1. Frank Frazetta tribute show (scroll down). Via.
2. Goblin War Machine is a fun flash game where you destroy medieval towns with an upgradeable buggy. Via.
3. Video showing off close combat kill animations in Halo Reach.
*Buy Halo toys at eBay.
Showing posts with label video games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label video games. Show all posts
Gallery 1988's Multiplayer show now on sale
Artwork from Gallery 1988's video game-themed show is now on sale. Here's a few of my favorites:
Princess Toadstool by Nate Duval.
Mega Man by Zac Gorman.
Katamari Damacy by Mike Mitchell.
Contra by Jeff Proctor.
*Buy Mega Man toys at eBay.
Princess Toadstool by Nate Duval.
Mega Man by Zac Gorman.
Katamari Damacy by Mike Mitchell.
Contra by Jeff Proctor.
*Buy Mega Man toys at eBay.
Gallery 1988's Multiplayer show
A few pieces from tonight's video game-themed show at Gallery 1988:
Moogles by Adam Hanson.
Silent Hill by Daniel Danger.
Duck Hunt by Eric Tan.
*Buy Final Fantasy toys at eBay.
Moogles by Adam Hanson.
Silent Hill by Daniel Danger.
Duck Hunt by Eric Tan.
*Buy Final Fantasy toys at eBay.
Video game where you control living organisms
"Stanford physicist Ingmar Riedel-Kruse has begun developing 'biotic games' involving paramecia and other living organisms. He hopes the games lead to advances in education and crowd-sourcing of laboratory research while helping to raise the level of public discourse on bio-related issues." Basically, the organisms are under magnification, and some sort of video game like screen is superimposed over the magnification. You control the game with a control pad that initiates releases electrical fields, which in turn make the organisms move. (If I understood it right.)
Creepy.
Via.
Dead Space 2 demo walkthrough
Full playthrough of the scary and gory Dead Space 2 demo. It's starts off with a summary of the events of Dead Space 1. (I definitely prefer the suit from the first game to the new version.)
*Buy the Dead Space 2 Collector's Edition at Amazon.
If Myst took place in the world of Tron, you'd have Fract
Here's the official description:
Fract is an atmospheric adventure game set in an abstract forgotten world of analog sounds, samples, and glitches. Myst + Rez with a heavy dose of Tron.You can download the demo here. Via.
*Previously: Barry Bonds Plays Myst (A Clickthrough Adventure).
*Buy Tron toys at eBay.
Link roundup
1. "The protagonist of The Shining is the hotel" - - observation from a well-written and multi-part analysis of Kubrick's The Shining. Via.
2. Pointing out how archaic the Final Fantasy systems have become:
2. Pointing out how archaic the Final Fantasy systems have become:
Our major concern with the battle system is the use of numbers: quite frankly, it’s jarring in a game where the visuals have obviously been afforded so much care. Numbers were, in the early days of the role-playing game, a placeholder for some more-effective future means of communicating the awesomeness of an attack. In Final Fantasy XIII, you will never see an enemy’s total hit points: you will, however, see the shit out of the amount of HP being subtracted with each attack. The stronger the attack, the bigger the numbers. The bigger the numbers, the bigger the . . . numerals. The numerals themselves grow in size, turn gold, begin to glow and gleam. The growth, goldness, and gleam of the numerals indicates to us that the game designers might understand, on some subconscious level, that using the graphics is the key to enhancing the effectiveness of the game’s communication of damage to the player.3. Step 1 of 12 from instructions on putting on a sports bra:
1. Approach the sports bra with confidence, secure in the belief that you will wear it.*Buy Advent Children at Amazon.
Space Harrier cover
Space Harrier cover from this collection of video game box art.
The hero seems to be disgusted by the box art, doesn't he?
*Buy The Art of the Video Game at Amazon.
Link roundup
1. Funny American Elf strip (I mean, I'm assuming it worked out).
2. I'm really enjoying the video game reviews at Action Button. Here's part of a lengthy review of Mass effect 2:
*Buy Mass Effect toys at Amazon.
2. I'm really enjoying the video game reviews at Action Button. Here's part of a lengthy review of Mass effect 2:
The first thing I notice when I’m playing the second time is that interactions aren’t decisions — they’re social monsters that need to be killed to pass quests. When they die, you get experience toward paragon or renegade levels, which allow access to higher level conversations, which are basically social dungeons. The second thing I notice is, once you know, for certain, that someone won’t add any interesting new information to their initial, perfectly clear summary statement of their role in the story and your expectations regarding them, the game gets alot shorter. Except for when these people are expositing about some shoehorned summary that seems completely out of context, unless you pumped them for redundant information, earlier.3. Hang Ken is an enormous cave in Vietnam: "There’s a jungle inside Vietnam’s mammoth cavern. A skyscraper could fit too. And the end is out of sight."
*Buy Mass Effect toys at Amazon.
The Humble Indie Bundle is awesome
I highly recommend the Humble Indie Bundle. It's pay what you want for five games, but if you spend around $8 you get 11 games. Osmos alone is well worth the price. Purchasing, downloading, and installing was all a breeze.
New York's Ground Zero in the new Pokemon game
New York's Brooklyn Bridge, Financial District and Ground Zero are an area in Pokemon: Black and White.
