kottke.org posts about video games
Speaking of Daft Punk, did you know they released some new music recently? Ok well, that’s not quiiiite true, but in late September, Epic launched the Daft Punk Experience in Fortnite and IMO it’s a) extremely cool, nd b) should be considered a part of the group’s official discography.
For a taste of what it’s like, here’s the seven-minute intro to the experience:
Watch video on YouTube.
I watched this live when it launched, on a big TV and with the sound turned up, and it was awesome. Again, no new music, but definitely a new music video experience.
During the intro, you can control your player slightly but the game mostly moves you through it. After you’re inside the pyramid though, there’s a lot to do. The main event is a concert playing some of the songs from their Alive 2007 tour; here’s what that looks like from start to finish (33 min):
Watch video on YouTube.
You can move freely around and dance, including with other players who are in the pyramid with you. During some songs, you can bounce really high on the dance floor or fly around the room.
Off of the main pyramid are four smaller interactive rooms (in order of coolness):
- Dream Chamber Studios: You can choose from almost two dozen Daft Punk songs and mix them together, adjust tempos, etc. This room alone makes the whole experience worthwhile…it’s the easiest way to create DP remixes.
- Around the World. You and up to three other players work to recreate and then customize the iconic Around the World music video. Oh, and you’re all Lego characters.
- Daft Club: Dance to music from Random Access Memories. (You can see the full Daft Club sequence in the latter part of this video.)
- Robot Rock Arena: You and some teammates join forces to defeat robots using musical weapons.
In all, that’s six new interactive audiovisual experiences from Daft Punk, featuring 31 songs from their discography. It’s huge.
The easiest way to see/experience all of this is to play the game…the Daft Punk Experience is still playable afaik. Fortnite is a free download and the DPE is free as well. If you’re a Daft Punk fan, it’s worth checking out for sure.
Watch video on YouTube.
Super Mario Bros. Remastered is an open source, fan-created, remastered version of the original Super Mario Bros. The trailer is above.
The game includes new levels, custom modes and characters, a custom level editor, and more. You need the SMB1 NES ROM to play it — “none of the original assets are contained in the source code, unless it was originally made by us!”
You can download versions for Windows, Linux, and MacOS…check out all the options and details on Github.
Dan Sinker recently visited an arcade full of old school vintage arcade games and documented some of the wonderful typography and design of the game cabinet marquees.
After a while though, I became captivated not by the games themselves but by the incredible art on the cabinets and specifically the marquee, the sign set above the screen, tempting a kid from 1983 to spend their hard-earned quarters. The marquee back then had to do a lot of work, because the games themselves were all low resolution and blocky affairs. The marquee had to sell the idea of the game, the excitement around the concept and the story because the on-screen graphics alone weren’t going to do it. So you made sure that your marquees did the job, filling it with exquisite hand-lettered logos, art borrowed from the pages of fantasy novels, sci-fi, and comics, and vivid color palettes that would shine out into the dark arcade.
I’ve been to Funspot in New Hampshire a few times and it’s so fun to walk around and marvel at all of the 70s, 80s, and 90s graphic design — to see what the past thought the future was going to look like.
Lego is coming out with a near 1:1 replica of Nintendo’s iconic Game Boy handheld video game system. It’s not playable, but you can insert & remove Lego game cartridges and use different lenticular screens to pretend. Here’s a short video showing how it “works”:
Watch video on YouTube.
You can preorder the kit from Amazon; the price is $60, which is only $30 less than the actual Game Boy cost when it was released.1
I still have my original Game Boy from 1989 — it’s sitting on a table near where I’m typing this. I played so so much Tetris on that thing… (via moss & fog)
Watch video on YouTube.
A perfect game in Tetris is defined as achieving the max score (999,999) in the least amount of time possible, meaning you need to score a bunch of Tetrises in a row (and nothing else) at the highest possible starting speed. A few years ago, a player used a tool to develop a sequence of moves and timing to score a perfect game, proving that it was possible. But could a human do it just by the playing the original game in the way it was intended? Well, you’ve got to watch the video to find out.
