kottke.org posts about video games
Been on a bit of a Guitar Hero kick lately…I just played it for the first time recently so of course I’m looking around the web for advice, hacks, YouTube videos, etc. Nothing like a little web research to reinforce how little you know.
Anyhoo, I found this video of a 8-yo kid shredding it up on Guitar Hero 2…he missed only three notes on an expert level song and wasn’t even looking at the screen some of the time. Little blighter. If you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go have a few alcoholic drinks, smoke some cigarettes, rent a car, and join the Army…let’s see him do all that! (P.S. I wrote a hit play!)
Nice interview with Nintendo game designer Yoshiaki Koizumi, particularly the bits about shifting from 2-D to 3-D Mario games and Mario Galaxy. The bulk of the gameplay in Galaxy takes place on spherical surfaces:
He explained that no matter how large you make the playing field, if you walk long enough you will run into a wall, and that will make you turn around, which makes the camera turn around and runs the risk of making the player lost. With a sphere, Mario can run all he wants without falling or hitting a wall… a useful concept for getting players totally absorbed in the moment. Koizumi added that the best thing about spherical worlds is the “unity of surface,” and the “connectedness.” Neither will the player get lost easily, or need to adjust the camera - by using spheres, Koizumi said, they had created a game field that never ended.
They also talk about the Galaxy’s two-player (well, 1.5-player really) feature, which is a really nice way of getting a second passive player involved in what is essentially a one-player game. (via snarkmarket)
Rob Walker on Guitar Hero:
Guitar Hero offers a connection to all this, but departs from it in an obvious way: You’re not actually playing the guitar. No matter how good you may get at Guitar Hero, if you decide to take up the real instrument at some point, you’ll be starting from scratch.
I don’t know what it’s like to be a rock star and there’s no way I can pick up a guitar right now and play it, but the pretend version of the whole rock n’ roll thing that Guitar Hero provides is pretty powerful, at least for this impressionable newbie. Playing Guitar Hero and believing you’re a rock star might be like eating apple pie on the internet, but if you don’t know the difference in the first place, does it matter?
The Crate Review System judges video games by how the length of time it takes a player to find the first crate, “which represents the point where the developers ran out of ideas”.
Please note that by crates, we mean both crates proper and the circular crate, the barrel.
(thx, joshua)
A history of matching tile games (like Tetris, Dr. Mario, Bejeweled). Don’t miss the family tree of matching tile games about a fourth of the way down the page (larger version here). I’m no matching tile game scholar, but where the hell is Snood?
Update: Aha, it’s because Snood is a rip-off of Puzzle Bobble. (thx, greg & kevin)
An appreciation of the Real Super Mario Bros 2. The game was released in Japan in 1986 but was considered too difficult/weird for US gamers and a different Mario 2 (based on a Japanese game called Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic) was released to the US.
In most games, you trust that the designer is guiding you, through the usual signposts and landmarks, in the direction that you ought to go. In the Real Super Mario Bros. 2, you have no such faith. Here, Miyamoto is not God but the devil. Maybe he really was depressed while making it — I kept wanting to ask him, Why have you forsaken me? The online reviewer who sizes up the game as “a giant puzzle and practical joke” isn’t far off.
The whole upshot is that RSMB2 is now available on the Wii Virtual Console as Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels. And for the record, I loved SMB2.
Nintendo-themed rap music video: Buy Mii a Wii. My favorite part is when he rhymes Nintendo with Shigeru Miyamoto. (thx, undulattice)
Statetris: “Instead of positioning the typical Tetris blocks, you position states/countries at their proper location.” There are versions for the US, Africa, Europe, the UK, and more.
Oh, so you like the addictive games, eh? Gameaholic? Imbibe too much gameahol on occasion? Behold, Bloxorz.
Update: Here’s a walkthrough for the game, including passwords for each level so you can skip around. And here’s a direct link to the Flash file for full-screen playing. (thx, peter)
I’m a light Etsy user, but Lost Mitten has a great store: Super Mario Bros drink coasters, Katamari Damacy buttons, Bob-omb needlepoint patch, etc. I’m a proud owner of a set of Bubble Bobble coasters. She takes custom orders, will reissue sold items, and all her stuff is 20% off until Thu. (Know of any good Etsy stores? Share them in the comments.)
