Dumb Video Games: Pandemic Edition

The game Pandemic II challenges you to destroy the world. Are you up to the challenge or will you let a bunch of monkeys in lab coats defeat you?

Absolutely random Thursday gaming edition

Classic Castle Wolfenstein 3-D is free, free, free!

Comics Friday: God works in mysterious ways edition

Dumb games Friday was too much effort, because we have to play a game for a while to know whether it's worth posting. So instead I'm trying out webcomics. 

You euthanized your faithful companion cube faster than any test subject on record. Congratulations!

img via blogtown

Man o man, did I love Portal. If you haven't played it, you really should just stop what you are doing and go play it. It's like being inside a Terry Gilliam movie.

I'll have a review of Portal 2 here in a bit once I finish it. Anybody else planning on playing it?

Let's take a moment to talk about videogames

For you who care not for our national art, come back after Thanksgiving for less dorky postings. Meanwhile, those of you who know of which I speak, skip past the jump and join me.

My life*

via Penny Arcade


* I don't play Halo, I play better games, but still

All the kids from Beaver Lick, Ohio, didn't even try in the first place.

Microsoft bans a player from Xbox Live for saying he's from "Fort Gay," even though he really is from the actual town, Fort Gay, West Virginia.

Oh, the hapless Xbox Live moderator. Hired at 9 bucks an hour to intercede in verbal race wars on a nightly basis; how is he to know that when a kid who sounds like Beavis says, "Yeah, I'm from, uh.. uh... FORT GAY," that he's just another kiddo from West Virginia who wants to spawn camp for a few hours?

Times is tough all around.

Just... less talk, you know?

Speaking of video games, they share something with other creative works: The more you talk about them, the longer they they take to finish. And the worse they turn out when finally finished.

Which is why my enthusiasm for Superbrother's iPhone game, Sword & Sorcery EP, has dipped with every new PR update and BoingBoing post.

The thing is, I love the style, and I agree with almost everything in their Less Talk, More Rock manifesto. I'd really like to see an actual game that embodies their design ideas. Until they can deliver something that delivers, though, I'd really prefer that they turn down their hype machine. Their game is famous before it even exists. If it were a novel or an actual EP, that's often the kiss of death.

Playing video games before bedtime may give people an unusual level of awareness and control in their dreams

Yep.

img credit

Another day, another insane Dwarf Fortress developer note

Dispatches from a parallel universe of video game development:

I had somebody shoot my toe off with a crossbow, which was cool, because it was after the slash vs. pierce merge. It just happened that the toe was narrow enough to be removed.

I got to test out the sort of reverse compound fracture thingies where a piece is knocked inward rather than out through the skin. Right now the relationships for the ribs are a little too general, so in the example a left rib goes through the liver (rather than a more appropriate right rib, but that's okay for now. The current text: "You bash The Farmer in the upper body with your bismuth bronze war hammer, bruising the muscle, jamming the left floating rib through the liver tissue and tearing the liver!" There are various issues -- mentioning the bruise is a little weird since it's not that important, the mention of the liver tissue vs the liver tear could be compacted, there are actually two floating ribs on that side and it doesn't go into exactly what happened there, and The Farmer is capitalized (which is an older problem), but it works well enough for now so I'm not going to spend a lot more time on the text. This one also demonstrates the body part relationships nicely though -- the rib was struck first, and it shows a compound-style fracture acting between different parts (rather than just a bone through skin in a single part).

This is the avant-garde

What’s more, certain independent games are entering a phase – familiar to historians of jazz, comics and indeed 20th-century literature – of vigorous experimentation with techniques of narrative. (An evening with the frightening and baffling The Path, rather like an Angela Carter story siphoned through The Sims, will show you what I mean.) And with book sales falling, it may not be long before prose writers jump ship for a medium that offers some of the most exciting possibilities of the new century.
...
Our experience of stories is, by and large, a lateral one, in which the writer commands every aspect of the world the reader inhabits as well as the process by which it reveals itself. Fine; it’s worked for centuries. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that gaming – which increasingly promises a narrative space for the player to make his own way, never having the same experience twice – is where at least some of the great writers of tomorrow will make their names. At which point, as with comics, everyone will get a terrible headache over trying to think of a new name for the medium. |Telegraph.UK - Tim Martin|

I can't quite decide what to think of Martin's essay. On the one hand, it resonates with my view that video games are one of the signal cultural artifacts of our era, an emerging medium with the same kind of potential that photography had in the nineteenth century and cinema in the twentieth. On the other hand, I think that the works of those who locate themselves on the avant-garde are more often than not self-indulgent crap, so I sure hope video game designers don't start believing their press clippings.

400 Human Sounds

Personalize it to your own tastes and keep kids entertained, make your friends laugh, add effects to your business meetings, clearly communicate your pleasure/displeasure to others and irritate parents.

Users who "have additional sounds" are encouraged to email them to the app's author.

Boom goes the dynamite

Researchers use functional MRI imaging to track brain activity as subjects play a simple game against a computer, and find that some areas of the brain become more active when told that their opponent is human, an effect that's more pronounced in males. | ours technical |

I just get bored with most single-player game experiences these days. Multiplayer keeps me interested. I don't know if this is the cause.