I’ve said it before — I love these Tetris analysis videos. Both aGameScout, who did the video above, and Summoning Salt (who made this feature-length video about the history of Tetris world records) are world-class at using video to explain the innovation, competition, and cooperation that allow these players to keep pushing higher and faster, past what anyone thought possible even a few years ago.
Thinking back to the Jackson Goldstone post, what I really want is a aGameScout- or Summoning Salt-caliber video about the differing riding styles of mountain bike riders, how each of them uses their own style to go faster, and where the innovations are happening. I’m sure these videos exist and I just don’t know where to find them, but if they don’t, this would be a hell of an opportunity for someone with ace communication & video editing skills.
Lagarto Films is a film collective based in Puerto Rico that makes interactive YouTube videos and games. This is pretty clever actually…they use keyboard shortcuts to skip to different parts of the video, Choose Your Own Adventure style. So you can play a game of Uno:
Watch video on YouTube.
Or direct the action in a short cops & robbers film:
Watch video on YouTube.
Play Grand Theft Auto in real life:
Watch video on YouTube.
There are many more of their interactive videos in this playlist. (thx, ollie)
The Video Game History Foundation has launched a digital library of documents, magazines, and transcripts related to video games that’s free for everyone to access. Some of you might be interested in the collection of materials related to the development and promotion of games created by Cyan (Myst, Riven, etc.) but I went straight for the library of video game magazines. The earliest issue I could find was this issue of Electronic Games from 1981.
Ha, I bet you had forgotten that George Plimpton was a spokesman for Intellivision. (Quick sidebar here because I can’t resist this odd fact: Plimpton was one of a group of people, which also included former NFL star Rosey Grier & Olympic gold medalist Rafer Johnson, who apprehended and disarmed Sirhan Sirhan after Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy.)
That same issue of Electronic Games from 1981 contains this interesting nugget of news about how long McDonald’s has been thinking about replacing their cashiers with computers:
Will McDonalds be the first fast-food chain to hop on the electronic gaming bandwagon in a big way? The hamburger king has approached Atari about the possibility of designing a computerized video monitor. The device would take the meal order and then help the customer pass the wait pleasantly by playing a videogame. One potential hitch: What happens if a player is on a hot streak when the Big Mac, fries and soft drink show up?
Anyway, I definitely lost more than a few hours to this. You can check out the full digital library and watch this video for more information about what’s in it. (via the verge)
Watch video on YouTube.
Nintendo has finally released some details and a sneak peek trailer for their upcoming console, a sequel to the mega-popular Switch. From The Verge:
The console looks a lot like the original, but it’s bigger. In the video, the Joy-Con controllers are black with colored accents, and they attach to the side of the console instead of sliding on and off. The Joy-Cons appear to snap on quite easily — leaks have suggested they could be attached via magnets.
It looks like there’s going to be a new Mario Kart game (huzzah!) and the Switch 2 will play Switch games, although “certain Nintendo Switch games may not be supported on or fully compatible with Nintendo Switch 2”. As for what Nintendo hasn’t revealed at this time, it’s a long list — and The Verge has some questions:
Perhaps the most glaring omission in the Switch 2 reveal was the fact that Nintendo didn’t say anything about how powerful the new console is. We can see that the console is bigger, but what’s the screen size? Is it OLED or LCD? Is the screen resolution still 720p? Is 4K resolution supported?
Though visible for a few brief moments, the reveal video showed off the Switch 2’s new dock. What’s the docked resolution? Is it just a charging shell, or is it still required for TV play? Can you dock the Switch 2 in the original Switch dock, or will it support all the super-portable third-party docks?
Very excited for the Switch 2, but I’ll admit I will be slightly less enthused if it doesn’t support 4K resolution while docked.
