The most valuable supply of worthlessness on the web
Any gaming post.
This is a project promising quite a throwback. The TA Spring project is basically an open source remake of Total Annihilation, brought up to modern system standards. If you having been gaming long enough to know what that means, you’ll appreciate the joy this can bring.
[tags]Open-source Total Annihilation remake, The TA Spring project[/tags]
Apparently this is not a new comic, having a pretty substantial archive, but I just found the DM of the Rings comic (link goes to the first epidose). DMotR combines the D20 gaming system with the recent Lord of the Rings movie to generate some pretty good geek humor.
[tags]DM of the Ring, Web comic[/tags]
Finally. The long-overdue PSP price drop has come to be. Starting April 3rd, the PSP core pack will be just $169.99.
Were you planning on picking up a Sony PSP tomorrow from your local Gamestop or EB Games? Excellent. Were you planning on paying for it? Super excellent. As a reward for your unquestionable moral values, you’ll be given a $30 discount on that purchase of “the past”. You see, as of April 3, the PSP Core Pack is being marked down from $199.99 to $169.99.
I’ve been planning on getting a PSP for a while. Looks like another push for me to get out and do it.
[tags]PSP price drops $30, PSP core now $170[/tags]
If I ever saw a dream job, this story about the offerings for game reviewers in Australia certainly seems to be the one I’d try to get.
Former editor of Official Australian PlayStation 2 Magazine Richie Young got his weekly editorial off to a very controversial start by suggesting that corruption is rife in the Australian gaming press.
Young’s accusations include reviewers being offered sex and money to change review scores, backroom deals in exchange for “exclusive” stories, elaborate gifts like overseas trips, and advertising support influencing review scores.
Time to start looking for a job down, I suppose, so I can pay the bills until I get the dream job.
[tags]Australian game reviewer offered sex for exclusive stories and better review scores[/tags]
Look familiar? That’s a modern remake of a really, really, really cool game from nearly 25 years back alongside a screenshot from the original.
Continue reading “I’m afraid your mission is just not possible”
Joystiq has recent coverage on a cool new game sure to bring a smile to many coulrophobes: clowns falling down stairs. Billed as the ultimate physics game, one of the brains behind the game explains why it will succeed.
Yesterday, in his talk at the Independent Games Summit, Matthew Wegner beat up clowns. To be specific, he showed a physics sim clip of a dozen full-costumed clown ragdolls tumbling helplessly down a spiral staircase. Wegner, head of the physics game site Fun-Motion, called clowns falling down stairs “the ultimate physics game.” Why? Because it’s a lot easier to identify with clowns in peril then, let’s say, a bunch of shapes. Besides, it’s just hilarious. Later on, Wegner also showed a sim of a few hundred cows falling through a mess of painful looking barriers. Also very excellent.
Physics, clowns, and stairs. Really, what else do you need?
[tags]Clowns falling down stairs, A coulrophobes dream games[/tags]
Not too long ago, I posted a link to the video which gave rise originally to the Leroy Jenkins ‘net meme. Today, I find that Westworld has recently done an in-depth article on Leroy and the real person behind the character. The author talks to Ben Schulz, the man who is Leroy Jenkins, and finds out a little about how the character game to be. He even asks if the video was for real, or if the Leroy Jenkins kamikaze assault in the instance was staged for the video.
Continue reading “Investigating Leeroooooooy Jennnkinnsssssss!”
Not much meat to this story. Here’s the full article about the coming Zelda for the DS, Phantom Hourglass:
San Francisco (CA) – Zelda will join the ranks of many other classic Nintendo franchises that have made their way online, with the release of Phantom Hourglass later this year.
In an interview with Game Informer magazine, Zelda co-creater Eiji Aonuma was asked if The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass will have online multiplayer battles. Without elaborating, he just said, “Yes.”
As with many other gamers with a long history of Nintendo gaming, I’m a sucker for the Zelda games. I hear the CD-Interactive Zelda games were horrid. But I’ve never played a bad Zelda game (and I totally skipped the CD-i generation because that whole technology looked stupid to me, even back then). I’m looking forward to Zelda on the DS. (via Joystiq)
[tags]Zelda DS to feature online play, First online Zelda game – Phantom Hourglass[/tags]
Many months ago, I bought World of Warcraft (WoW) in a moment (well, a 6 week long period) of disappointment and frustration with the state of City of Heroes (CoH – look for me as global @RagManX1 or @RagManX2). I have yet to install WoW, as I did eventually get back into playing CoH, but I am considering trying out WoW just for an occasional change of pace. Given that, are there any recommended sites I should hit to learn the game better? Any particular guides I should read to help me decide my starting character?
I can tell you that in City of Heroes, I typically build min/max characters, or at least fairly power-efficiency focused ones. I also solo most of my play time, as play sessions can be 10 minutes, 6 hours, or anything in between for me, and many, many times I don’t often know in advance just how much time I’ll get to focus on the game. So I really want something that can solo well, but that is useful enough for a team if built well that I’ll be able to find a team. I don’t know that I’ll care enough about WoW to stick with it to the really high levels, so I don’t know that I’ll care much about being built for raiding. In CoH, I mostly play controllers, with scrappers being my main fallback class. In CoV, I mostly play brutes, with corrupters being my main fallback class.
Where do I go to get a good pre-install guide to help me know where to start, and what sites do I need to keep up with if I play a lot?
[tags]Help me start playing WoW, I’m considering joining the 8 million+ collective – guide me[/tags]
A neat gaming project is going on thanks to the folks at the MIT Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab. The plan is to get people to play a game based on a restaurant interaction, then by processing the collected gameplay data and processing it through some magic-like algorithm, come up with game behavior that will better mimic human response.
Contribute to the first collaboratively authored computer game and earn Game Designer credit!
. . .
The Restaurant Game takes about 10 minutes to play. It is a two-player game that will automatically find partners for players once you join a server. You are welcome encouraged to play multiple times. In order for this project to be at all successful, we will need to collect a lot of data — data from over 1,000 10,000 gameplay sessions. Play early, play often, and please spread the word!
This project attempts to address two frustrations I experienced as a professional game developer. 1) Convincing human social behavior is difficult to model with existing hand crafted AI systems. 2) Play testing by people outside of the development team typically comes too late to have a major impact on the final product. This experiment aims to generate AI behaviors that conform to the way players actually choose to interact with other characters and the environment; behaviors that are convincingly human because they capture the nuances of real human behavior and language.
I’ll be downloading and installing this little gem tonight after work. There’s even a desktop widget available so you can get notification of when there is an available restaurant gamer waiting for a partner. (via DubiousQuality)
[tags]Artificial Intelligence used for improving human-like game interactions, Gaming with the MIT AI lab[/tags]
I’ve been reading the latest issue of Electronic Gaming Magazine tonight, and in a fit of stupidity on my part I’ve decided to post some out-of-context quotes from recent game reviews. I do this because this makes me laugh, while revealing to the world how stupid and immature I can be (like most males, I’d offer).
These come respectively from reviews for:
This is over 8 minutes long, but if you want to see just how absorbing massively multiplayer games are to those of us who play them (and how pathetic we are for getting so into the games), check out this American Dad clip on Youtube.
[tags]MMOs and their affect on nerds[/tags]
