another participant – the hotter the sauce, the more aggressive they were. (Yes, hot sauce – remember, they’re Canadians, so giving the test subjects guns, bazookas or nukes is a wee bit frowned upon.)

The researchers found no difference in aggressiveness between the two groups of gamers. They write, “The results suggest that the violent content alone was not sufficient to produce elevations in aggressive behavior compared with a nonviolent video game.” (more…)

Here comes the Fall with a chill in the air, a return to school and football on the tube. But you know what else is on the tube? The Fall’s biggest games. So we close out the Summer with a look back at what we played in August… even if August didn’t have much in the way of new releases. (more…)