Have you ever wanted to browse art from the Metropolitan Museum in a first-person shooter interface? You are in luck because DOOM: The Gallery Experience exists.
DOOM: The Gallery Experience was created as an art piece designed to parody the wonderfully pretentious world of gallery openings.
In this experience, you will be able to walk around and appreciate some fine art while sipping some wine and enjoying the complimentary hors d’oeuvres in the beautifully renovated and re-imagined E1M1 of id Software’s DOOM (1993).
They sourced the art from the Met’s Open Access collection and in the game you can click through to see each piece on the Met’s website. Here’s a video of the gameplay:
Watch video on YouTube.
And of course people are speedrunning it. (via waxy.org)
Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, actors out of work during the pandemic, were playing Grand Theft Auto when they found the Pinewood Bowl amphitheater and decided to try staging a production of Hamlet within the game with other players voicing all the parts. Grand Theft Hamlet is a documentary about the effort. It’s not streaming anywhere yet, but I hope it will be soon!
They audition all-comers: an uproarious business in which weird randoms show up with a tendency to destroy others by using a flame-thrower or rocket-launcher for no reason at all while the production is being explained to them.
They end up performing the play all over the city, “this is Shakespeare on a billion dollar budget,” not sticking to the amphitheater. The trailer looks great.
Watch video on YouTube.
Super Moxio Bros is a version of World 1-1 of the original Super Mario Bros done using typewriter characters. I didn’t check for sure, but there’s a good chance I got this link from waxy.org.
Watch video on YouTube.
I know a lot of you probably aren’t going to take me up on this, but I recommend watching Summoning Salt’s feature-length documentary on the history of Tetris world records. I started watching in the other night and once I got going, I couldn’t stop. Some of plot points were familiar — Why Are Humans Suddenly Getting Better at Tetris?, A Revolutionary NES Tetris Technique Gaining Steam, The Greatest Classic Tetris Game of All Time, 13-Year-Old Becomes First to Beat NES Tetris, Another Tetris World Record Completely Demolished! What Is Going On?! — but seeing it all put together in one engaging & informative narrative was really compelling.
Watching these videos about Tetris (and also Super Mario Bros), what strikes me most is how clearly you can see, over and over again, how innovation works:
This is a great illustration of innovation in action. There’s a clearly new invention, based on prior effort (standing on the shoulders of giants), that allows for greater capabilities and, though it’s still too early to tell in this case, seems likely to shift power to people who utilize it. And it all takes place inside a small and contained world where we can easily observe the effects.
And it’s a credit to Summoning Salt and other video producers that this process is so clear to the viewer:
In the video analysis of this speedrun, if you forget the video game part of it and all the negative connotations you might have about that, you get to see the collective effort of thousands of people over more than three decades who have studied a thing right down to the bare metal so that one person, standing on the shoulders of giants in a near-perfect performance, can do something no one has ever done before. Progress and understanding by groups of people happens exactly like this in manufacturing, art, science, engineering, design, social science, literature, and every other collective human endeavor…it’s what humans do. But since playing sports and video games is such a universal experience and you get to see it all happening right on the screen in front of you, it’s perhaps easier to grok SMB speedrun innovations more quickly than, say, how assembly line manufacturing has improved since 2000, recent innovations in art, how we got from the flip phone to iPhone X in only 10 years, or how CRISPR happened.
