Games

cthulhuedo

the hideously maddening game from World of Lovecraft: … read on …

Pac-Man vs The Asteroids

In these days of Grand Theft Auto IV and WiiFit (who knew you could wee and get fit) its good to know there are plucky game designers out there doing it all for nothing. Perhaps as a showcase for half finished ideas, perhaps as a way of trying out ideas. Or just to show off. Anyway in flicking through a couple of these at Indie Games* I came across ROM CHECK FAIL! which is a acid fuelled nostalgia fest which has been a fun little diversion for the last couple of days.
… read on …

HitchHikers Text Adventure Sequel – Oh Em Gee

waxy.org – Milliways: Infocom’s Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

From an anonymous source close to the company, I’ve found myself in possession of the “Infocom Drive” — a complete backup of Infocom’s shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I’ve ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of the legendary interactive fiction game company. Among the assets included: design documents, email archives, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made.

If you want to play it here is the z-code file. You need an application that loads z-code files.

Legend of Zelda Movie Trailer

An April 1st (2009) release, but if it is another joke it’s an amazingly good-looking one! There have been previous fake Zelda movie trailers, mostly by fans, and you can tell.

Twisty little passages - mazes re-solved

Maze War is the grand-daddy of not only first-person shooters, but also networked multi-player games like World of Warcraft. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are mazes in WoW, Second Life etc, as they are the nursey-slopes for 3D environment creating. I doubt they feature highly in such games.

The persistence of mazes in the text adventure genre of computer games is due perhaps for two reasons. Mazes seem to have an affinity with things literary - they can be used metaphorically or as entities in a magical realist settings, in ways that wouldn’t cohere in more ‘realist’ graphically-oriented game. There is also the metaphor of ’story as maze’ of which Borges ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ is the most well known.

More importantly, the genre just seems to attract game designers who like mazes as mazes, and as a historical ‘in joke’. In Graham Nelson’s Designer’s Manual he puts it bluntly: “it is designers who like mazes … players do not like mazes.” I would also go along with his description of mazes as the ‘locked room’ of text adventures. Provide a novel solution, and you please everyone.

So it goes that in modern text adventures, mazes in name and appearance only often have peculiar and map-free solutions:

SPOILAZ ALERT
* an unsolvable maze - you … read on …

Gary Gygax 1938–2008 RIP

AP story on wbay.com “Gary Gygax died this morning at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin”

Yes, he’s failed that final saving throw and the Official D’n'D site has a black front page today.

I Was A Cretan (Cretin?)

As heard on last weeks FTLoP, amongst the fantasy gamebook boom of the mid eighties, was an unusual threesome known as the Cretan Chronicles. Not the first linked set of gamebooks, it nevertheless followed quite swiftly on the heels of Steve Jackson’s very popular Sorcery series, and in a similar way tried to add more depth to the 400 paragraphed Fighting Fantasy books. It did this by a complex patronage/religion system, a novel setting and occasionally seeming to have a bit of sex in it.
… read on …

JBOF Watch: NZ Racism Undermined By Photo Research

Those of you following the current cricket controversy in Australia will be aware of the basic facts. During the recent test Indian cricketer Harbhajan Singh allegedly called black Australian player Andrew Symonds a “monkey”. Now this may seem like a simple case of kneejerk racism and unacceptable, but it is amazing how both sides have spun the story until it is now out of all context and control. For example, as Marina Hyde reports, Raj Natarajan the President of Australia’s United Indian Association offered this opinion to calm things down. “Considering that the monkey god is one of the revered idols of Hindu mythology and worshipped by millions it is surprising that it was considered a racist term.”

Well I love the PG Tips monkeys but you don’t see me throwing bananas on the pitch at my favourite tea loving footballers. As Marina’s piece goes on to say, the big problem is not just the racism (or lack of) that lies in these comments, it is that within cricket the concept of sledging is not just allowed, it is in some instances celebrated. … read on …

Mario Bandwagon — Keep On Loving You

The Physics of Super Mario Galaxy.

I’m loving this game (about half way through I reckon), but if I have a complaint, it is that the visual resolution of where you are in all the magnificent 3D-ness is a little underdetermined by the graphics you see. Hence the shadow under your feet “as if light in Mario’s universe always falls directly toward the nearest source of gravity” is not only essential, but I find i spend more time fixing on the shadow than on Mario!

To be fair, the game designer recognises this as mentioned in this Gamasutra interview.

If you place a bag of holding in another bag of holding…

10 Awesome Things About D&D from someone who’s started playing the original game has attracted a lengthy nostalgia-list comment thread. Although I am boggling some at ‘Calzone Golems’