Ski Safari is an iOS game that's kind of a cross between Tiny Wings and CycloManiacs...which is to say that I love love love it. Here's my high score, about which I'm very ashamed and proud at the same time:
(via @gavinpurcell)
A Super Mario Summary is a abbreviated version of the original Super Mario Bros game in which each of the levels has been squeezed into one screen. For instance, here's World 1-1:
(via waxy)
From what I can tell, the Museum of Soviet arcade machines is an actual physical museum in Moscow but you can also play one of the games (called Morskoi Boi) online. The museum has around 40 machines, about half of which are playable, including Repka, Safary, Vozdushniy Boi, Duplet, and Snezhnaya Koroleva.
Judging from the sheer number of you who sent in this link, it might be the kottke.orgest link in the history of the internet. In it, Sam Anderson goes long for the NY Times Magazine on casual games (like Angry Birds, Tetris, Bejeweled, etc.).
In 2009, 25 years after the invention of Tetris, a nearly bankrupt Finnish company called Rovio hit upon a similarly perfect fusion of game and device: Angry Birds. The game involves launching peevish birds at green pigs hiding inside flimsy structures. Its basic mechanism - using your index finger to pull back a slingshot, over and over and over and over and over and over and over - was the perfect use of the new technology of the touch screen: simple enough to lure a suddenly immense new market of casual gamers, satisfying enough to hook them.
Within months, Angry Birds became the most popular game on the iPhone, then spread across every other available platform. Today it has been downloaded, in its various forms, more than 700 million times. It has also inspired a disturbingly robust merchandising empire: films, T-shirts, novelty slippers, even plans for Angry Birds "activity parks" featuring play equipment for kids. For months, a sign outside my local auto-repair shop promised, "Free Angry Birds pen with service." The game's latest iteration, Angry Birds Space, appeared a couple weeks ago with a promotional push from Wal-Mart, T-Mobile, National Geographic Books, MTV and NASA. (There was an announcement on the International Space Station.) Angry Birds, it seems, is our Tetris: the string of digital prayer beads that our entire culture can twiddle in moments of rapture or anxiety - economic, political or existential.
But the real lily gilder here is that you can play Asteroids right on the article page...you can shoot almost everything off the page aside from the article itself -- ads, comments, navigation, etc. This in-article game is based on this JavaScript hack that will let you play Asteroids on any old web page. Pretty cool. (thx, everyone)
Don't know why exactly, but I am loving the hell out of Happy Wheels. The game is pretty simple -- it's a cross between CycloManiacs, Line Rider, and Jackass -- you ride on a bike or Segway or mobility scooter through a course avoiding obstacles and trying to reach the end. Which is fun enough except that when you hit something hard, you body flies apart and blood sprays all over the place. Hilariously. Like this Skate 3 video, which is also inexplicably gut-busting. (via mlkshk)
Been a few months since we've had one of these. Constellations is a simple game where you shoot jellyfish at stars and shoo fish out of the way. What, I was just playing that for 30 minutes? Oof.
Kinect Star Wars has a Galactic Dance Off mode where you can "dance to modern songs remixed with Star Wars lyrics". After watching 30 seconds of this, you may not be able to get "I'm Han Solo" out of your head. It features dance moves like "The Speeder", "Chewie Hug", and "Trash Compactor".
Kind of amazing, but not surprising, that the Star Wars universe has come to this. As one YouTube commenter noted:
I just felt the death of Star Wars. It was as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
Here are some of the lyrics:
I'm feeling like a star,
you can't stop my shine
I'm loving Cloud City,
my head's in the skyI'm solo, I'm Han Solo,
I'm Han Solo.
I'm Han Solo. Solo.Yeah, I'm feeling good tonight,
Finally feeling free and it feels so right, oh.
Time to do the things I like,
Gonna see a Princess, everything's all right, oh.No Jabba to answer to,
Ain't a fixture in the palace zoo, no.
And since that carbonite's off me
I'm livin' life now that I'm free, yeah.Told me to get myself together
Now I got myself together, yeah.
Now I made it through the weather,
Better days are gonna get better.I'm so happy the carbonite is gone.
I'm movin' on.
