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
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.
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)
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.
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)
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)
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.
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)
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)
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?
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.
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:
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.”
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