Sunday, October 28, 2007
Arcade Flyer Art Saturday: Crazy Climber
12:00PM Flynn De Marco | We’re going all the way back to 1980 for this week’s Arcade Flyer Art Saturday feature, Crazy Climber. Produced by Nihon Bussan Co. Ltd., credited to Nichibutsu (whos name appears on all the buildings n the game) and eventually licensed by Taito, Crazy Climber will surely be remembered by arcade denizens of years past. Crazy Climber was an early relative of the ever popular Rampage and had the player controlling a man who for some unknown reason enjoys scaling the sides of 200 story buildings. The control was done with two joysticks, each one controlling one of the climber’s hands, so some ambidextrous coordination was definitely involved while playing this one. It was eventually ported and remade for several home systems, but nothing could quite recreate that two joystick feeling. More »
Atari 2600 Pitfall Commercial
11:00AM Flynn De Marco | It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these old commercials so I figured it was high time for a little retro gaming advertising goodness. For your consideration is this Atari 2600 Pifall commercial circa 1980 something. I guess they hadn’t yet found the uber talent that is Jack Black to push their game so they decided to go with a bunch of crusty old British Explorer types and a completely bonkers American guy. Not quite the same somehow… except for the completely bonkers part. Interesting to note that they actually mention the name of the game’s creator at the end as a selling point More »
WoW Pumpkin Makes Us Say WOW!
10:00AM Flynn De Marco | It wouldn’t be an October day on Kotaku without a game pumpkin. So to that end I bring you this amazing World of Warcraft inspired pumpkin brought to you courtesy our friends at Wired. You know, I was starting to get pretty jaded with the whole Jack O’ Lantern thing given the avalanche of pictures we’ve been getting lately, but this one is quite impressive. Wow, indeed! More »
Going Postal: The Postal 10th Anniversary Collector’s Edition
9:00AM Flynn De Marco | Running With Scissors’ Postal, the game that has a little something to offend everyone, is celebrating its 10th Anniversary with a Collector’s Edition that creator Vince Desi describes as “The mother load of swag.” The package includes Postal (Classic and Uncut with the bonus Special Delivery levels), Postal 2 (the full and expanded version including Share the Pain multiplayer), Postal 2 Apocalypse Weekend expansion pack (with new weapons, characters, dismemberment and 20 new maps) plus a bunch of fan-made mods including Eternal Damnation, A Week in Paradise and A Very Postal Christmas! Also included is a CD entitled Music To Go Postal By, 10 sets of Postal Babe photos, POSTAL Comics; Posters and POSTAL 3 concept art, preview screens and a sheet of nostalgia inducing Postal colorforms. All this fun comes stuffed in a Krotchy O’s cereal box with word puzzles on the back and will be available on Tuesday. Part on an insane balanced breakfast, Uwe Boll not included. Postal 10th Anniversary Collector’s Edition [Running With Scissors] More »
Constructing Artificial Emotions: Game Design
8:30AM Maggie Greene | I love the essays put together by Daniel Cook (aka Danc) of Lost Garden – they’re frequently complex, but always enlightening. This week at Gamasutra, he tackled the challenge of creating strong emotional experiences via game design: it’s a powerful aspect of media and one that has been discussed in a lot of forums. He pins down the (general) problem of game design when it comes to evoking emotion – designers tend to rely on one of two methods. Either games fall back on other forms of media (”And then we show a movie of the faithful heroine being stabbed by the evil villain!”) or what he terms ‘copious handwaving’ (’”See, this pink pulsating blob represents ‘Feelings’”, explains the designer to the confused player.’). His solutions? Taking a look at several different methods (most with a long history of other applications), their uses and limitations, and how technology can help. Some general thoughts?: Here is a thought. When trying to create emotion in your players, tone down with the fixation on Hollywood, camera techniques and in-game narrative. It isn’t our unique strength as a medium. Instead, explore what would happen if we, as designers, actively attempted to create and manipulate the social, psychological and physical environments of our players in order to induce artificial emotions. Toss the storyboards and scripts. Game design becomes an exercise not so dissimilar from the movie The Truman Show. You provide the carefully balanced system that sets up the appropriate physiological states and cognitive labels. The players react with predictable, measurable human drama. OK, I’m not sure we really need to toss the storyboards in all cases, but experimentation with new ways of making the medium more powerful is never a bad thing. It’s a really, really interesting piece and well worth sitting down to peruse. Constructing Artificial Emotions: A Design Experiment [Gamasutra] More »