I was talking to my son about this video yesterday and of course he’d already seen it — “I love Summoning Salt’s videos” — and I loved his take on the way in which the NES version of Tetris was unwittingly challenging these players beyond what the game’s makers had ever envisioned. Where the designers may have just kept increasing the speed of the game as the levels got higher (boring!), the game glitches and throws all these interesting challenges at players: tile colors you can barely see, game-ending kill screens that you can pick your way around, a level with 810 lines, and the game resetting after hundreds of levels. So instead of players just having to get faster (which they have definitely done), they’ve had to navigate all of these other obstacles as well. (thx, nathan)
Oh wow, this takes me right back to my childhood: Electronic Plastic, a museum of portable, old-school electronic toys. We didn’t have a gaming system in my house growing up — I had to settle going over to my friend Steve’s house for Atari 2600 and my big city cousins’ Intellivision — but we did have a couple of these handheld games. Specifically: Baseball (upper right), Football 2 (lower left), and Q*bert (lower right). The football game was my favorite. I played it for hours and hours — so many touchdowns. (And look at these Soviet handhelds!)
Friends at school had other games: I particularly remember the watches, some of the mini arcade cabinets from Coleco, and these pre-Game Boy Nintendo handhelds. The teachers hated them…I think they probably got banned at some point.
I know that my dad still has these games stashed somewhere in the house I grew up in…I’d love to play Football 2 again. 🤖🏈 (via present and correct)
Tetris was created by Alexey Pajitnov 40 years ago. The NES version has been out since 1989. You’d think that people would have “solved” the game long ago. But humans, properly motivated, are relentlessly inventive, and the past few months have seen a flurry of record-setting activity that is remarkable for a 35-year-old game.
It’s only been a little more than a month since a 13-year-old player named Blue Scuti reached the kill screen for the first time in history, a feat only performed previously by an AI. Now it’s been done twice more and the world record for points changed hands three times in three days.
And then just three weeks later, in mid-January, a player named PixelAndy absolutely destroyed the highest score world record. Here’s the engaging story about how he did it, including a surprising family rivalry and a clever strategic innovation:
Watch video on YouTube.
I’ve written before about how great these video game analysis videos are at communicating how innovation works:
This is a great illustration of innovation in action. There’s a clearly new invention, based on prior effort (standing on the shoulders of giants), that allows for greater capabilities and, though it’s still too early to tell in this case, seems likely to shift power to people who utilize it. And it all takes place inside a small and contained world where we can easily observe the effects.
Watch video on YouTube.
Yeah, you heard me: the 1993 video game Doom, which has been ported to every platform imaginable (an Apple Pippin, a jailbroken John Deere tractor, a Peloton), can now run on a display made of phosphorescent E. coli bacteria.
Ramlan’s paper doesn’t go to the enormous trouble of actually encoding all of Doom to run in bacterial DNA, which the author describes as “a behemoth feat that I cannot even imagine approaching.” Instead, the game runs on a standard computer, with isolated E. coli cells in a standard 32x48 microwell grid serving as a crude low-res display.
After shrinking each game frame down to a 32x48 black-and-white bitmap, Ramlan describes a system whereby a display controller uses a well-known chemical repressor-operator pair to induce each individual cell in the grid to either express a fluorescent protein or not. The resulting grid of glowing bacteria (which is only simulated in Ramlan’s project) can technically be considered a display of Doom gameplay, though the lack of even grayscale shading makes the resulting image pretty indecipherable, to be honest.
Technicalities aside, that’s still pretty cool.
Watch video on YouTube.
13-year-old Blue Scuti is now the best Tetris player in the world after becoming the first human player to beat the NES version of the game by playing until reaching the kill screen. The feat took him 38 minutes (as well as who knows how many thousands of hours of practice) and also resulted in a new high score, new level & lines records, and something called a “19 Score world record”. Skip to the 38:00 mark to watch his last few lines and what happens when he wins.
See also: an AI beating Tetris just over 2 years ago and an explanation of the “rolling” technique that Blue Scuti used to beat the game. (via waxy)
Watch video on YouTube.
{Hyperventilating slightly} They’re making a World of Goo 2 15 years after the original one was released?! Holy smokes! I loved World of Goo back in the day and I can’t wait to play this sequel. (via waxy)
Watch video on YouTube.
