Google Street View first-person shooter
There’s no gameplay asside from firing the gun and moving around, but it’s still disturbing to walk around within Google Street View with an assault rifle. (thx, job)
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kottke.org posts about video games
Shigeru Miyamoto to step down at Nintendo
Miyamoto, who is responsible for creating or overseeing the creation of Mario Bros, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, and many other games, is stepping down from his role as manager of Nintendo’s Entertainment Analysis and Development branch to work with a smaller team on smaller games with much shorter timelines.
“What I really want to do is be in the forefront of game development once again myself,” Miyamoto said. “Probably working on a smaller project with even younger developers. Or I might be interested in making something that I can make myself, by myself. Something really small.”
Miyamoto was profiled in the New Yorker last December. (via @shauninman)
Update: Nintendo says it was a misunderstanding.
“This is absolutely not true,” said a spokeswoman for Nintendo. “There seems to have been a misunderstanding. He has said all along that he wants to train the younger generation. “He has no intention of stepping down. Please do not be concerned.”
Classic video game deaths
A video compilation of deaths from old school video games, from Pong and Space Invaders right on up to Afterburner.
The music is a MIDI version of Mad World, originally done by Tears for Fears but probably best known in the gaming community as the music in the most poignant trailer ever done for a violent third-person shooter game.
Kreayshawn The Game
From Beth Maher, a Flash video game featuring rapper Kreayshawn (Gucci Gucci). And it uses Silkscreen! (via clusterflock)
Type design game
Remember the kerning game? The same folks have built a letter shaping game where you can play at being a type designer. I found this to be a bit more difficult than kerning.
Metroid source code
Here’s the entire source code + helpful annotations for the original Metroid game for the NES.
Labels corresponding to address values have been added to every line to make the code easier to follow for beginners interested in understanding the inner workings of a Nintendo game. The labels also make the code easier to debug if it is modified. At this time, the source code is still a work in progress but it is much farther along than the original document. The title page is completely documented. The intro routine, end routine, password scheme and sound engine are described in detail. About a third of the game engine is detailed and about half of each game area page.
(via @shauninman)
So you think you can kern?
Kern Type is a game that compares your kerning efforts to those of professional designers. It’s surprisingly fun. (thx, damien)
Museum of 8-bit video game title screens
Title Scream is a collection of 8-bit video game title screens. Not just static images either…animated GIFs, yo.
Why is Sergey Brin so good at Angry Birds?
I spent perhaps too much time this morning pondering one of the mysteries of the internet: Sergey Brin’s astronomically high scores on the Google+ version of Angry Birds. For instance, Brin’s high score on the easiest level of the game is 36240. It’s a legit score (here’s a higher one) and he has impressive scores on several other levels. But in 15 minutes of playing this morning, I couldn’t get within a thousand points of his score. (Hey, at least I beat Kevin Rose.)
So does Brin actually spend time obsessively playing Angry Birds to get those high scores (instead of, say, running Google or his other ventures) or has he written a program of some sort to produce near-optimal scores or does he have a fleet of interns playing as him for hours on end? We need to know this vital info…if you’re interviewing Sergey at an upcoming conference, please ask him about this!
Glitch is a go
Glitch, the “massively multi-player game built in the spirit of the web” built by Stewart Butterfield and other ex-Flickrinos and ex-Game Neverendingarinos, is out of beta and ready for everyone to try. The Glitch blog has more.
Glitch launches today. Launch is an important milestone, but in most ways, this is just the beginning. The end of Beta means we have something stable enough and fun enough that we’re happy to invite the world to play. But we want to create a game and world with the real possibility for infinite play, and that means Glitch will be continuing to grow, develop and evolve for many years to come.
The Artist is Present video game
This is … well, I don’t really know what to say about it. It’s a video game version of Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present. You buy a ticket, walk into the museum, look at some art, and then you wait in line. (via waxy)
A Super Mario Bros version of Portal?!
Wow. Someone is making a video game featuring the original Super Mario Bros worlds but Mario is outfitted with a Portal gun. Watch the demo:
More information on the game’s development is here.
Yes, this is an actual game being developed - it is not a mod of any existing one. It’s coded with L”ove (info at the bottom of the left menu) and will be released for free (so we don’t get stabbed by lawyers)
All the source code of the game will be available after release
The game will have mappacks, which will be downloadable from ingame. Users most likely won’t be able to publish maps directly, but will be able to send them in and we’ll add them for everyone to use.
The primary maps will have a story and some portaly puzzles. What kind, well, we’ll figure that out as we go
Level editor will be embedded in the game so you can edit the level while you play
Original SMB levels and Lost levels will be included
Simultaneous Multiplayer
Wonderputt
Wonderputt is a wonderfully inventive mini golf game. You might even call it whimsical. (via waxy)
Kingdom Rush
Ok, if you don’t want to be playing this game for the next 20 hours straight, click away now. Kingdom Rush is my latest tower defense addiction and it may be the best one yet. That the music sounds a lot like the Game of Thones theme isn’t hurting it either.
If Super Mario Bros was designed in 2010
If Super Mario Bros was designed more recently, it might look a little different.
(via ★interesting-links)
Audiosurf
Audiosurf is a racing game where the courses are determined by the music you play from your own library. There are all sorts of YouTube clips of the gameplay (which is reminiscent of Guitar Hero)…here’s a representative one:
Infinite Super Mario Bros
Based on Super Mario 3, this HTML5 Super Mario game goes on forever. Someone bet Billy Mitchell he can’t finish this game and we’ll never have to hear from him again! (via waxy)
The Xbox version of Dock Ellis’ LSD-fueled no-hitter
In 1970, professional baseballer Dock Ellis, who was good at pitching baseballs, threw a no-hitter while under the influence of LSD. In 2011, professional blogger A.J. Daulerio, who isn’t so good at video game baseball, attempted to throw a no-hitter while on LSD…playing a customized Dock Ellis in MLB 2K11 on Xbox.
