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Addictive game alert: Chain Factor. (you suck, tien)
Update: The Chain Factor game was part of a larger ARG that had to do with the TV show Numb3rs. (ARG = alternate reality game.) The game was produced by area/code here in NYC. (thx, andy)
Guitar Zero is a band that has repurposed the Guitar Hero game controllers to make real music with them. Even better: they’ve posted the instructions so you can make your own. (thx, nick)
Passage, a tiny game that takes 5 minutes or an entire lifetime to play. It’s much better if you play it once and then read the creator’s statement. I didn’t know a game (and such a tiny one at that) could be so poignant. (via clusterflock)
Update: Here’s an article in the WSJ today about Passage.
A World of Warcraft player is attempting to level up two characters in the game without intentionally killing anything or anyone.
Both my priest and my rogue try not to hit anything, although there’s always a chance of a misclick when trying to open a quest item with mobs fighting near it. Both of them always wield a fishing rod, so any accidental hits won’t increase their weapon skills. Neither of them will do quests where they have to kill things.
(via clusterflock)
Todd Levin begins a series on video game systems he has known. He starts off with a Radio Shack Pong knockoff and the Atari 2600. As you may remember, there were some differences between the arcade version of Pac-Man and and the Atari version:
But most disorienting of all was the hero: Pac-Man had been re-imagined as an octagon with a constantly chomping, greedy slot for a mouth, and designed so large he could scarcely squeeze through the maze. Because of Pac-Man’s macrocephalic condition, he was incapable of rounding corners, but Atari found a brilliant workaround: Pac-Man would always face west. When pushing the joystick to the right, Pac-Man simply backed into dots and energy blocks, his mouth still opening and closing rhythmically, as if crying in pain from shoving things into his rectum. Underscoring Atari Pac-Man’s overall cognitive disorder, the home game replaced the familiar rhythmic dot-munching soundtrack with a flat, repeating “bonk” note — its own digital Tourrette’s bark.
It’s been awhile since I’ve heard anything about Spore, Will Wright’s long zoom supergame. Last summer the word was that EA’s promo machine had gotten started too early and that the game wasn’t quite ready for primetime because it wasn’t “fun”:
The unofficial word from someone on the development team is that Spore the system is almost ready but Spore the game isn’t all that much fun yet. A recent round of user testing didn’t go so well. Hence, the delay.
EA said at the time that the release date would be after March 2008, which still seems to be the case. In an October 2007 interview, Will Wright said the game was about six months away from release, which means April 2008. Even so, Wired made Spore the #2 pick on their Vaporware 2007 list. Anyone have any better intel on a release date or if the game is more fun now? Hit me on my burner.
A pair of videos showing off Wii Fit, a balance board device for the Wii. Looks pretty interesting, although if it’s marketed as exercise equipment, I fear it may not do so well. The board and a Wiimote in each hand could make for a pretty convincing skiing experience.
Update: Hmm, the Honda Fit and Wii Fit logos look pretty similar. (thx, dave)
Sad news. Guitar Hero 3 and I have broken up. Sure, we might hook up occasionally when I’m lonely at night, but our relationship is effectively over. I can play every song1 without effort on Easy mode but can barely make it through any on Medium after dozens of tries. So so lame. I’ve hit the wall and my pinky is to blame…the damn thing just won’t work properly and I’m unwilling to try playing with just three fingers (a la Clapton) because that seems like a dead end once Mr. Orange Button comes into play.
But the real reason is that because I don’t have a natural talent for the game, the only way to get better is through deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task — playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.
Deliberate practice…sounds like fun! Yeah, no. No doubt I could master the game with enough focused effort, but when games stop being fun and become deliberate, that’s where I get off. Back to the surprising depth of Desktop TD.
[1] When relationships end, that’s when the lies start. The one song I still can’t play all the way through is Slayer’s Raining Blood. That damn song is just random notes as far I can can tell. ↩
Eyewitness account of pimply teen absolutely killing the most difficult song on Guitar Hero 3 in the midst of holiday shopping at Best Buy.
There is complete silence. Even my son is staring slackjawed, like he does in church during communion, not understanding the content of the ritual but understanding the tone and sacredness of the space. At just over 6 minutes, the song becomes even more ludicrous. While actually playing it will ever remain for me an uncrossable gap, I am enough a student of the form to recognize the crux. He is Lance Armstrong approaching the bottom of Alpe D’Huez: Will he attack? Kyle has yet to use the Star Power crutch he has carried throughout his meditation. He continues to ignore it.
Here’s a video of someone else playing the same song. In. San. Ity.
