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High Scores And Egos: There's Always A Bigger Doodle Alright class, time for a flash game. This is “Orbitrunner” and it’s reasonably addictive for such a simple concept — place your star on the grid so that the planets (and their satellites) fall into orbit without smashing into you, each other, or going out of the boundary. I’m not sure how realistic the gravity physics are, but it’s very challenging, and I like the background music. The collision/explosion sound/animation is lame, however. I was hoping for a Praxis Effect. If they put this in a 3D, rotatable-camera environment, I’d play it for hours.
You can skip up to five levels if you find you’re just not getting the hang of one. It stores your IP address and lets you continue.
Orbitrunner [Gamezhero.com]
In totally unsurprising news, China’s game market continues to climb — numbers just posted for the second quarter of 2008 show an 11.2% increase over first quarter, and a nearly 66% increase from the same quarter last year (!). In terms of market share, Shanda leads the pack with a 17.9% share, with other big companies hovering below that.
The current market is estimated to be worth 4.43 billion yuan (around $US 645 million), and with no predicted slowdowns, one wonders what we’ll be seeing this time next year (or even fourth quarter of ’08). And with companies like Perfect World making a foray into Western markets, we’ll just have to wait and see where China’s industry is heading long-term.
China market: 2Q08 online gaming services valued at 4.43 billion yuan [Digitimes via GamesIndustry.biz]
So do the proud consoles die … crucified, not on a cross of gold, but on a humble backyard poplar in Mechanicsville, Va.
Reader Daniel S. sent us this is from iReport — the “citizen journalism” site CNN launched. Citizen Journalist Mum said Citizen Journalist Dad “repeatedly warned” Citizen Journalists Jr., III, and IV about “their behaviour” (I guess that doesn’t mean rocket-jumping, PIT manoeuvres, or killing hookers) while playing the Xbox. Left unsaid, but if I know dads, there was probably some tired-of-it-all ultimatum along the lines of “I’m gonna nail the goddamn thing to a tree”. And when their antisocial act-outs continued, he followed through.
A few weeks ago, Bonnie Ruberg wrote about a few gripes with Google Lively‘s user interface and chat system; Mark Young, the user experience designer for Lively, quickly got back regarding the complaints and the two shared an interesting little Q&A on future plans for making Lively more user friendly. On the topic of what bits of the interface are still being tweaked, Young had this to say:
Ah, football and August — fresh cut grass, training camp, two-a-days, puking, pre-season football, the release of Madden and, about 3 seconds after that, the reports of the first Madden glitches. Unlike last year’s bugfest, it’s been reasonably quiet so far. But paging through YouTube on Friday I found a plethora of classic, often hilarious Madden glitches, plus one of him perhaps subconsciously drawing a wiener on the telestrator in real life.
We lead off with the Madden Ambulance Montage (love that title card) above. You can watch the health care professionals (oath: “First, do harm”.) in John Madden Football ’92 cut a path of destruction through the uninjured players on their way to pick up the crumpled halfback — with slo-mo replay, too. Many more clips after the jump.
Newlyweds Frank and Paige Hackett are gamers, he on his PS3 and SNES (yep), she on her DS and PSP. They’re also, in Frank’s words, a “short Italian guy and much taller blonde girl”. So it would follow that that thing, above, would be the cake at their wedding last weekend. Frank provided us the source pictures and we’ll have an architectural discussion on the jump.