I'm so happy that it's over now.
The pain is gone.I'm putting on my shades
to cover up my eyes
I'm jumpin' in my ride,
I'm heading out tonightI'm solo, I'm Han Solo,
I'm Han Solo.
I'm Han Solo. Solo.I'm picking up my blaster,
put it on my side.
I'm jumpin' in my Falcon
Wookie at my side.I'm solo, I'm Han Solo,
I'm Han Solo.
I'm Han Solo. Solo.
It's at this point that Lando comes on and gets jiggy. Amazing. (via ★ironicsans)
Eating a flower gives you the power to spit fireballs. Bullets have faces. Stars make you invincible. In addtion to being video game, maybe Super Mario Bros is a surrealist masterpiece.
Mari0, the Super Mario Bros + Portal mashup I posted about last August, is now finished and available for download for Windows, OS X, and Linux.
Daft Punk already sort of sounds like they make their music using vintage video game systems but Da Chip is what that would actually sound like. Better than I expected. (via @shauninman)
Martin Amis, one of the greatest living British novelists, published a guide to video games in 1982 called Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict's Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines. It has an introduction by Steven Spielberg and Amis has barely acknowledged its existence since its publication.
It's a deeply strange artifact: an A4-sized, full color glossy affair, abundantly illustrated with captioned photographs, screen shots, and lavish illustrations of exploding space ships and lunar landscapes. It boasts a perfunctory introduction by Steven Spielberg ("read this book and learn from young Martin's horrific odyssey round the world's arcades before you too become a video-junkie"), complete with full-page portrait of the Hollywood Boy Wonder leaning awkwardly against an arcade machine like some sort of geeky, high-waisted Fonz. We're not even into the text proper, and already its cup runneth over with 100-proof WTF.
I was addicted to this tower defense game awhile back as an in-browser Flash game, but the iPad version is even better. It's like the iPad was made for games like these. (thx, jim)
ps. Can you hear that sound? That's Kingdom Rush sucking all your free time away this weekend. You're welcome.
The quantum levitation videos I showed you a couple months ago are pretty cool, but scientists scienticiens at the Japan Institute of Science and Technology have upped the game by using QL CGI to build a real-world Wipeout track.
Say it with me: science!! Also, do Rainbow Road next! (via ★interesting)
Update: Say it with me: advertising! Or some other such nonsense. Several people have alerted me that this video is a fake...you can see vapor trails passing through walls, etc. Boo. Boo-urns. (thx, all)
An increasingly frustrated lizard plays a game called Ant Crusher on an Android phone. He's pretty good, but is no less hungry than before he started.
(via stellar)
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)
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."
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.
From Beth Maher, a Flash video game featuring rapper Kreayshawn (Gucci Gucci). And it uses Silkscreen! (via clusterflock)
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.
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)
Kern Type is a game that compares your kerning efforts to those of professional designers. It's surprisingly fun. (thx, damien)
Title Scream is a collection of 8-bit video game title screens. Not just static images either...animated GIFs, yo.
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, 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.
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)
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 is a wonderfully inventive mini golf game. You might even call it whimsical. (via waxy)
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 more recently, it might look a little different.
(via ★interesting-links)
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:
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)
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.
Why didn't anyone tell me that Hedgehog Launch was available on the iPhone? You're all fired!
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, !!!!!
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)
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)
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'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)
Here's what playing the original Super Mario Bros would look like from a first-person perspective.
(via devour)
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)
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."
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)
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 a nifty one-tap game featuring a flying bird...the graphics are really lovely and feel almost handmade.
BoxCar 2D is a fun little toy: it uses genetic algorithms to evolve little cars that can complete obstacle courses (like the ones you'd find on Cyclomaniacs). If you play this for more than a minute or two, you'll be at it for 30 minutes, easy. (via moleitau)
Today only, World of Goo for the iPad is only 99 cents. Like I said before, this game is what the iPad was built for. (via capn design)
Forgive me Internet for I have sinned. It has been several months since I regularly posted addictive Flash games to kottke.org. As penance, I offer up Love, in which you get your spinning square close to (but not too close to) a bunch of squares. More funner than it sounds. Go in peace.