What saith you Mr. Clark?

"LittleBigPlanet," described by review Web site IGN.com as an "instant classic," has been pulled from warehouses after it was noticed that one of its music tracks contained words from the Islamic holy text, the Quran.

The move is a blow to the Sony PlayStation game, seen as the console's first launch of an icon to match Nintendo's ubiquitous Mario, in which rag doll character Sackboy negotiates a lavishly designed world of platforms and challenges.

"We're sure that most of you have heard by now that one of the background music tracks that was licensed from a record label for use in the game contains two expressions that can be found in the Quran," a statement on the game's Web site said. |CNN|

Item: In virtue of what, exactly, might Muslims be offended? Ignorant Americans like me want to know! Is quoting the Quran blasphemous in the same way that depicting the prophet is blasphemous, or is this more of a robot-armies-attack-while-shouting-allahu-akbar type situation? CNN does not relate.

Predictably: The situation has created a speculative LittleBigPlanet bubble. At least I assume it's speculative. I invite anyone who disagrees to explain the fundamentals of the market to me.

Better than legos; or, More research than CNN saw fit to do:

Yesterday a reader sent us a link to a music file containing the two offending phrases, which can be found here. Hit the jump for the translation of the offending phrases.

The words are:

1- In the 18th second: "كل نفس ذائقة الموت" ("kollo nafsin tha'iqatol mawt", literally: 'Every soul shall have the taste of death').

2- Almost immediately after, in the 27th second: "كل من عليها فان" ("kollo man alaiha fan", literally: 'All that is on earth will perish').|Kotaku"|

A final note regarding our linguistic practices: Can't speak for anyone else, but I like seeing the wikitastic XxxxxYyyyyyNnnnn convention grow in prominence.

Friday reviews

Braid (video game)



It's about time travel. It's a moving watercolor painting. It's a poetic reinterpretation of Super Mario.

If you have an xbox, you have to try this game. The demo is free. Go. Do it now.

Burn After Reading (movie by those guys)

It's funny, it's awesome. Unless you feel that they should only be doing the dark movies like Miller's Crossing (my favorite) and No Country for Old Men, you will probably like it.


Fringe (TV show starring Joshua Jackson¹)

I thought this was the promised American version of The 11th Hour. But no, it's just the X-Files with an old-school cranky Doctor Who thrown in (They know it, too. they defensively bring up Doc. Who references just to distance themselves from it.... It's weird.)

Oh, and spoilerz alert. It's pretty clear the Doctor Who guy cloned and/or designed his son, who will of course be the key to the whole "pattern." 

Blech.
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1 -- These days, he wouldn't last one minute on the Creek.

Smart game Wednesday

This is pretty fun.

Bellman culture watch, "Drive monkey, DRIVE!" edition

I'm not saying that it's a good movie, but I bet you'd enjoy Grandma's Boy. Also, the FX network seems committed to showing it over and over and over again so all you need to do to see it is steal cable.

It sounded relaxed and informative in a manner I would not have expected from this measured performance

Julia Dudley, age 10, had this to say about the PlayStation 1^[1,2]:

You can play multiple games on it, like Mario, Zelda, and many more. You control the characters with a special remote control that you hook up to the PlayStation. There are multiple other PlayStations by Sony as well. There are even games for girls on it. This is how you play the game of your choice: First, you insert the game CD-R and hook up the memory chip to your PlayStation, then hopefully, the CD will not be defective, and you press Menu, and press what you played last (if you saved your last game). Lastly, voila, you can play your game leisurely until your mom calls you off to dinner (hopefully not spinach).

-----------
1 - Dudley, Art. "Sony PlayStation 1 CD Player." Stereophile, Vol. 31, No. 7 (July 2008): 73-81.

2 - Shoppers note: "This was a first generation machine, the only model to have the RCA output jacks and the AKM AK 4309AVM 16-bit sigma-delta DAC chip. My son Harry has a third generation PS1, and SCPH-7501, which has the multi-pin A/V output only and a different DAC chip; I measured that sample, but it was very much worse in most respects than the SCPH-1001."

To Wii or not to Wii

SVG:

But the reason I hate advertisers (while simultaneously maintaining terrified, Old Testament awe at their power) is because I'm a total hype sucker. I read somewhere, and I cannot recall where, that Nintendo spent more money on Wii Fit's marketing campaign than they've ever spent on anything. It seems to be working. It makes me excited, like when I call my Mom and tell her she ought to finally buy a Wii because she'll really like this game and she tells me, actually, she was thinking about it.

I'm sort of scared of Wii Fit. I mean, it'll know how much I weigh, and it'll make me look really stupid, like that lady in the picture up there. But everyone seems kinda scared of it, and kinda excited about it, and as much as I roll my eyes, hard, whenever I see news anchors "discovering" the latest game stuff on the morning news, it kinda, just a little, makes me happy.

So, are you getting it?

Yes, I'm getting one today.

(and yes, I know it's a meanie that calls little girls "fat")

Missed opportunities

Do you know what I just learned? The secret code that gets you unlimited lives (or whatever) when playing Contra on the original Nintendo is a generalized cheat code for any Konami game on that console. Not sure what any of those other games are.

I learned that fact from this thread, which I came across while searching for images of Shaq Fu.