Now that the trippy stills have whetted your appetite, feast your eyes on the trailer for Speed Racer, in freaking HD no less. The race courses remind me of those in Mario Kart: Double Dash, particularly Rainbow Road, Dry Dry Desert, and especially Wario Colosseum. (thx, askedrelic)
Activision is working with Nintendo on re-mastering the Guitar Hero III discs for the Wii, which have been mistakenly encoded to reproduce music in mono rather than in stereo. Once the re-mastering has been done, early next year, the company will swap out current Guitar Hero III discs for free.
I honestly hadn’t noticed the mono issue, but I’m still waiting for my replacement ‘Pet Sounds’ to ship.
The latest installment of Super Mario has received plenty of notice for its revolutionary style of gameplay. But just as striking is the intricacy of its sound design. One convention of the game is a Pull Star, a floating anchor that Mario can grab with some sort of magical, musical force which, when activated emits a creepy, almost theremin-like wail, wavering just a bit before solemnly sliding down in pitch. This sound is one of those elemental formulas for touching an emotional soft spot. The other day I was playing a level with a series of Pull Stars in succession and my girlfriend implored me to stop, as it was making her sad, and not only because I’m a grown man playing a child’s video game. Here is an example of the Wailing Pull Star (and a taste of the very Vangelis-like score scattered throughout the game).
Also: via Boing Boing Gadgets, footage from a live orchestra scoring session for the game. Mario’s creator, Shigeru Miyamoto sits aside and supervises.
Also also: I noticed that the menu for selecting levels to play is a musical instrument in its own right, allowing the player to create melody with chord changes and everything. It’s a subtle touch.
Been on a bit of a Guitar Hero kick lately…I just played it for the first time recently so of course I’m looking around the web for advice, hacks, YouTube videos, etc. Nothing like a little web research to reinforce how little you know.
Anyhoo, I found this video of a 8-yo kid shredding it up on Guitar Hero 2…he missed only three notes on an expert level song and wasn’t even looking at the screen some of the time. Little blighter. If you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go have a few alcoholic drinks, smoke some cigarettes, rent a car, and join the Army…let’s see him do all that! (P.S. I wrote a hit play!)
Nice interview with Nintendo game designer Yoshiaki Koizumi, particularly the bits about shifting from 2-D to 3-D Mario games and Mario Galaxy. The bulk of the gameplay in Galaxy takes place on spherical surfaces:
He explained that no matter how large you make the playing field, if you walk long enough you will run into a wall, and that will make you turn around, which makes the camera turn around and runs the risk of making the player lost. With a sphere, Mario can run all he wants without falling or hitting a wall… a useful concept for getting players totally absorbed in the moment. Koizumi added that the best thing about spherical worlds is the “unity of surface,” and the “connectedness.” Neither will the player get lost easily, or need to adjust the camera - by using spheres, Koizumi said, they had created a game field that never ended.
They also talk about the Galaxy’s two-player (well, 1.5-player really) feature, which is a really nice way of getting a second passive player involved in what is essentially a one-player game. (via snarkmarket)
Guitar Hero offers a connection to all this, but departs from it in an obvious way: You’re not actually playing the guitar. No matter how good you may get at Guitar Hero, if you decide to take up the real instrument at some point, you’ll be starting from scratch.
I don’t know what it’s like to be a rock star and there’s no way I can pick up a guitar right now and play it, but the pretend version of the whole rock n’ roll thing that Guitar Hero provides is pretty powerful, at least for this impressionable newbie. Playing Guitar Hero and believing you’re a rock star might be like eating apple pie on the internet, but if you don’t know the difference in the first place, does it matter?
The Crate Review System judges video games by how the length of time it takes a player to find the first crate, “which represents the point where the developers ran out of ideas”.
Please note that by crates, we mean both crates proper and the circular crate, the barrel.
(thx, joshua)
Steam is keeping some interesting statistics related to how people play Half-Life 2. I love the heat maps of where people die on certain levels.
A history of matching tile games (like Tetris, Dr. Mario, Bejeweled). Don’t miss the family tree of matching tile games about a fourth of the way down the page (larger version here). I’m no matching tile game scholar, but where the hell is Snood?
Update: Aha, it’s because Snood is a rip-off of Puzzle Bobble. (thx, greg & kevin)
An appreciation of the Real Super Mario Bros 2. The game was released in Japan in 1986 but was considered too difficult/weird for US gamers and a different Mario 2 (based on a Japanese game called Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic) was released to the US.