The big new game will be called Angry Birds Rio. It's a movie tie-in (blech), but as long as the game features a ton of that trademark bird-flinging action, who cares?
There will also be a Valentine's Day edition of Angry Birds, perfect for ignoring your beloved on that special day.
Andy Baio has compiled a listing of metagames...video games that are about video games.
Over the last few years, I've been collecting examples of metagames -- not the strategy of metagaming, but playable games about videogames. Most of these, like Desert Bus or Quest for the Crown, are one-joke games for a quick laugh. Others, like Cow Clicker and Upgrade Complete, are playable critiques of game mechanics. Some are even (gasp!) fun.
There's an iPad version of World of Goo? Oh, man. Must resist, too much to do...
Z-Type is a fun typing game...falling enemies each have a word associated with them and you type it to blow them up. More fun than it sounds. (via @nathanperetic)
In the Seahawks/Saints game over the weekend, Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch made an improbable game-winning touchdown run. So, I can't decide which one of these videos is better. Marshawn Lynch's Tecmo Bowl Run:
Or Marshawn Lynch as Super Mario in star mode:
The New Yorker's Nick Paumgarten goes long on Nintendo's resident genius, Shigeru Miyamoto, designer of many of Nintendo's top games.
In his games, Miyamoto has always tried to re-create his childhood wonderment, if not always the actual experiences that gave rise to it, since the experiences themselves may be harder to come by in a paved and partitioned world. "I can still recall the kind of sensation I had when I was in a small river, and I was searching with my hands beneath a rock, and something hit my finger, and I noticed it was a fish," he told me one day. "That's something that I just can't express in words. It's such an unusual situation. I wish that children nowadays could have similar experiences, but it's not very easy."
A nice Angry Birds illustration:
See also the Angry Birds peace treaty.
Meat cut diagrams for some of your favorite Nintendo characters.
The Super Nintendo version of There Will Be Blood:
This is pitch perfect. What really puts this video over the top are the sound effects ("milkshake!") and that it doesn't go on too long.
In a recent interview for the 25th anniversary of Super Mario Bros., Mario's baby daddy Shigeru Miyamoto revealed that the infinite 1-up trick was included in the game on purpose but that the minus world was a bug.
"We did code the game so that a trick like that would be possible," Miyamoto revealed. "We tested it out extensively to figure out how possible pulling the trick off should be and came up with how it is now, but people turned out to be a lot better at pulling the trick off for ages on end than we thought." What about the famed Minus World? "That's a bug, yes, but it's not like it crashes the game, so it's really kind of a feature, too!"
Scrabb.ly is a massively multiplayer game of Scrabble...everyone plays on one gigantic board. It's insane how large the board is. (thx, zach)
Using motion tracking software, Rhett Allain finds out if the flight of the slingshotted Angry Birds adheres to the laws of physics.
The only force acting on the bird (if the bird is not moving too fast) would be the gravitational force from the Earth. This is where I see lots of intro-student mistakes. They tend to want to put some force in the horizontal direction because the bird is moving that way. DON'T do that. That is what Aristotle would have you believe, but you don't want to be in his club. There is no horizontal force in this case -- no air resistance.
He also determines the height of the red bird: about 2.3 feet tall. The big red bird must be at least double that.
This bookmarklet will let you play Asteroids on any web page...the enemies are the images, text, and videos on the page. You can click here to play right now on this very page. (Arrows to move, spacebar to fire, the score is in the lower right corner.) It's pretty satisfying to blow the kottke.org front page to bits. Someone should make a multiplayer version so that everyone currently visiting a page can all play together. (thx, cary)
Steve Wiebe has reclaimed the high score on the planet's collective Donkey Kong arcade machine; he's the third player to hold the top spot this year.
Wiebe last held the Donkey Kong record in spring of 2007, only to be bested by his movie rival Billy Mitchell months later. Mitchell's score fell to New York's Hank Chien in March of this year, but the Florida hot sauce distributor regained the title on July 31 with a score of 1,062,800 points.
You may recall Weibe's battle with Mitchell in King of Kong.
