Chainsawsuit is a pretty weird comic. It isn’t specifically a comic about video games, but its author does play games. He also thinks about cooking, doctors, and Superman.
This strip is from last week. I like it a lot.
Today, the growing 4 color rebellion network announced the addition of their excellent arts/culture/DS blog, Tiny Cartridge. Topics and subject matter range from Retronauts to Game Center CX, to the cutest little Metroid diorama I have ever seen. Obviously, I added Tiny Cartridge to my feedreader immediately. You should do the same.
I’m getting some freaky health thing checked out, just to make sure it’s nothing serious—I’m not sure how long that’ll keep me away, but if there’s a dearth of updates, yes, that.
Prolific game designer Petri Purho doesn’t need a gimmick, but if he has one, it is this: the man is committed to making one new game every month.
And he’s no slouch. As Kloonigames approaches its two-year anniversary, Petri has created the Big List o’ Games, a one-stop catalog of his 24 most recent creations. Many of them are must-plays for anyone interested in indie game development—so go check them out! Go on! Shoo!
Congratulations on two years of Kloonigames!
That sound you hear? It’s the whooshing of Chris Kohler’s envy.
This image I purloined from Game|Life, which conveniently doubles as an illustration of how my intestines feel today, is a screenshot from Alien Crush Returns. The Virtual Console revival of Alien Crush—that is, the original TurboGrafx pinball game from 1988—apparently generated enough interest (and revenue!) that Hudson released this spectacular graphical update of Alien Crush todayish on WiiWare. Well, in Japan.
But Chris Kohler isn’t one for geographic circumscription, so you can bet your bottom dollar he’s already played Alien Crush Returns. His early impressions? ”[It’s] pretty nifty,” he writes.
The game is played with the trigger buttons on the Wii’s nunchuck and remote, and Chris notes that the lack of Classic Controller support “is kind of disappointing—it’s a bit tiring to have to use your index fingers the entire time instead of your thumbs.”
Chris promises a full review later, so keep watch.
“My character was running all over the place,” I wrote in 2005, “and I freaked out because I was like, ‘If I were running this much and this often, I would weigh 90 pounds.’ And then I quit playing because I felt like I should have been investing more time in, uh, moving.”
I’d just sworn off playing Final Fantasy XI for PS2. That version of the MMORPG had come bundled with a proprietary hard drive; consequently, I’d felt obligated to play the game for months. I had tired of levelgrinding, and of fetch quests, but above all I was tired of running.
Over at Hack a Day, there’s a blurb about two guys who wanted to “see what it would be like to run as much as their World of Warcraft characters”—I guess the existential weirdness of watching your avatar live more healthily than you do had gotten to them, too.
These WoW fans rigged two treadmills up to their computers and, in full WoW regalia, commenced on what they’ve christened the RL Race Across Azeroth. Check out their entire write-up; the rig itself is extremely clever, and the corresponding video is adorable.
OK, OK. The photo itself is from a few months ago, apparently, and this really doesn’t have anything to do with video games, I know. But I figure Star Wars devotees and video game players might have overlapping cultural interests, and anyway, I liked this. Ready?
The entire Bento Challenge flickrpool is well worth checking out, but Rena’s contributions to the group are just astonishing:
Here’s an interesting aside from Stephen Totilo over at MTV Multiplayer. Totilo writes that he’s taken some flack for having never hopped on the HDTV train—as a matter of fact, he still reviews games in standard def, thank you very much.
So of all the games coming out to the 360 and PS3, which titles are making him rethink his position on HD? Why, the 2D ones, of course.
Specifically, Totilo says, while 3D games still look very nice, 2D offerings like PixelJunk Eden are frustratingly fuzzy, as are the maps in another PSN release, The Last Guy.
Totilo’s point—that it’s the 2D games that suffer most when presented in standard definition—isn’t just interesting, but more pointedly, apt.
I was very recently shocked to see how pretty Grand Theft Auto IV is on a cruddy old monitor. The game itself was crisp and clear, even crystalline. You see, I’d loaned an old computer monitor from 2002 to a friend whose HD CRT is in the repair shop (something inside had melted or exploded, I guess). So he bought some sort of adapter and connected the old monitor to his 360, and at the time I couldn’t help but think GTA4 somehow benefited from the smaller, duller screen. Strange, indeed.
Ah, the game cheat: it’s pure magic.
The following is a screenshot from Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. The article itself, “Video Game Hints, Tricks, and Cheats,” was published in 2002. It’s pretty weird.
Oh, it gets sillier. Much sillier.
Ooh, what a great find.
Never mind the existential agony of the ‘wait’ icon: this is top-notch design. It’s US$89.00—a lot of dough, but worth it, I think.
Last month I pointed you toward the D20 Gaming Dice Set, a 99-cent iPhone application—its developer followed the first release with a US$2.99 “PRO” release, which allows for the rolling of multiple sets of dice at a time.
Since that distant time, though, a bevy of dice rolling applications have been added to the esteemed ranks of the iPhone’s App Store. There’s the DieRoller app, which costs a meager 99 US cents. Its developer, Derek Jones, writes:
Non-gamer tip: use 5d6 to play Yahtzee, or use the Percentile roll to make up statistics!
Tempting!
There’s also the simpler DiceDaemon (99 cents), the comparatively pricy Dicenomicon ($3.99; pictured at left), and of course, Dice Bag (free).
