Sunday, April 6, 2008
Druaga Anime Broadcasting on Internet
11:00AM Owen Good | For those who remember Namco’s The Tower of Druaga — first released in 1984 and built on Super Pac-Man code — now, two dozen years later, there’s an anime series based on it. The first episode is available today. More »
Because Everything on Craigslist is For Real
10:00AM Owen Good | I’m looking for an apartment. Haven’t had to do this in about three years. So yesterday, I’m on Craigslist and I find the Cognitive Dissonance Bargain of a lifetime: Two bedrooms, 1300 sq feet, air conditioning, parking, cat-friendly, in San Francisco’s white-approved Noe Valley, for $US 1300. “That’s a Nigerian 419 scam,” my friend at work said. “They put these dream homes up and try to sucker you into placing a holding fee or deposit.” I was crushed. I could take the relentless fakery and heartbreak of trolling for online sex in the spam-soaked CL casual encounters. But housing? Was nothing sacred? And now there is this: More »
30th Anniversary Space Invaders Pillows
9:30AM Maggie Greene | Following in the footsteps of the 30th Anniversary Space Invaders bath towels, Taito is now offering up Space Invaders pillows. They’re actually kind of cute and certainly nowhere near as hideous as they could have been. Shipping in July, you can get them for $US 29.90 each. Space Invaders Pillow [NCSX via ALBOTAS] More »
The Only Game I Ever Beat on the First Try
9:00AM Owen Good | OK, time for a flash-game cookie break! Know what I like about this one? Even though you get the joke, even though you follow the instructions, even though you do it right with complete and total hand-holding the first time … You’re still proud of yourself for figuring it out. Someone stick a walkthrough on Gamefaqs, please. I’m busy posting. You Have to Burn the Rope More »
Ian Bogost on Spore’s Universal (?) Appeal
8:30AM Maggie Greene | After taking Spore’s creature editor for a spin at the ICE 2008 conference and watching the average, non-gaming public’s response to the editor, Ian Bogost has some opinions on the universal appeal of Spore (or lack thereof). Unlike The Sims, Bogost says, Spore is facing a significant challenge in getting to the general public: … The observation that surprised me the most was how people totally unfamiliar with Spore reacted to the very idea of a creature editor. From my perspective, it’s a brilliantly engineered, elegantly constructed content authoring tool. But from theirs, it’s an unfamiliar interface to an almost deviant act. More »
MRIs Get to the Bottom of Wiiitis
8:00AM Owen Good | Alright! More scholarly discussion of Wiiitis, a word I like because it breaks the rule of a word having no more than two vowels in a row. For those of you with subscriptions to Skeletal Radiology, move along. For the rest of us … Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), ubiquitous in sports medicine, have been used to examine a healthy 22-year-old Wii player complaining of shoulder soreness after playing Wii Sports Bowling, in the latest thrilling epsiode of Skeletal Radiology. Blah blah blah, authoritative description of simple injury, diagnosis: Wiiitis. It’s right there in the peer-reviewed paper. More »
EVE Online and World of Darkness: Reynir Harðarson on MMOs
7:30AM Maggie Greene | Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a great (as always) interview up with Reynir Harðarson, one of the minds behind EVE Online, on EVE, new MMO-in-production World Of Darkness, MMOs in general, and why MMOs should be more like … Facebook? More »
Stephen King Weighs in on Video Game Violence
7:00AM Owen Good | Best-selling author Stephen King points up and rips down the double-standard of what’s tolerable in violent films, compared with video games, in a brilliant op-ed for Entertainment Weekly. You should take a look at this, because as a creator of worthy stories filled with violence and suspense, he speaks with real authority. Plus, it’s great to see this kind of defence in a mainstream medium. King’s been writing horror novels for nearly four decades, many of them reaching the big screen, some of them even winning Oscars. And he rightly points out that to a politician, a 17-year-old can see gruesome flicks like Hostel or Saw, but would be a danger to society playing the less graphic Grand Theft Auto or Hitman series. Then he loses it on a bill before the Massachusetts state legislature, and it gets good. More »
Portal’s Power: A Narrative Critique
6:30AM Maggie Greene | Emily Short, the interactive fiction designer/author, has an interesting look at Portal’s story from the perspective of someone who does IF. I always like reading critiques from people who are engaged in the ‘gaming’ world, though perhaps not in the way we’re expecting. It’s a thoughtful look at what went right, what went wrong, and maybe why people were so excited about it: More »
