Super There Will Be Blood
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.
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kottke.org posts about video games
The Super Mario Bros infinite 1-up
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!”
Massively multiplayer Scrabble
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)
The physics of Angry Birds
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.
Play Asteroids on any web page
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)
Donkey Kong record falls again
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.
Clock Blocks
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.
Long exposure photos of video games
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)
The metaphysics of Pac-Man
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)
Pacifism and first-person shooters
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.
Solipskier
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 video game reviewed by real Japanese gangsters
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
Entanglement is a fun little Flash game that reminds me a lot of those old Pipe * games. (thx, kathryn)
Video game virgin
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.
Original Pac-Man sketches
Toru Iwatani recently showed his original sketches for Pac-Man at a Dutch gaming festival.
Ragdoll Cannon 3
Got sucked into this game for more than a few minutes: Ragdoll Cannon 3. (via buzzfeed)
A four-year-old plays Grand Theft Auto
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.
Dear Leader meets Sim City
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)
A pixel art documentary
Pixel is a short documentary film exploring the artistic use of pixel-style animation in contemporary video games.
(via waxy)
Cursed Treasure
This tower defense game is really really addictive. Like don’t start if you want to get something done today. (via buzzfeed)
Super Mario Bros, 2010 version
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)
Super Mario Bros remixed
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)
Asteroids record broken
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.
Video games attack NYC
Pixelized video game characters lay waste to NYC.
Give it a few seconds to get going…things get good right around Tetris time.
Beating dad’s high score
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.
Steambirds
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)
Old school arcade games show
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.
Taberinos one-click game
Oh, I can see where this game would get maddeningly addictive after awhile, especially if you like to shoot pool. (thx, marc)
The gameification of everything
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.
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