A little Friday fun: Clock Blocks. It took me a bit to figure out how to play, but basically you clear a grid of clocks by shooting from clock to clock at the angle of each clock's rapidly spinning second hand. Ok, maybe not so basically, but you'll get the gist after playing for a few seconds. There is also an iPhone version.
Rosmarie Fiore did this series of long exposure photographs of Atari games a few years ago.
Fiore did a similar project with pinball machines...instead of photos, the ball was covered in paint and left trails on vellum. Reminds me of some of the other time merge media I collected awhile back. (via @brainpicker)
This profile of Billy Mitchell and other classic video game record holders starts off as most do, with descriptions of Mitchell's hair, the dizzying scores, the rivalries, and Mitchell's perfect game of Pac-Man:
Another player named Rick Fothergill had almost beaten Billy to the mark, but he fell short by nine dots, or 90 points. Fothergill is Canadian, and his challenge made Billy redouble his efforts, because Billy thinks of his Pac-Man prowess as a patriotic symbol, a matter of national pride not unlike like the space race. Billy was so determined to beat Canada that he forgot to eat for several days. He had set out on his quest July 1 -- Canada Day -- and eventually executed 30,000 precisely calculated turns for a perfect run just in time to celebrate America's own Day of Independence on July 4. "It's like Neil Armstrong walking on the moon," he told reporters afterward. "No matter how many people accomplish the feat, it will always be Armstrong who will be remembered for doing it first. And, best of all, it was an American." To emphasize the point, Billy began using a new set of high-score initials: U S A.
But then, it starts to get deep. This is a great piece and not just for gamers. (thx, @asimone)
Glen McCracken is attempting to complete the first-person shooter game Modern Warfare 2 without killing anyone. Did John Conner tell him not to?
This feat may sound impossible, but for Game Informer reader and hardcore Modern Warfare 2 player Glen McCracken, it's only a matter of time. In two hours of playing, Glen has reached rank 5 without taking a life. Using pacifist means to earn points, Glen estimates it will take him roughly two months to be the first player to reach rank 70 with zero kills.
Uh oh, this one is going to be a big timesink. Timetub? Timelake? Anyway, try out Solipskier and feel the rest of your day slipping away. My top so far: 18.7 million...I got a lot better once I tried it on the iPad. (via waxy)
Yakuza 3 is a video game about the Japanese gangsters (known as Yakuza). Boing Boing sent someone to put the game in front of three actual yakuza to see what they thought of it.
Of the three reviewers, only Kuroishi manages to play it all the way to the end. Two of the three are missing their pinkies -- in the old days, when a yakuza or his subordinates screwed up, they chopped off pinkies as an act of atonement -- and this seems to affect their gameplay.
The game got high marks overall.
M: The corporate yakuza guys get a thumbs up for realism. Nice suit. Smart. Financially savvy. Obsessed with money. Sneaky and conniving. Ruthless.
S: There are a lot of guys whom I feel like I know. The dialogue is right too. They sound like yakuza.
K: Braggarts, bullies, and sweet-talkers. I agree -- it feels like I know the guys on the screen.
M: Kiryu is the way yakuza used to be. We kept the streets clean. People liked us. We didn't bother ordinary citizens. We respected our bosses. Now, guys like that only exist in video games.
S: I don't know any ex-yakuza running orphanages.
K: There was one a few years ago. A good guy.
M: You sure it wasn't just a tax shelter?
K: Sure it was a tax shelter but he ran it like a legitimate thing. You know.
I am a sucker for this stuff...it reminds me of Chicago gang members reviewing The Wire.
Entanglement is a fun little Flash game that reminds me a lot of those old Pipe * games. (thx, kathryn)
Nicholson Baker has "always had pacifist leanings" so it was interesting to read about his first experiences playing video games, mostly the popular violent ones: Halo 3, Red Dead Redemption, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, etc.
To begin with, you must master the controller. On the Xbox 360 controller, which looks like a catamaran, there are seventeen possible points of contact. In order to run, crouch, aim, fire, pause, leap, speak, stab, grab, kick, dismember, unlock, climb, crawl, parry, roll, or resuscitate a fallen comrade, you must press or nudge or woggle these various buttons singly or in combination, performing tiny feats of exactitude that are different for each game. It's a little like playing "Blue Rondo a la Turk" on the clarinet, then switching to the tenor sax, then the oboe, then back to the clarinet.
