caught sleeping
A good Rohrer-related read:
She shrieked in response and called for her friends. I ran back into the safety of the bathroom only to find that I’d been in the women’s room the whole time, and there were more girls here now. I tried to hide in a stall as a small mob gathered — everyone angry, taunting — wondering how I might escape.
One girl took pity and yelled for me to follow her. We made a fast exit. She pulled me toward an adjacent restroom, and told me to come close so she could tell me a secret. Feeling like this could easily be a trap, but too stunned and confused to object, I inched closer. “Banana bread,” she whispered.
Sleep Is Death
Jason Rohrer’s preview of his new game, Sleep Is Death. I almost forgot to post this, but Andy’s link reminded me of it.
Geek Lust
Portal 2 is official.
games designed by artists
That is to say, non-programming artists:
Here’s an interesting curveball, though: what if someone who isn’t a game developer is let loose on tools this powerful? Sjoerd “Hourences” De Jong, better known as the guy behind the splendid Unreal 3 mod (and soon to become commercial and standalone) The Ball, has been leading a Unreal Development Kit course at Stockholm’s fascinating FutureGames Academy. The course lasted six weeks, all-in: three of tuition, and three spent creating games. The clincher? None of the students had any game design experience. Moreover, no programmers were allowed – only designers and artists. They couldn’t possibly make a game on their own, could they? They bloody well could. Several, in fact.
Some of the videos in the link look just fantastic.
Mimeo and the Kleptopus King
Shaun Inman, developer of Fever, has a new game in development:
Mimeo (even the name) started as a Mario clone with a twist: instead of power-ups affecting the player, they affect the entire game world. A story and mythos quickly developed. The so-called Mimeoverse consists of two 16-bit demiverses sharing 32-bits between them. When the evil Kleptopus King, an 8-bit octopus with an inferiority complex, discovers a portal into Mimeo’s realm and begins to syphon off its bits, Mimeo is sucked in and downsampled to 2-bit. So begins Mimeo’s quest to restore balance to the demiverses.
Mimeo collects carts to upscale himself and the game world and enables switching between acquired resolutions to solve platforming puzzles. He will find guidence from nearest-neighbor and native rabbit Gaido. Collected bits translate into 1ups. Disposing of certain types of enemies leaves behind hoodies that grant Mimeo special abilities. The Quantum Glove puts Mimeo’s bits in a state of quantum supposition; enemies can’t hit him but they can’t dodge him either. “It’s so bad.”
Adventures In Sex City – The Game
Not sure what to say about this.
this unique 18-minute genre has its own requirements
From a Wired article on how to ace a TED Talk:
“I’m surprised to see that half the people here know my career in some detail and the other half don’t know who I am,” he says.
Science is fine, but not when it messes with our illusions.
If she had included solar power and African child warriors, it would have been so perfect a TED talk that there would have been no need for others.
Wolfram wraps his talk by saying that when it comes to trying to boil down the universe to a simple algorithm, “it’s almost embarrassing not to at least try.”
“Just because someone has an ego,” he says, citing a writer whose name I can’t read from my scribbled notes, “doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”
Old Nintendo sells for $13,105
Last week, North Carolina eBay user lace_thongs35 thought she was putting up an everyday, 80s-era Nintendo Entertainment System (together with five games) up on the popular auction site. But less than an hour after the first bid, the price was over $6,000 — and on Wednesday, when the auction closed, the final selling price topped $13,000.
It wasn’t the console that was worth so much.
Monopoly: Revolution Edition
“Monopoly: Revolution Edition” is slick and round instead of dull and square, with debit cards and an ATM instead of paper money and a banker, clear plastic representations of the classic tokens (bye-bye, little boot!), and clips of popular songs (like Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day,” and Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love”) that play after certain actions.
No paper money!
If Not You, Who Can We Believe In?
A seemingly bewildered contestant pauses during the Tough Guy Challenge 2010 obstacle course in Wolverhampton, England. The course, which includes running through fire, swamps, mud, barbed wire, etc., was started by a fellow named Mr. Mouse.
Fool’s Errand
Who remembers the game Fool’s Errand? It is one of my all-time favorite puzzle games.
Turns out you can now download the game for free.
Video Game Consoles
The BSS Bildschirspiel 01, the only known videogame system from Eastern Germany. The entire list of consoles is just incredible. (via quips)
Quote out of context, “If I Had a Hammer” edition
I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.
no more prison fantasies
Singer was told by prison officials that he could not keep the materials because Dungeons & Dragons “promotes fantasy role playing, competitive hostility, violence, addictive escape behaviors, and possible gambling,” according to the ruling. The prison later developed a more comprehensive policy against all types of fantasy games, the court said.