“What’s Opera Doc” Free On XBL
8:00AM Flynn De Marco | As we reported earlier this week, the Xbox Live Video Marketplace just added a ton of old Warner Bros. cartoons to it’s lineup. I logged on to XBL earlier to investigate that IPTV rumour and discovered that one of my favourite Bugs Bunny cartoons is currently available for free. What’s Opera Doc, Bugs’ take on Wagner’s epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, is offered in both HD and regular versions. So if you’re like me and love the site of Bugs Bunny in Valkyrie drag riding an obese horse with tiny legs, log on to XBL now and get it while it’s still free. “Kill the wabbit!” More »
The Blurred (Marketing) Line Between Games and Reality
7:30AM Maggie Greene | Weird tasting Final Fantasy drinks, Coke ads featuring Taiwanese pop singers getting sucked in by WoW, and … travel packages centered around your favourite game? Admittedly, the game-based travel packages are for MMORPGs that are based around actual geography, but gaming tourism (and I don’t mean casinos) was a new one for me: In July 2007, China Youth Travel Service Co., Ltd and Sohu jointly released a travel package based on the plots of a popular internet game: the Semi-Gods and the Semi-devils (天龙八部，Tianlong Babu). The game was adapted from a well-known martial arts novel by a Hong Kong novelist Jin Yong. In 2002 Taiwan-based Soft-world turned it into a RPG internet game and received enormous success on mainland China. The new travel package covered plot-related legendary places such as Hainan Island, Sichuan, Nanshao etc. and included real-world games similar to the internet games. The “Tianlong” fans, most of whom are in their twenties can also get VIP cards to play with the internet games after they go back home. I wonder if this is the sort of thing that will ever make the jump outside of Asia. And what form would it take? And would Western gamers pony up for the chance to travel around with a horde of fellow gamers, taking in the sites. Trend: Chinese Virtual Games Go Real [CScout] More »
Xbox 360 Orange Box Update
7:00AM Flynn De Marco | A late night missive from Valve informs us that there is a major update for the recently released Orange Box for the 360. The update is mainly for Team Fortress 2 and includes the following changes. • Reduced network bandwidth usage in multiplayer. • Improved overall game performance. • Arranged search results to favour preferred host conditions. • Improved searching for ranked games. • Addressed a possible false report of too little storage space on larger hard drives. And there you are. Updated to the teeth for your playing pleasure. Now, go forth and give your Team Fortress 2 a (apparently) much needed overhaul. The Engineer awaits! More »
Look Ma, My DS Made Me Smarter!
6:30AM Maggie Greene | Or at least a better at math – so says a small study conducted with primary school students in the Scottish city of Dundee. The wee kidlets were divided into three groups of 30 for the ten week study: one group played More Brain Training every morning for 15 minutes prior to lessons; another group used “Brain Gym”, which is a series of physical exercises designed to stimulate brain activity; and the final group did nothing. Based on the math test given at the beginning and end of the project, the researchers found the Brain Training group made gains across the board, while neither of the other two groups showed such gains. And there were more benefits to some quality time with the DS in the morning: He said: “The results of this small-scale Dr Kawashima project have shown how a targeted and managed use of such a game can help to enhance pupil numeracy skills and classroom behaviour.” There was also a noticeable impact on behaviour and levels of concentration throughout the school day, with the children becoming more self-confident. Mr [Derek] Robertson [who designed the study], a former teacher and university lecturer, said: “It had a real calming effect on children in the class. “In fact I have never before seen such gains across the board.” With all the chatter about the use of games in schools, it’s nice to see a concrete (if small) study conducted on easy applications of gaming within the bounds of education. The researchers are hoping to do bigger studies in the future to have a better and more statistically significant sample to pull from. Daily computer game boosts maths [BBC, thanks James T!] More »