A list of resources for my recent dive into the deep end of an infinite pool. Wikipedia page. Search inside @ Amazon. A Reader’s Companion to Infinite Jest. Reviews, Articles, & Miscellany. The Howling Fantods! A scene-by-scene guide. Hamlet. Act 5, Scene 1. Infinite Jest online index. Wiki from Walter Payton College Prep (incl. timelines, chars, acronym list, places, etc.). Chronological list of the years in Subsidized Time. Notes on What It All Means. Character profiles by Matt Bucher. Character guide. Vocabulary glossary. Various college theses on IJ. Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (sadly not out until Nov). Not entirely unrelated: map of the overworld for The Legend of Zelda, which I’ve started playing again on the Wii. Suggestions welcome, especially looking for a brief chronological timeline of the whole shebang, something like the chronologically sorted version of this but covering more than just when the scenes themselves take place.
Update: Just to be clear, this is my second time through the book. (Last time was, what, 4 years ago?) Trying to make more of a study of it this time.
Update: Suggestion from Ian: “Get 3 bookmarks. 1 for where you are reading, 1 for the footnotes, 1 to mark the page that lists the subsidized years in order.” I’m currently using two bookmarks…will get a third for the sub. years list.
For those that don’t like the new version of Desktop TD, you can go back in time to play version 1.2 and version 1.0.
BREAKING NEWS!!! The newest version of Desktop Tower Defense is out. My afternoon (and yours) is shot.
Update: New features include new Fun modes (Trickle- 1 creep per second, Random creeps), new Challenge mode (15 towers max). I’m on the scene, more as I have it.
Update: One new tower: ink tower, which has a minimum and maximum range and one new creep, a dark creep which I don’t yet know how to kill (it seems to repel a lot of different attacks). My initial impression is that a lot of the changes make the game more complex but not necessarily more fun to play. Much more research is clearly warranted.
Update: It’s also got in-game advertising…the little “K”s on some of the creeps refer to kongregate.com, a sponsor of the game. Blech. (Or maybe it’s good that you can shoot advertisements?)
Will Wright’s long zoom game, Spore, has been delayed until 2009. No one knows why, but I hope the answer involves porting it to the Wii. (via waxy)
Update: EA’s fiscal year starts in March, so it’s not delayed until 2009…just until after March 2008. (thx, zach)
Update: The unofficial word from someone on the development team is that Spore the system is almost ready but Spore the game isn’t all that much fun yet. A recent round of user testing didn’t go so well. Hence, the delay.
Tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal has a story about Paul Preece, creator of the mega-addictive Desktop TD. Version 1.5 of the game is launching sometime this week.
Julian Dibbell on Chinese who farm gold (and perform other for-pay duties) in online games like World of Warcraft. “Nick Yee, an M.M.O. scholar based at Stanford, has noted the unsettling parallels (the recurrence of words like ‘vermin,’ ‘rats’ and ‘extermination’) between contemporary anti-gold-farmer rhetoric and 19th-century U.S. literature on immigrant Chinese laundry workers.” Dibbell’s Play Money was a great read and deserves wider readership than it originally received.
Video of a bunch of reject Wii games, including WiiWhaling, Paperwork Mario, and WiiDriveby. (thx, jeffry)
The guy behind Desktop TD and the guy behind Flash Element TD have quit their jobs and teamed up to form a small games company…here’s the blog they’re writing while they get things together. Includes a sneak peek at the new towers for version 1.5 for DTD.
The Line Rider version of the first level of Super Mario Bros…in case you need to know what having way too much time on your hands looks like.
The top-ten 8-bit games. Can’t argue with the top 5 too much, but the other selections might be a bit off. Whither Metroid? And Tetris?
Cynical-C is keeping track of what the media is blaming for the Virginia Tech murders. So far, the list runs to more than 30 items, including South Korea, Bill Gates, the second amendment, violent video games, and cowardly students.