*Buy Pokemon at eBay.
Link roundup
1. I hated Douglas Adams's Starship Titanic game, but the game lead to the creation of something far more interesting:
2. "The government has created a speculative bubble in the alpaca breeding industry." "Twenty-five years ago, there were 150 alpacas in America. Now, there are 150,000."
3. Thomas Barnett on the major challenges facing China:
When we created the initial fake-brochure site, we thought it'd be a fantastic laugh if the fictional shipbuilders had their own intranet. If you filled in the form on the brochure site (specifying your name, email address and favourite species of frog) we followed the occasional mail about the game. Then, one day, folks got a mail from the intranet admin, "Chris Stevedave", giving folks the link to the intranet and the current password, which was hurriedly followed by a second mail apologising for the accidental mail leakage and urging customers not to click the link, then a third email noting that Chris Stevedave had been demoted to Bilge Emptier Third-Class. It worked fantastically (so fantastically that some people really did send the emails back, reassuring us that they hadn't looked at the site) everyone poured into the Starlight Lines intranet.Via.
The idea was to present a read-only Senior Management forum in which you'd see some of the key backstory characters getting on each others' nerves. But we figured there should probably be a writeable forum for the lower-level employees, so I spent half a day hacking up a stupidly basic forum system and forgot all about it.
Six months after the site launch, I happened to peek at the employee forum and there were ten thousand posts in there.
A brief aside: Working for Douglas Adams, you get exposed to a huge variety of Hitchhiker's fans. Somehow, these fans think that Douglas's humour is a rarely-enjoyed thing, only appreciated by a specifically-tilted mind, and so in meeting other fans they will find a kinship. It's bollocks, of course; Douglas's humour has very wide appeal and these people tend to have surprisingly little in common with each other. But the effect at the TDV end was that any online community we created with Douglas's name attached was instantly flooded with fans looking for their kinds of people and their kinds of silliness.
But what happened inside the Starlight Lines employee forum was even stranger than that. Because it was buried one password and six clicks into the site, only a few dedicated people found it, and found each other. And once they were there, they started roleplaying Starlight Lines, and didn't stop evolving a long and bizarre narrative for the next thirteen years. When TDV died I moved the forum to my own hosting; every so often one of the players will poke me because something's broken, and I'll eventually fix it and they can carry on with their adventures. It's been thirteen years of hosting an accidental community. It's somewhat like ignoring the vegetable drawer of your fridge for a year, then opening it to find a bunch of very grateful sentient tomatoes busily working on their third opera.
2. "The government has created a speculative bubble in the alpaca breeding industry." "Twenty-five years ago, there were 150 alpacas in America. Now, there are 150,000."
3. Thomas Barnett on the major challenges facing China:
Not content with recently surpassing the U. S. as the world's biggest CO2 emitter, China just snuck past America this year as the world's biggest energy consumer, too. Naturally, this was interpreted throughout the West as yet another sign of China's world-shaping dominance instead of what it truly represents: China's skyrocketing resource dependence on the most unstable regions in the world.*Buy Chinese Posters: Art from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution at Amazon.
Link roundup
1. I really liked Broken Angels, the second novel I've read by Richard Morgan. It's a little tough to describe, basically imagine a tale of WW2-era profiteering featuring a Humphrey Bogart like character, if Bogart's character was a genetically modified super soldier. But the cover, which you can see at Amazon is embarrassingly bad.
2. The good news: EA says expect less in-game advertising in the future. The bad news: expect more microcharges since those have proven to be highly lucrative. Via.
3. Funny comic by James Kochalka. After reading it, you'll want to know what he looks like.
2. The good news: EA says expect less in-game advertising in the future. The bad news: expect more microcharges since those have proven to be highly lucrative. Via.
3. Funny comic by James Kochalka. After reading it, you'll want to know what he looks like.
New Lego Cubedudes by Angus MacLane
Angus MacLane posted a bunch of new Lego Cubedudes including Dirk the Daring from Dragon's Lair and Dabney Coleman as Jack Flack in "Cloak & Dagger" (which scared me quite a bit when I saw it in the theater). He posted several Last Airbender Cubedudes, too.
*Buy Dragon's Lair toys at eBay.
Link roundup
1. Bat Country is a fun free game that lets you pilot a helicopter against giant bats, enormous sharks, and more. (Make sure you get good at slinging the bombs.) Via.
2. "Free Print-and-Fold Guide Offers 10 Tips for First-Time Android Owners."
3. How to use Mechanical Turk to get a story on the NY Times's most emailed story list. Via.
*The HTC Droid Incredible is one penny at Amazon.
2. "Free Print-and-Fold Guide Offers 10 Tips for First-Time Android Owners."
3. How to use Mechanical Turk to get a story on the NY Times's most emailed story list. Via.
*The HTC Droid Incredible is one penny at Amazon.
Tron Evolution playthrough
Here are the first two parts of a full playthrough of the Tron Evolution game. The videos do a good job of capturing everything that's wrong, and right with the movie - - the action is exciting and stylish, but the dialog is unbearable. At least this explains the totally extraneous genocide talk in the movie - - it's apparently what the game is all about.
I wish the cityscape with Recognizers menu screen was available as a screensaver.
*Buy Tron toys at eBay.
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