Sunday, April 20, 2008
What Are You Playing This Weekend?
11:00AM Owen Good | Reader Jacob Reiff pointed out that we have yet to ask the most important question of the weekend, so let’s wrap up Saturday with just that. So, what are you playing this weekend? Me? Thanks for asking. Still powering through Bully, and I also downloaded the Iron Man demo, Ikaruga, and Black from Xbox originals (dunno why). I am also playing the super realistic Apartment Security Deposit Challenge 2K8: Oven Cleaning, and I downloaded the optional Refrigerator De-Scum Map Pack for that one too. Seriously, let us and let everyone know in the comments what you’re jamming to until we resume our regularly scheduled lives on Monday. More »
C-C-C-Combo Game Breaker!
10:00AM Owen Good | Hey! You got your Pong in my Breakout! You got your arm rasslin’ in my Tetris! I swear, the only way to make boring classic video games playable and entertaining in modern times is to rig them to insane controls or pair them with another classic. Here are two. More »
Games With the Best Stories Ever
9:00AM Owen Good | These evergreen features are made for weekends: GamesRadar has a list of the 15 best video game stories of all time. It’s good for a mid-afternoon bull session between the hours of whatever you’re playing (still hammering on Bully, myself.) More »
Two Brothers Meditating Upon Questions of Pac-Man
8:00AM Owen Good | My brother, Fletch, and I were 8 and 6 years old, respectively, when Pac-Man debuted. As this IM conversation demonstrates, to this day we approach the game with the same wide-eyed curiosity and emotional maturity as we did in 1980. More »
The ‘Infocom Drive’: Milliways, the Hitchhiker’s Guide Sequel
7:30AM Maggie Greene | Working weekends here at Kotaku means that we can’t lay claim to articles when we find them — and I’m constantly amazed as to what interesting articles I’ve come across have (and haven’t) been posted by the time I stumble in on Saturday mornings. This week, it was the ‘Infocom Drive,’ a complete backup of Infocom’s shared network drive from 1989 — including a whole lot of discussion and documentation about the unreleased sequel to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. It’s an interesting look at the internal workings of Infocom and a look at a game that never was:
A Wee Screen for the Wii Machine
7:00AM Owen Good | Before you get all excited, this is a mod, not a Wii laptop. I saw this and racked my brain for an actual real world use, ending up with a vision of a Wii on a beach hooked to 1.4 miles of extension cord, and some Charles Atlas musclehead shadow-fighting with Wii Boxing. More »
Putting Together the ‘History of RPGs’ Class
6:30AM Maggie Greene | Michael Abbott of The Brainy Gamer is putting together an undergraduate seminar on the history of the RPG (fun!), and the whole process of deciding what games to include and the reasons for that is pretty interesting — admittedly, I find syllabus construction to be an interesting process that can tell you a lot about the person teaching the class (and a simple fact of life for those of us who want to stay in the Ivory Tower). He’s put together a lengthy list of RPGs that will be whittled down (with some assistance from helpful readers) to 15 titles that will fulfil his criteria: More »
Gamestop Girl, If You Only Knew
6:00AM Owen Good | From the Best of Craigslist in Raleigh, N.C., here’s an ode to true love that, to non-gamers sounds about like Survivor’s “The Search is Over.” But this should melt the heart of any girl who has taken controller in hand and crusaded against unrelenting hordes of enemies, wondering if there ever was a boy out there who considered her just as worthy of the fight. “Oh GameStop Girl, how you make my heart meter skip a beat. If you were being held captive in a mountain fortress by a ruthless mutant mafia gangboss and I had to fight my way through 16 levels of fire-breathing undead ninjas with swords the size of small ponies, I would find a way, even if, after every level, a small man continued to taunt me by saying that you were in another castle. EVEN IF.” More »
A History of Interactive Fiction
5:30AM Maggie Greene | This is an oldie (appearing in 2006) but goodie if you’re interested in interactive fiction — Jimmy Maher wrote a lengthy, well-written and comprehensive history of interactive fiction, from Eliza to the era of Infocom to the state of IF today. It’s a fascinating wrap up, even if you’re not one of the handful of active IF players; but IF’s fall from commercial grace hasn’t stopped IF creators from trundling on to creating bigger and better things: More »