Bummer that the whole article isn't online.
Toru Iwatani recently showed his original sketches for Pac-Man at a Dutch gaming festival.
Got sucked into this game for more than a few minutes: Ragdoll Cannon 3. (via buzzfeed)
He spends much of the time arresting criminals, taking people to the hospital in an ambulance, and putting out fires.
At this point my son was familiar with the game's mechanics and hopped into the ambulance. As he put the crime fighting behind him, he wondered aloud if it was possible to take people to the hospital. I instruct him to press R3, and then he was off to save a few lives. He was having a blast racing from point to point, picking up people in need, and then speeding off to Las Venturas Hospital. During one of his life saving adventures, he passed a fire house with a big, red, shiny fire truck parked out front. He didn't want to let his passengers down, so he took them to the hospital and then asked if I could guide him back to the fire truck.
A 22-yo architecture student from The Philippines has "beaten" Sim City 3000 by building a city with the largest possible population that sustains itself for 50,000 years. The city, called Magnasanti, is not somewhere you would want to live.
There are a lot of other problems in the city hidden under the illusion of order and greatness: Suffocating air pollution, high unemployment, no fire stations, schools, or hospitals, a regimented lifestyle -- this is the price that these sims pay for living in the city with the highest population. It's a sick and twisted goal to strive towards. The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don't rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time.
Update: In 1922, Le Corbusier designed an "ideal" city with 3 million inhabitants. (thx, diana)
Pixel is a short documentary film exploring the artistic use of pixel-style animation in contemporary video games.
(via waxy)
This tower defense game is really really addictive. Like don't start if you want to get something done today. (via buzzfeed)
What if Super Mario Bros had been designed as a typical circa-2010 networked game? It might look a little something like this:
The site's a little slow right now...check back later if you can't get the page to load. (via waxy)
Oh, man. Now you can play the original Super Mario Bros game as Link from Zelda, Mega Man, Samus Aran, and others. Really really fun. The only thing that could make this better is if you could play as NHL94's Jeremy Roenick or Tecmo Bowl's Bo Jackson. (thx, will)
The current record for Asteroids is 41,336,440. It was set back in 1982, making it the longest-held record in video gaming.
[Fifteen-year-old Scott] Safran, who had been practicing nonstop at the game for the previous two years, agreed to play a marathon session of Atari's popular outer-space shooting game as part of a charity event in Pennsylvania. His mother drove him to the event and lent him a quarter, which he dropped into the machine Nov. 13.
Why has the record held so long? Because Safran's game took three continuous days to play with minimal breaks. Now, a new unofficial record has been set by John McAllister; he played 58 straight hours and beat Safran's record by just over 2,000 points. Oh and those minimal breaks I mentioned:
When he needed a bathroom break, he stepped away from the machine and shed a few lives until his return. It got a little scary towards the end, because he started to run alarmingly short on extra lives as a result of his final bathroom break. He recovered well shortly thereafter, but not without giving all of us onlookers quite the scare first.
For reference, the contest in Hands on a Hard Body lasted 77 hours.
Pixelized video game characters lay waste to NYC.
Give it a few seconds to get going...things get good right around Tetris time.
Troy DeArmitt shares a fond childhood memory of competing with his father for the household's high score on Mega-Bug, a game for the TRS-80.
the next time i sat down at the computer, on a tablet of paper was written a number with an emphatic underline beneath it. it was in my father's handwriting and it took me a moment to realize it was a score, his high score, to the game. it was also higher than my highest score to date.
Mega-Bug is available to play online...Troy has the full instructions in his post. I played this game when I was a kid too...it was called Dung Beetles on the Apple II and was one of my favorites.
A fun dogfighting game; here's the premise:
1835: Sir Albert Pembleton accidentially discovers low temperature fusion. His invention changes history. A nuclear hotbox is installed in an early aeroplane. Super heated steam, the technology of the age, drives all the systems.
