“Plein-Air In My Pocket“ Gladstone Hotel Art Bar (1214 Queen Street West) October 4–10 A new exhibition opens today at the Gladstone Hotel, filled with pieces of fine art with a twist—all the work in “Plein-Air In My Pocket” was created on the Nintendo DS, a portable gaming system. The DS has a touch-sensitive screen, [...]

As children, we rarely questioned why we played the games we did. The games were fun or boring and one game might be favoured over another, but the act of play itself was a foregone conclusion. Somehow, as adults, this sense of play has dissipated and been replaced by a focus on productivity. Yet, an emerging body of research suggests play has value, even if the main objective of the game isn’t tethered to those rewards. Now Torontonians looking for a new way to play can turn to Recess.TO, a meetup started this year that presents an updated, adult take on the kind of games played in schoolyards.

If you've ever dreamed of controlling a brave green pig saving his village from monsters by tossing snot, today's release of an iOS game called Gesundheit is a dream come true. Four years in the making, the game is the first for Toronto illustrator and animator Matt Hammill, who says his art style was influenced by National Film Board classics like Cat Came Back, Log Driver's Waltz, and Blackfly. Even for those who hadn't considered seasonal allergies a boon to solving puzzles, there is much to love about Hammill's whimsical and playful game.

A screenshot of Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure, where Sissy battles an evil lemon. Cassie is your typical five-year-old child. She is constantly in motion, an unfathomable ball of energy, and flips on a whim from shyness to exhibitionism, from joy to sadness. During our visit to Cassie and her family for this story, she barked [...]

Is anyone else disappointed that the dystopian future promised in 1980s films isn’t here? If there’s one thing we’ve learned here at Torontoist, is that en masse, humans are terrible at predicting our future. It’s always so much more mundane than we expect it to be. The perfect example being The Running Man. Instead of [...]

We managed to see Cloverfield a few weeks ago, and with the release of Diary of the Dead (above) this week, we have to say it’s rather timely to discuss our opinion of it. As tired as this quote is, there’s really no better way to describe Cloverfield than to take from Macbeth’s famous soliloquy: [...]

Today launched Dear Toronto, a new independent videoblog site by Adam Schwabe, Ryan Couldrey, and Rebecca Black. The trio had previously collaborated at BlogTO, but recently decided to branch out on their own to focus on strictly video-based content. It’s only Day One, but Dear Toronto already has two posts up: one for Video Games [...]

Attention basement dwellers: on Wednesday, February 6, OCAD is hosting a free presentation by SWEAT, a collaboration of game designers, programmers, and artists dedicated to bringing socially aware video games to the general public. SWEAT has already produced games like Crosser, a Frogger-esque game about illegal crossing at the US/Mexico border, and is currently developing [...]

Unless you’re just coming off a three-day bender, you already know that Australian actor Heath Ledger died in New York yesterday, an event covered by the media with the familiar dead celebrity combination of prurience and gravitas. Still, he was good at what he did and he had a little girl and it’s sad. Good [...]

After decades of being situated as an icon of Queen Street West, it has been revealed that Citytv will be moving to a new high-profile location: Dundas Square. Since Rogers Communications announced plans to acquire Citytv, there has been much speculation about what would happen to the legendary Queen Street studios. The solution became the [...]