Nearly everything about Fortnite’s popular Battle Royale mode is geared towards creating conflict between its players. In this episode of Pop Culture Detective, Jonathan McIntosh explores whether you can be a pacifist in a virtual world filled with war and, beyond that, whether you can make friends with your fiercest enemy. As a Fortnite player who has qualms about even the cartoony violence in the game, I loved this video. It reminded me of Robin Sloan’s piece in the Atlantic from 2018: I Played Fortnite and Figured Out the Universe.
When they’re successful, these negotiations are honestly more nervy and exciting than the game’s most intense shoot-outs. I’m not the only one who thinks so. In forums dedicated to Fortnite Battle Royale, some players share clips of chance alliances, and others reply glumly: “Super rare to find someone [who] won’t shoot you when you emote.” I dream of a Political Fortnite in which victory goes not to the twitchiest sniper but the most charismatic organizer, with factions forming and dissolving… I imagine the fear and thrill of seeing not one but a dozen tiny silhouettes on the far ridge-a war band sweeping fast down the hillside. I’m outnumbered; can I convince them to let me join them?
(thx, andy)
I love reading about speedrunning, specifically Super Mario Bros speedrunning, so this piece in Ars Technica about a new world record by Niftski is right up my alley. Here’s the run if you want to watch it:
Watch video on YouTube.
Four particular things caught my eye about this run:
- Niftski’s new record is 4m 54.631s, which is now faster than what was believed to be the theoretical limit for a human-played game.
- It’s also extremely close to the fastest SMB game ever played done using tool-assisted speedrunning (where you basically play in super slow motion, so you can make all the very precise movements easily, a la The Flash). “In the battle of man versus machine, Niftski is now just 0.35 seconds away from standing up, John Henry-style, against the standard of machine-made automation.”
- I always marvel at the level of dedication and ingenuity of the players working together (though competition) to lower the possible times through the tiniest of adjustments.
- His heart rate tops out at 188bpm by the end of the game. I know he’s sitting at a desk, but that’s got to be of some cardiovascular advantage, right?
👏👏👏
Watch video on YouTube.
The makers of Alto’s Adventure and Alto’s Odyssey, two of my all-time favorite video games, are back with a game called Laya’s Horizon, which brings the familiar Alto vibe to a 3D open-world situation. In the game, you fly & glide around, navigating different terrain to achieve various goals and objectives. I’ve been playing it for the last few days and it’s a really fun, chill game. Basically, if you loved either Alto game, you’ll enjoy this.
Laya’s Horizon is available on iOS and Android and is free to play if you have a Netflix account. Did you know Netflix had a gaming service? (thx, patrick)
Watch video on YouTube.
I’ve gotta say that I was a little skeptical when Phil Edwards started out this video saying that he wasn’t going to talk about Pac-Man’s gameplay as a vital component of why it was such a huge success when in came out in 1980. He allows that, of course, the gameplay was very compelling but other factors truly pushed the game beyond the competition and into its own category, including the decline of pinball (profit per square foot), its family friendliness, and some legal & financial maneuverings.
Oh, and here’s the playable keychain-sized Pac-Man that you can see in the video. Didn’t even know that was a thing!
Long-time readers will recall that I used to link to Flash games pretty regularly. They were typically easy to play and hard to put down — I collected them under the addictive Flash games tag. The collective time and energy spent by kottke.org readers playing these games over the years is, well, I don’t even want to take a guess. So, it is with regret for the rest of your workday that I pass along this site that contains playable versions of tens of thousands of Flash games, including many of the ones I’ve collected. Here are several that you might remember:
Good luck with all that…I only escaped after an hour of poking around. 😬 (via waxy)
Watch video on YouTube.
In the finals of the Classic Tetris Mega Masters Championship held at the end of last month, two of the top Tetris players in the world played what is probably the greatest 1-vs-1 Classic Tetris game of all time. And then they did it again…
Even if you only have a passing interest in Tetris or video games, this is worth a watch and just as exciting as watching a hard-fought soccer or tennis match.