(thx, nick)
If you're into old school video games and pinball, the place to be in mid-July is at California Extreme, a classic arcade games show. Tickets are $60 for the weekend but the relevant pullquote here is:
Everything is on free play. You can play from the moment you arrive until we shut off the power at closing -- Play as many games as you want, in whatever order you want to. There are *HUNDREDS* of games, all set to play for free. This is a your chance to try those older games, or the newer games that you'd never put money into in an arcade. There are also many games that never got produced, and are very hard to find.
I went with some friends several years ago and it was a lot of fun.
Oh, I can see where this game would get maddeningly addictive after awhile, especially if you like to shoot pool. (thx, marc)
In this 28-minute presentation, Jesse Schell talks about the psychological and economic aspects of Facebook games and what that means for the future of gaming and living. If you make products or software that other people use, this is pretty much a must-see kinda thing...the last 5 or 6 minutes are dizzying, magical, and terrifying.
It's another one of those puzzle shooters I like so much. (via buzzfeed)
A strategy shooter game that gets pretty hard in the later levels...like level 19, my nemesis.
You've gotta have a scroll wheel (or trackpad) to play Record Tripping, a game in which you utilize DJ scratching to solve little puzzles.
Stewart Butterfield and his ex-Flickr co-founders have revealed what their company, Tiny Speck, has been working on for the past few months: a game called Glitch. A CNET reporter has been embedded at Tiny Speck for the past few months and has more than you probably want to know about the new company and game.
From Casey Reas, a quick Chrome-only mouse-only game called Twitch. (thx, david)
Build your network, set up your blasters & mortars, get some energy stores in place, and try not to play Creeper World for like 12 straight hours. And this is just a demo for a downloadable for-pay game with more than 50 missions. (via buzzfeed)
Pictogrid starts off deceptively simple but is difficult to stop playing after a few rounds. (via buzzfeed)
I didn't think much of this one at first (yet another tower defense game, right?) but the megatower wrinkle helps make Bubble Tanks Tower Defense almost unputdownable.
Oh, and there's a level with unlimited money to spend on towers and upgrades to defend against unlimited enemies (it's the last board in the top row). I built up the board as much as I could and let it run overnight. After 10 hours or so, the game got to level 2758 before all 20 lives were gone.
Completely trippy version of Tetris where pushing the rotate button ROTATES THE WHOLE WORLD. (thx, ryan)
If you liked Hedgehog Launch, you'll also like Fly Hard.
New Super Mario Bros Wii may be difficult, but the simple Hoshi Saga had me tearing my hair out way more than Bowser's minions.
And call your hairdresser because there is also Hoshi Saga 2, Hoshi Saga 3, and Hoshi Saga Ringo. (via buzzfeed)
Endless Migration is a fun Flash game where you control a flock of geese while dogding airplanes and weather systems. (thx, neil)
Super Mario Bros + Tetris = Tuper Tario Tros. (via waxy)
A simple but oddly compelling multiplayer basketball game...after each shot, you're shown how you're doing against everyone else (~1000 players when I was playing). (via waxy)
This is possibly the most American thing I've ever seen:
Such ingenuity combined with such conspicuous waste. (via waxy)
Let's get your Monday started off on the wrong foot: Warzone Tower Defense. A worthy alternative to Desktop Tower Defense. (thx, shay)
GFB is a game and it's totally safe for work unless you want to actually get something done today. From a review at Jay is Games:
There is a certain paradigm shift that must occur when playing this game for the first time before the light goes on and the player 'gets it'. I believe this is due to a sort of cognitive bias we have as gamers: when firing a turret we expect things to explode... and to go fast.
However, this game is anything but fast. The gameplay forces the player to slow down, think first, and to plan each shot carefully. Each game therefore becomes a careful placement of orbs rather than a quick-fire session to arrive at the end result. The slower pace gives way to excitement as an orb inches ever so close to that fearsome dotted line, and strategy emerges as the key ingredient to an award winning recipe. Those who don't experience the paradigm shift may never appreciate the subtlety and the genius of this very simple gameplay design.
There's also a version for the iPhone called Orbital.
Update: Here's a Java version with rotation.
