cronjob ·
July 13, 2010 at 1:00 am
· Filed under Linksplosions
- Pixel Prospector – The Big List Of Indie Game Sites
Whoa. (via superlevel.de’s @Fabu)
- McSweeney’s Internet Tendency – Roland Barthes Reviews "Pac-Man."
Cross-saving Mike Nowak’s (@n0wak) hilarious del.icio.us link.
- GameLife – Spooky Platformer Eversion Gets Polished Up for Steam
Guilherme Töws, whom I know best as "Zaratustra" from IRC channels, now has a game on Steam! And while you can still grab the freeware ‘Eversion’ from his website, the US$5 download promises redesigned levels and better graphics. Hop to it!
- Numberless – Sight Unseen
Scott Jon Siegel wonders: with HD televisions and cable services, three-dee tee-vee, the iPhone 4’s "Retina Display," and now the Nintendo 3DS, how is a company supposed to market a technology that the consumer cannot see until he is, well, actually seeing it?
- Lost Levels – Review: Colors
Oh, man, I can’t believe I am only just reading this. I have always dreamed of somehow getting ahold of the source code for this game, slapping it on an SD card, and loading it right up on my beloved Gizmondo. As I understood it back in 2005, ‘Colors’ was meant to be one of two planned ARGs for the Gizmondo handheld device: using cellular network service and the gadget’s built-in GPS, you were supposed to basically wardrive around town until you found another player to brutally murder in-game—kind of like foursquare for Haters. (Or, OK, the idea of cell phone drive-by social gaming is actually pretty old and, I think, Swedish.) Anyway, apparently the solo play in ‘Colors’ is not too great. Oh, well! I guess I’ll just go back to looking for the Gizmondo source code for ‘Johnny Whatever’ instead.
- Drunken Moogle – The Rainbow Road Shot Challenge
The best looking worst idea ever.
- GameLife – Next post UK’s Channel 4 Uses Games to Teach Teens Happiness
Games for good.
- Artful Gamer – The Changing Nature of Gaming Interfaces
Excellent read that elegantly conveys, ultimately, my own horror at touch screen devices. Here’s Chris Lepine’s footnote on button-mashing: "I am using a very special meaning of the word ‘repression’ that Merleau-Ponty introduces in his phenomenology of the body. ... For more details see Lawrence Hass’s book Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy, pp. 89-90."
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Kevin Bunch ·
February 28, 2009 at 1:42 am
· Filed under Design philosophy, Ephemera
It’s been nearly four and a half years since the release of Halo 2 on the original Xbox console. The game is remembered for a number of reasons—online functionality, the story, perhaps even the hype. But for a select group of fans, Halo 2 is remembered fondly not for its play features, but for the Halo 2 ad campaign: The Haunted Apiary, or I Love Bees.
I Love Bees is an ARG, or alternate reality game. What that means specifically is hard to quantify, but ARGs tend to share a few common characteristics. They are played in real time over a finite length of time; they involve group efforts in puzzle-solving, either online or in the real world; their stories are told in rather unconventional ways, ranging from clothing lines to trading cards to false newspapers to in-game websites in games over the years. As for I Love Bees, the main action of the game occurred at the website of the same name.
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Jenn Frank ·
July 18, 2008 at 8:09 am
· Filed under Books, Nonfiction
When Game Life’s Chris Kohler reported that the Wii had finally outsold the Xbox 360 in the U.S. yesterday, he also reprinted Nintendo’s annoucement, which itself is written in a strange, alien shorthand. “After just 20 mos, Wii is the new console leader in the US @ nearly 10.9 million units, says NPD 2day.”
Kohler received said information from Nintendo directly—not through a formal press release, but instead through a text message.
That’s a text message that Nintendo of America just sent to journalists’ phones, knowing they’d be away from their desks covering E3. (The company used the same delivery medium to announce the Wii MotionPlus controller on Monday.)
Although Kohler’s SMS message from Nintendo isn’t the main point of his update, I find this unbelievably interesting. Two days ago I noted that I’d followed E3 news and rumors using Twitter almost exclusively—and using the new Twitteriffic iPhone app, at that. “When I look over my Twitter friend-feed,” I’d said (yes, quoting myself is bizarre), “it’s like this extremely concise liveblog written by ten or twenty people.”
Nintendo, SMS, and Howard Rheingold’s ‘Smart Mobs’: connecting the dots
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Jenn Frank ·
June 20, 2008 at 1:40 am
· Filed under Ephemera
At our last office job, a certain coworker was quick to email with links to every new microsite that pertained to Dark Knight’s ongoing ARG/viral marketing campaign (each new puzzle is part of a larger online scavenger hunt, see). Frankly, it’s really very interesting—and maybe heartening, in a way—to see all these fans assembling clues, as if the whole internet were tackling a single problem together.
Yesterday, fans received SMS messages that eventually led them to www.whysoserious.com/laughtilithurts...
...which is the site of the boringest flash game in the world. Think ‘Desert Bus’. Seriously, it’s horrible.
But the forumgoers at SuperHeroHype.com are relentless. And thanks to the efforts of someone who a) hacked whysoserious.com; b) actually played an utterly perfect game, or c) works at Warner and deliberately leaked some information to hurry this along, the message board discovered the knack to escaping the game and getting a redirect to the super-secret video. The video itself contains one still frame of Heath Ledger as the Joker; the internet kids have continued to painstakingly analyze the footage.
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