Fun fact: one of the finalists, Alex T, managed to score zero points in a match at a previous tournament. (via @peterme)
Remember Line Rider? It’s a simple video game / physics toy where you draw slopes and curves for a person on a sled to navigate, pulled along by gravity. SineRider, a project started by Chris Walker and finished by a group of teen hackers at Hack Club, is a version of Line Rider where you use math equations to draw curves to maneuver the sledder through a series of points, sometimes in a certain order. Here’s a trailer with some gameplay examples:
Watch video on YouTube.
Let me tell you, I haven’t had this much fun mucking around with an online game/toy since I don’t know when. My math is super rusty, but SineRider eases you into the action with some simple slopes (no cosines or tangents necessary) and before you know it, it’s 20 minutes later and you’re googling equations for parabolas.
Right now, there are two ways to play. You can start on the front page and go through a progression of puzzles that get more challenging as more concepts are introduced (such as the curve changing over time). Or you can do the challenges, which are posted daily to Twitter or Reddit. My son and I spent 10-15 minutes solving these two challenges and we were laughing and cheering when we finally got them. (The educational opportunity here is obvious…)
SineRider is currently in beta so some of the UI stuff is a little rough around the edges, but I was really charmed by the music, the animations…everything really. The project is open source — the code is available on GitHub and the Hack Club folks are looking for contributors and collaborators:
There’s a reason it’s open-source and written in 100% vanilla JavaScript. We need volunteer artists, writers, programmers, and puzzle designers. And, if you’re a smart teenager who wants to change education for the better, you should come join Hack Club!
Last month I posted a link to a story about a woman who discovered she was one of the world’s top Candy Crush players.
Since progress was tied to game score rather than PvP results, Rhoden kept getting pop-ups for milestones such as passing the quarterfinals, and then entering the semifinals as she was just casually taking part in her regular Candy Crush routine.
She was overwhelmed, so she texted the other esports athlete in the family: Her son. Xane was the best Meta Knight player in the midwest during the height of his Super Smash Bros. career. She asked him what a $250,000 prize pool was. After he explained that first place got half of the total pool, he asked why. “I’m in the semifinals accidentally,” she wrote.
In that vein, a reader sent me a link to this 2007 Boston Globe piece about a woman who discovers that she’s actually the world’s best Tetris player.
“It’s funny,” I told Flewin. “We have an old Nintendo Game Boy floating around the house, and Tetris is the only game we own. My wife will sometimes dig it out to play on airplanes and long car rides. She’s weirdly good at it. She can get 500 or 600 lines, no problem.”
What Flewin said next I will never forget.
“Oh, my!”
After I hung up the phone, I went to the bedroom and woke my wife, Lori.
“Honey,” I said. “You’re not going to believe this, but I just got off the phone with a guy who’s in charge of video game world records, and he said the world record for Game Boy Tetris is 327 lines, and he wants us to go to New Hampshire this spring so you can try to break the world record live in front of the judges at the world’s largest classic video game tournament.
Spoiler alert: she broke the record. Baker is still 5th on the all-time scoring list but her score was bested just three months later by Harry Hong, the original record holder, who achieved a score six times higher than Baker’s. (thx, euse42)
The Fictional Brands Archive is a collection of fictional brands found in movies, TV shows, and video games — think Acme in Looney Tunes, Pixar’s Monsters, Inc., and Nakatomi Corporation from Die Hard. Very cool. But gotta say though, the dimming mouseover effect makes this more difficult to use than it needs to be… (via sidebar)
This was me a couple of years ago when I first started playing Fortnite, as satirized by Adam Driver and the SNL gang:
Watch video on YouTube.
I found this sketch via a piece that Tom Vanderbilt wrote about playing Fortnite with his daughter (and her friends).