It’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these. Here are some updates on some of the topics, links, ideas, posts, people, etc. that have appeared on kottke.org recently:
Two counterexamples to the assertion that cities != organisms or ecosystems: cancer and coral reefs. (thx, neville and david)
In pointing to the story about Ken Thompson’s C compiler back door, I forgot to note that the backdoor was theoretical, not real. But it could have easily been implemented, which was Thompson’s whole point. A transcript of his original talk is available on the ACM web site. (thx, eric)
ChangeThis has a “manifesto” by Nassim Taleb about his black swan idea. But reader Jean-Paul says that Taleb’s idea is not that new or unique. In particular, he mentions Alain Badiou’s Being and Event, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze. (thx, paul & jean-paul)
When I linked The Onion’s ‘Most E-Mailed’ List Tearing New York Times’ Newsroom Apart, I said “I’d rather read a real article on the effect the most popular lists have on the decisions made by the editorial staff at the Times, the New Yorker, and other such publications”. American Journalism Review published one such story last summer, as did the Chicago Tribune’s Hypertext blog and the LA Times (abstract only). (thx, gene & adam)
Related to Kate Spicer’s attempt to slim down to a size zero in 6 weeks: Female Body Shape in the 20th Century. (thx, energy fiend)
Got the following query from a reader:
are those twitter updates on your blog updated automatically when you update your twitter? if so, how did you do it?
A couple of weeks ago, I added my Twitter updates and recent music (via last.fm) into the front page flow (they’re not in the RSS feed, for now). Check out the front page and scroll down a bit if you want to check them out. The Twitter post is updated three times a week (MWF) and includes my previous four Twitter posts. I use cron to grab the RSS file from Twitter, some PHP to get the recent posts, and some more PHP to stick it into the flow. The last.fm post works much the same way, although it’s only updated once a week and needs a splash of something to liven it up a bit.
The guy who played Spaulding in Caddyshack is a real estate broker in the Boston area. (thx, ivan)
Two reading recommendations regarding the Jonestown documentary: a story by Tim Cahill in A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg and Seductive Poison by former People’s Temple member Deborah Layton. (thx, garret and andrea)
In case someone in the back didn’t hear it, this map is not from Dungeons and Dragons but from Zork/Dungeon. (via a surprising amount of people in a short period of time)
When reading about how low NYC’s greenhouse gas emissions are relative to the rest of the US, keep in mind the area surrounding NYC (kottke.org link). “Think of Manhattan as a place which outsources its pollution, simply because land there is so valuable.” (thx, bob)
NPR did a report on the Nickelback potential self-plagiarism. (thx, roman)
After posting about the web site for Miranda July’s new book, several people reminded me that Jeff Bridges’ site has a similar lo-fi, hand-drawn, narrative-driven feel.
In the wake of linking to the IMDB page for Back to the Future trivia, several people reminded me of the Back to the Future timeline, which I linked to back in December. A true Wikipedia gem.
I’m ashamed to say I’m still hooked on DesktopTD. The problem is that the creator of the game keeps updating the damn thing, adding new challenges just as you’ve finally convinced yourself that you’ve wrung all of the stimulation out of the game. As Robin notes, it’s a brilliant strategy, the continual incremental sequel. Version 1.21 introduced a 10K gold fun mode…you get 10,000 gold pieces at the beginning to build a maze. Try building one where you can send all 50 levels at the same time and not lose any lives. Fun, indeed.
Regarding the low wattage color palette, reader Jonathan notes that you should use that palette in conjunction with a print stylesheet that optimizes the colors for printing so that you’re not wasting a lot of ink on those dark background colors. He also sent along an OS X trick I’d never seen before: to invert the colors on your monitor, press ctrl-option-cmd-8. (thx, jonathan)
Dorothea Lange’s iconic Migrant Mother photograph was modified for publication…a thumb was removed from the lower right hand corner of the photo. Joerg Colberg wonders if that case could inform our opinions about more recent cases of photo alteration.
In reviewing all of this, the following seem related in an interesting way: Nickelback’s self-plagiarism, continual incremental sequels, digital photo alteration, Tarantino and Rodriquez’s Grindhouse, and the recent appropriation of SimpleBits’ logo by LogoMaid.
Amusing Super Mario Bros mod. Like the post says, the invisible coin blocks are surprisingly funny. (via waxy)
Mere days after I’d kicked the habit, enabling kottke.org reader Jay sends word that the heroin-like DesktopTD has updated with new modes, new bad guys, and new weapons. It’s Friday….get strung out on the new DesktopTD like it’s your first time.
Not sure that there’s a iron-clad source on this, but a new version of Katamari Damacy seems to be rolling towards the Wii. Katamari seems like one of those games that the Wii remote was made for.
Can’t. Stop. Playing. Desktop Tower Defense. (via damn you, schachter)
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