Just like Liz Parker said
My grandmother watched CSPAN like it was a marathon of General Hospital. While she thumbed through the morning’s newspaper and Senate committees hocked in the background, we kids jumped in and out of the swimming pool and then raced each other down to the beach. On the off-chance that she’d manage to grab one of us for a cuddle, Grandma would point at her 6″ television screen and say, “See that man? Look, see that wide smile? That man is a Democrat.
“Now wait. See that scowler? Can y’see how unhappy that man is? That’ll happen to you if you become a Republican.”
I never doubted her, not even for a minute. And then I came across this research, coincidentally from my grandmother’s nephew.
kicking the chicken
Tell me you didn’t do this when you played one of the Zelda games. (thanks, Autumn)
mighty big striatum
How well you perform on video games may be determined, at least in part, by the size of a certain region in your brain, a new study suggests. Researchers were able to predict a player’s performance simply based on the size of brain structures linked with learning and memory, with larger being better.
the first legal male prostitute
I think for a male, if you want to be successful in this type of venture, you’re not a prostitute. You’re a surrogate lover. You encompass everything that’s required of you—not only emotionally, physically—but psychologically. Because women are wired differently. They’re much more sensitive creatures. You actually have to enjoy what you do. You can’t necessarily say, “Oh, it’s just a job.” You actually have to say it’s a passion. I think it’s the same situation as with anything that happens when you break apart a social institution. There has to be some kind of change in terminology to describe persons like myself. And it’s more of a civil rights thing now. Basically this is the first time in the economy of the United States that a male has actually stood up and said, “I want to do this for a living.” And be protected under law to do it. It’s just the same as when Rosa Parks decided to sit at the front instead of the back. She was proclaiming her rights as a disadvantaged, African-American older woman. And I’m doing the same. I’m actually standing up now, and hopefully I can be supported by the male community and be understood as a person. This actually isn’t about selling my body. This is about changing social norms.
Congratulations.
(via marginal revolution)
Avatar for the Atari 2600
[via Boing Boing]
AD&D Covers
This brings back memories of late elementary school for me (of which I have few):
People who suggest, however, that the game has become highly sexualized because of the most recent edition of the player’s manual cover have obviously not spent much time flipping through the earlier manuals. Shoot, I haven’t touched them in nearly ten years and I bet I could find ALL the racy photos in a manner of minutes.
Avatar and the Hyperreal
Avatar’s story may be terrible, but the technology behind it is not:
As anyone plugged into the matrix will know, Avatar is an event film for reason of the boundary-pushing technology that powers its spectacle. The technology I refer to is not so much the 3D aspect (the use of which has existed since the 1950s, though perhaps never as spectacularly, or as integrated into the bone of the narrative, as it is used in Cameron’s film); rather, it is the innovative virtual camera system that Cameron developed for the manipulation of live-action within a hybrid CGI world which has dramatically upped the standards for film and camera technologies. Virtual camera technology is one unknown to most filmmakers because it has been mainly used to design video game environments in popular games like the Resident Evil series or the immersion-heavy Bioshock. Resident Evil is one such game that, to my mind, was greatly responsible for demolishing the old and ordinary standards of horror cinema. I can think of no horror film this past decade which consistently delivered such purely cinematic feats of terror as those that arise in the Resident Evil games. To the cineaste, such a statement will undoubtedly arouse indignation: video game art should not seriously be compared to film art, should it?
This Just In
The Potatoes beat the Christians in the Tostito Bowl.
Christmas Memory: bb guns
One Christmas, my brother and I got Daisy bb guns. We wanted them bad. We couldn’t wait to shoot them, but it was mid-winter in Rockford. Daddy set us up a stack of boxes packed with newspaper in the basement with a target stapled to the side. It wasn’t long before we bored of straight shootin’ and opted up for tricks. We went upstairs, stole Mom’s hand-mirror off her vanity, and commenced fancy-shootin’ backwards Annie Oakley style. My brother’s first shot riccocheted off the blocks of the basement wall and hit my brother in the back of his head. Didn’t hurt him. Didn’t break the skin. But how he howled. It stung! We could have put an eye out!
I invite all clusterflockers/readers near and far to tell us a Christmas story over the next few days. It would be the best gift we could give each other.
Visual Business Clichés
Diamond Trust of London
A strange site that Jason Rohrer (who?) has mentioned recently. Notice the url, “http://diamondtrustgame.com/“. I haven’t deciphered what exactly is going on, but it looks interesting.