It’s not as though Sylvie and I discussed the problem of free will as we dodged RPG rounds. For the most part, our interactions weren’t nearly so high-minded. We stole each other’s kills and squabbled over loot. She badgered me for V-Bucks so she could buy her character new baubles in the Item Shop. But sometimes, after playing, we’d go for a walk and analyze how we were able to notch a dub — Fortnite-speak for a win — or how we might have done better. We’d assess the quality of newly introduced weapons. (The best were OP, for “overpowering,” but often the makers of Fortnite would later “nerf” them for being too OP.) She’d chide me for trying to improve by battling more, rather than by practicing in Creative mode — which suddenly made her open to hearing about the late Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson’s theories of “deliberate practice.” (Like many kids, she had a built-in filter against my teachable moments.) We actually were, per Adam Driver’s character, bonding.
And in our Fortnite games I saw her cultivate prowess. I’m not talking merely about the widely discussed perceptual and cognitive benefits of video games, which include an improved ability to track objects in space and tune out cognitive “distractors.” I’m talking about that suite of abilities sometimes referred to as “21st-century skills”: imaginatively solving open-ended problems, working collaboratively in teams, synthesizing complex information streams. “Unfortunately, in most formal education settings, we’re not emphasizing those very much,” argues Eric Klopfer, who directs the Education Arcade at MIT. “Just playing Fortnite doesn’t necessarily give you those skills — but playing Fortnite in the right way, with the right people, is certainly a good step in that direction.”
This is the plain and perhaps embarrassing truth: During my sabbatical, I didn’t pursue any activity (with the possible exception of mountain biking) as diligently as I did playing Fortnite. My kids have been playing it for awhile, both together and separately, and it was fun to watch them working together to complete quests and sometimes even win. I tried playing with them a few times the previous year, but the last shooter game I played was Quake III in the late 90s and so I was comically bad, running around firing my weapon into the sky or the ground and generally just embarrassing my kids, who left my reboot card where it landed after I’d died more often than not.
Early last year, even before I left on my sabbatical, I decided I wanted to learn how to play properly, so that I could do something with my kids on their turf. I played mostly by myself at first — and poorly. Slowly I figured out the rules of the game and how to move and shoot. I played online with my friend David, who was forgiving of my deficiencies, and we caught up while he explained how the game worked and we explored the island together. I finally got a kill and a win, in the same match — I’d found a good hiding place in a bush and then emerged when it was down to me and some other hapless fool (who was probably 8 years old or a bot) and I somehow got them. A friend who had arrived for dinner mid-game was very surprised when I started yelling my head off and running around the house.
Over the summer after I started the sabbatical, I played most days for at least 30 minutes. I got better and was having more fun. I won some matches and bought the Battle Pass so I could get some different skins and emotes. Even though I got a late start in the season, I grinded on quests to get the Darth Vader skin, which is amusing to wear while you’re trying out different emotes. (You haven’t lived until you’ve watched Vader do the death drop or dance to My Money Don’t Jiggle Jiggle, It Folds.1) When the kids got back from camp, I was good enough to at least not slow them down too much and get a couple of kills in the meantime. I learned the lingo and how to work as a team, with my kids leading the way.1 I’m still not great, but it’s become one of our favorite things to do together and I’m enjoying it while it lasts.
Watch video on YouTube.
I randomly came across this YouTube video from an engineer (civil, not railroad) who was building virtual railroads using wooden toy tracks, you know from when you were a kid. Anyway, it turns out that he was playing an open-world game called Tracks, which is available on Steam, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox. Looks fun — if I ever get any free time again, I might give this one a shot.
Watch video on YouTube.
Watch as Polish dance troupe Fair Play Crew brings the twitchy movements from old school martial arts video games into the real world with a funny and perfectly choreographed routine (it starts at the 3:50 mark in the video above. It seems like they’re riffing on a few different games here — Karate on the Atari 2600, Black Belt, Karate Champ, Karateka, International Karate, and even a little Mortal Kombat — instead of just a single game.
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