In most games, you trust that the designer is guiding you, through the usual signposts and landmarks, in the direction that you ought to go. In the Real Super Mario Bros. 2, you have no such faith. Here, Miyamoto is not God but the devil. Maybe he really was depressed while making it — I kept wanting to ask him, Why have you forsaken me? The online reviewer who sizes up the game as “a giant puzzle and practical joke” isn’t far off.
The whole upshot is that RSMB2 is now available on the Wii Virtual Console as Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels. And for the record, I loved SMB2.
Nintendo-themed rap music video: Buy Mii a Wii. My favorite part is when he rhymes Nintendo with Shigeru Miyamoto. (thx, undulattice)
Statetris: “Instead of positioning the typical Tetris blocks, you position states/countries at their proper location.” There are versions for the US, Africa, Europe, the UK, and more.
Oh, so you like the addictive games, eh? Gameaholic? Imbibe too much gameahol on occasion? Behold, Bloxorz.
Update: Here’s a walkthrough for the game, including passwords for each level so you can skip around. And here’s a direct link to the Flash file for full-screen playing. (thx, peter)
I’m a light Etsy user, but Lost Mitten has a great store: Super Mario Bros drink coasters, Katamari Damacy buttons, Bob-omb needlepoint patch, etc. I’m a proud owner of a set of Bubble Bobble coasters. She takes custom orders, will reissue sold items, and all her stuff is 20% off until Thu. (Know of any good Etsy stores? Share them in the comments.)
A list of resources for my recent dive into the deep end of an infinite pool. Wikipedia page. Search inside @ Amazon. A Reader’s Companion to Infinite Jest. Reviews, Articles, & Miscellany. The Howling Fantods! A scene-by-scene guide. Hamlet. Act 5, Scene 1. Infinite Jest online index. Wiki from Walter Payton College Prep (incl. timelines, chars, acronym list, places, etc.). Chronological list of the years in Subsidized Time. Notes on What It All Means. Character profiles by Matt Bucher. Character guide. Vocabulary glossary. Various college theses on IJ. Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (sadly not out until Nov). Not entirely unrelated: map of the overworld for The Legend of Zelda, which I’ve started playing again on the Wii. Suggestions welcome, especially looking for a brief chronological timeline of the whole shebang, something like the chronologically sorted version of this but covering more than just when the scenes themselves take place.
Update: Just to be clear, this is my second time through the book. (Last time was, what, 4 years ago?) Trying to make more of a study of it this time.
Update: Suggestion from Ian: “Get 3 bookmarks. 1 for where you are reading, 1 for the footnotes, 1 to mark the page that lists the subsidized years in order.” I’m currently using two bookmarks…will get a third for the sub. years list.
For those that don’t like the new version of Desktop TD, you can go back in time to play version 1.2 and version 1.0.
BREAKING NEWS!!! The newest version of Desktop Tower Defense is out. My afternoon (and yours) is shot.
Update: New features include new Fun modes (Trickle- 1 creep per second, Random creeps), new Challenge mode (15 towers max). I’m on the scene, more as I have it.
Update: One new tower: ink tower, which has a minimum and maximum range and one new creep, a dark creep which I don’t yet know how to kill (it seems to repel a lot of different attacks). My initial impression is that a lot of the changes make the game more complex but not necessarily more fun to play. Much more research is clearly warranted.
Update: It’s also got in-game advertising…the little “K”s on some of the creeps refer to kongregate.com, a sponsor of the game. Blech. (Or maybe it’s good that you can shoot advertisements?)
Will Wright’s long zoom game, Spore, has been delayed until 2009. No one knows why, but I hope the answer involves porting it to the Wii. (via waxy)
Update: EA’s fiscal year starts in March, so it’s not delayed until 2009…just until after March 2008. (thx, zach)
Update: The unofficial word from someone on the development team is that Spore the system is almost ready but Spore the game isn’t all that much fun yet. A recent round of user testing didn’t go so well. Hence, the delay.
Tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal has a story about Paul Preece, creator of the mega-addictive Desktop TD. Version 1.5 of the game is launching sometime this week.
Julian Dibbell on Chinese who farm gold (and perform other for-pay duties) in online games like World of Warcraft. “Nick Yee, an M.M.O. scholar based at Stanford, has noted the unsettling parallels (the recurrence of words like ‘vermin,’ ‘rats’ and ‘extermination’) between contemporary anti-gold-farmer rhetoric and 19th-century U.S. literature on immigrant Chinese laundry workers.” Dibbell’s Play Money was a great read and deserves wider readership than it originally received.
Video of a bunch of reject Wii games, including WiiWhaling, Paperwork Mario, and WiiDriveby. (thx, jeffry)
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