Continuity is an ingenious little Flash game that is one part side-scroller and one part magic square puzzle. (thx, carl)
New on the Wii Virtual Console: Super Mario Kart. Many consider this the finest Kart made.
I don't have time for a proper play, but the sequel to Hedgehog Launch is out. It's more of the same, only different. (thx, ben)
PS. In case you missed it on Friday, all the fun Flash games I post have their own page now: addictive Flash games. There it is, your whole day. Waiting to be ruined.
Shields of Gemland is a fun Snood-like game. (via buzzfeed)
BTW, I've collected a bunch of the fun Flash games I post occasionally into a tag of their own: addictive Flash games. Hundreds of hours of fun, all on one page.
This Javascript Nintendo emulator works amazingly well in Google Chrome. You can play Dr. Mario, Super Mario Bros., Tetris, The Legend of Zelda, etc.
I highly recommend you use Google Chrome to play JSNES. Thanks to its high performance canvas element, and a clever optimisation by Connor Dunn, it runs at full speed on modern computers. Mac builds are also available. Otherwise, it just about runs on Firefox 3.5 or Safari 4, but it's hardly playable.
We've come a long way from the days of the 5K Awards.
A Life Well Wasted is a well-produced podcast about "video games and the people who love them", sort of a gaming version of Radiolab or This American Life. Each episode is accompanied by a limited edition poster designed by the awesome Olly Moss.
Update: The Bygone Bureau has an interview with A Life Well Wasted's creator, Robert Ashley.
Today's the day: those meticulously remastered Beatles albums are available today. The Beatles version of Rock Band is out as well.
The goal of the UPGRADE COMPLETE! game is to upgrade the game fully. (Yes, this game was inspired by Achievement Unlocked.)
This game has crummy graphics... UNTIL YOU UPGRADE THE GRAPHICS ENGINE! And no sound? UNTIL YOU BUY IT IN THE SHOP! And no mute button!? You guessed it, this game requires you to buy that as well!
Which seems a bit lame but then when you get into it a bit, it's a little less lame but the game is totally easy and it just takes some time to get through it and get everything. I guess what I'm trying to say is: I finished it.
CycloManiacs is Excitebike all grown up...it can drink alcohol and tie cherry stems in knots with its tongue. Warning: this is literally hours of fun. Hours.
Boggle + Tetris/Snood = Must Pop Words. This is difficult for poor typists like me. (via vsl)
Max Damage. You didn't want the rest of your afternoon, right?
Might have to dust off the Wii for this one: New Super Mario Bros. Wii.
Features include four-player collaborative play (!!) and something called "demo play".
The game will also be the first game on the Wii to feature "demo play", where players will be able to pause the game, let the game complete the level for them, and resume play at any time by unpausing.
In my house, this was called the "give the controller to my 11-year-old cousin and let him show you how it's done" feature. I both hated and loved that feature. (via object of my obsession)
The Circle the Cat game is addictive until you figure out the optimal strategy (which took me way too long) and then it's pretty easy. (via @dunstan)
In Multitask, you start off playing one game and then another and so on until you're playing several games at the same time. I am horrible at this. (via waxy)
Usually MMO games that reach the end of their usefulness are ungracefully shut down. The Matrix Online has cleverly built the closing of the game into the narrative of the world.
Ashes to ashes, decompiling sky to deletion. The Matrix Online is reminding us all that it's slowing coming undone as the system becomes more and more unstable with each passing day. Ashes raining from the sky, eyes being seen in the clouds, zombies, agents, angels, and demons all appearing out of the system's corruption to wreak havoc across the Mega City.
(thx, david)
Amazon has a mp3 listing of all the songs that will be included in the upcoming Guitar Hero 5. Lots of great stuff in there.
As an avid player of Flash games (when I've got time), I found Dan Cook's post on the economics of the Flash game platform really interesting and applicable to anyone who is offering content online and wants to get paid for it.
Flash games are currently the ghetto of the game development industry. Compared to the number of players it serves, the Flash game ecosystem makes little money, launches few careers, and sustains few developer owned businesses. Despite the vast potential of the ecosystem, Flash games contribute surprisingly little to the advancement of game design as an art or a craft.
This is just the first installment...two or three more are yet to come. (via @anildash)
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