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Fear and Loathing in World 1-1
Posted by Owen Good at 11:00 AM on May 18, 2008
With great apologies to the late Hunter S. Thompson, for the out-of-context riffing.
"Luigi had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest. ... We had two bags of fire flowers, 75 mushrooms, five invincibility stars ... And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge winged turtles, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car ...
Update: The picture's artist is suzyage4. He says he drew the above image back in 2005. It's still timely -- Mario is timeless after all.
Super Mario Las Vegas [The Off Topic Forum]
Gamers of my generation may remember Activision's Alter Ego, released in 1986. It was a text-and-graphics, choice-based somewhat-precusor to later games like The Sims or Second Life. The game fascinated me, even as a 13-year-old, with the idea of living another life -- and helping to create such a rich narrative -- or just living that far forward. I feel like I actually have memories of the virtual lives I led in the game:
For those that lament the plethora of crappy MMOs and poorly-planned 'virtual worlds' of various stripes — fear not, a new report indicates that 90% are doomed to failure within a year and a half. Gartner, the research and advisory firm that produced the report, notes that the high rate of failure could be due to a number of factors; perhaps most importantly, the low cost of entry means that more experimentation is taking place (and like any experiment, a lot of virtual experiments fail). But it's not all doom and gloom:
You might need to head to Australia to find them (Brian? Luke?). Or at least, that's where the sure bet is. A story in the Sydney Morning Herald last weekend cites figures showing 41 percent of gamers in Australia are women, and also 38 percent in the United States, both figures representing growth. The Herald also says that if the trend continues, it will be 1:1 guys/girls gaming by 2014.
The cartoony multiplayer side-scrolling brawler, promising one of the deepest gameplay experiences of any Xbox Live Arcade game, is finished. So says developer The Behemoth on its official dev blog. No release date as of yet -- it will take "a couple months at the very least" to finish QA, certification XBLA bureaucracy, etc. etc.
Quickjump reports that, according to a Nintendo news release, Disaster: Day of Crisis, being developed by Monolith Soft for the Wii won't make its July 2008 release date in Japan and has been delayed indefinitely. 
We meditated on the question of difficulty in games 
Another reason this is hell? Think of another thing gamers enjoy that requires opposable thumbs.
Alligator skin: Nothing like taking one of nature's top carnivores, a beast with no natural predators (except some jackarses on a fanboat), and turning it into something trivial. Once I ate alligator meat on a foccacia. A gator might dismember you in two bites and I imagine that hurts, but winding up as a sandwich? Pwned.
We were back to the usual forty-elebemteen-million Originals posts this week, and not all of it was Crecente mining EA Games Spring Break 08 or the Xbox 360 Spring Showcase, either. LucasArts and the ESA are splitsville. Sony announced its PS3 lineup through early '09. EA announced some numbers and said it's no longer providing quarterly guidance which, snark aside, I'd like to see more public companies do.