But by the fourth game I started to pick up tendencies in all the batters. Jason Bartlett swung at first-pitch changeups. Will Venable couldn’t hit the palm ball. In fact, most of these free-swinging Padres couldn’t hit Dock’s funky palm ball. I threw it often. But by then, also, the first acid distractions entered: the TV flickered; the cracks in the wall started to move; the hand soap started to breathe — those sorts of things. Plus I was drawn to the outdoor garden between innings. Rain was near, I sensed.
Hedgehog Launch for iPhone
Why didn’t anyone tell me that Hedgehog Launch was available on the iPhone? You’re all fired!
World’s best Tetris player
You think you’re good at Tetris? Think again. Hell, you think you’re good at anything? Think again, again! Tetris grandmaster Jin8 shows you how it’s done:
It starts getting insane around the 3:00 mark and then, at 5 minutes in, all the blocks turn invisible and he keeps right on going! It’s like he’s playing blindfold speed chess on the hood of a stock car!! I mean, !!!!!
Winning at the game of money
James Somers noticed that his equity derivative-trading roommate was the only one of his young professional friends who comes home from work “buoyant and satisfied”, so he accompanied him to work one day to see what his job entailed. Turns out he basically plays video games all day.
A trader’s job is to be smarter than the market. He converts a mess of analysis and intuition into simple bets. He makes moves. If his predictions are better than everyone else’s, he wins money; if not, he loses it. At every moment he has a crystalline picture of his bottom line, the “P and L” (profit and loss) that determines how much of a bonus he’ll get and, more importantly, where he stands among his peers. As my friend put it, traders are “very, very, very competitive.” At the end of the day they ask each other “how did you do today?” Trading is one of the few jobs with an actual leaderboard, which, if you’ve ever been on one, or strived to get there, you’ll recognize as being perhaps the single most powerful driver of a gamer’s engagement.
That seems to be the core of it, but no doubt there are other game-like features in play here: the importance of timing and tactile dexterity; the clear presence of two abstract levels of attention and activity, one long-term and strategic, the other fiercely tactical, localized in bursts a minute or two long; the need for teams and ceaseless chatter; and so on.
Athleticism and competitiveness are often downplayed when we talk about white collar careers but are essential in many disciplines. Doctors (surgeons in particular) have both those traits, founding a startup company is definitely competitive and can be as physically demanding as running, teachers are standing or walking all day long, and even something like programming requires manual dexterity with the mouse & keyboard and the stamina to sit in a chair paying single-minded attention to a task for 10-12 hours a day. (via @tcarmody)
World’s largest game of Pac-Man
This is kind of amazing: a nearly neverending Pac-Man maze constructed by the players.
You pick a starting maze and instead of the exits taking you to the opposite site of the current maze, it takes you to an adjacent maze. (via @davidfg)
A tower defense word game
That’s how Clockwords bills itself…you try words containing the available letters to shoot badguys coming your way. More fun than it sounds, especially for Boggle/Scrabble nerds.
Atari iPhone app
Atari’s Greatest Hits is a free iOS game that come bundled with Pong and the option to purchase 99 more classic arcade and 2600 games. Available games include Tempest, Missle Command, Crystal Castles, Centipede, and Asteroids, some of which are multiplayer over Bluetooth. (via df)
First person Super Mario
Here’s what playing the original Super Mario Bros would look like from a first-person perspective.
(via devour)
Play DOS games on your Mac
Yo dawg I heard you like to play DOS games on your Mac so, uh, here’s some software to do that.
Boxer plays MS-DOS games on your Mac. It’s based on the robust DOSBox emulator, with a lot of magic sprinkled on top. Run DOS programs from Finder. Wrap your games into tidy gameboxes that launch like Mac apps. Painlessly install games from CD-then bundle the CD with your game so you don’t even need it in the drive.
Dune 2, here I come! (via ★robinsloan)
The story of Oregon Trail
Oregon Trail is one of the most-played video games in history, and certainly one of the most popular educational games. Here’s the history of how the game was developed.
Forty years and ten iterations later, the Oregon Trail has sold over 65 million copies worldwide, becoming the most widely distributed educational game of all time. Market research done in 2006 found that almost 45 percent of parents with young children knew Oregon Trail, despite the fact that it largely disappeared from the market in the late ’90s.
A recent frenzy of nostalgia over the game has yielded everything from popular T-shirts (“You have died of dysentery”) to band tour promotions (“Fall Out Boy Trail”) to humorous references on popular websites (“Digg has broken an axle”).
“It’s hard to think of another game that endured for so long and yet has still been so successful,” says Jon-Paul Dyson, director of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games at the Strong. “For generations of computer users, it was their introduction to gaming, and to computer use itself.”
Play Katamari Damacy on any web site
This bookmarklet will let you play Katamari Damacy on any web site. Activating it will display a ball on your screen that will roll up all the images and words on the screen. Try it right now on kottke.org. Works best in Firefox and Chrome. (thx, yotam)
Swipe Four for iPhone
I love Boggle, so Swipe Four is right up my alley…it’s sort of Boggle in reverse. You build up the board letter by letter in an attempt to maximize points. There’s a playable online demo and it’s only 99 cents on the App Store.
Tiny Wings is the new Angry Birds
Tiny Wings is a nifty one-tap game featuring a flying bird…the graphics are really lovely and feel almost handmade.
Available on the App Store for $0.99.
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