(reprinted from: Delicious/tsangal)
Archive for the ‘games’ Category
IndieRPGs.com
Monday, June 14th, 2010The Combine Interview
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008Portal’s Still Alive filmed in Lego
Saturday, March 22nd, 2008The Compleat Gamer Geek’s Guide to Futurama
Monday, December 24th, 2007Wired’s Game|Life blog has just finished a series of articles on Futurama. Check them out for another look behind the scenes.
This week on Game|Life, Wired magazine senior editor Chris Baker took us through the crazy videogame-obsessed brains of the creators of Futurama, the geekiest show on television.
In case you missed any of the in-depth reports on how Futurama and games have and will continue to intersect, here is the complete set of links. Please waste your entire Friday reading them! I will.
Related:
The story behind the Portal end song
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007Jonathan Coulton, the writer of “Still Alive”, the memorable end song for Portal, gives us the story behind the song. You may already be familiar with Jonathan’s previous songs, like Code Monkey. Portal is one of the most brilliant games ever made, and also one of the funniest. This final song makes a perfect ending to the game, and has received a huge amount of attention.
The character is this hilarious passive aggressive personality, which is obviously a perfect subject for me. I write about that sort of thing all the time. I got an advance copy of the game when it was nearly finished, played through it, talked with the writers, and tried to get inside this character’s head as best I could. I bought my first ukulele specifically to record this song, it just seemed right for it. (Or maybe I wrote the song that way so I could buy a ukulele, hard to say.)
- Link
- Portal – “Still Alive” Credits Song on YouTube
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How-To: Make an Xbox 360 laptop (part 1)
Thursday, April 19th, 2007Engadget has posted part 1 of a detailed how-to on converting an Xbox 360 into a laptop.
The making-of How-To for the Xbox 360 laptop will be in three parts. In today’s segment we’ll discuss the parts list, stripping down an Xbox 360 motherboard, and modding / reattaching the DVD and hard drives. The next installment will cover case design, construction and hacking the LCD display, as well as wiring the video. Part 3 will then describe wiring all the separate parts together, troubleshooting, and finishing up the unit.
The Original Human Space Invaders
Monday, April 2nd, 2007Space Invaders in stop-motion using humans as pixels. Brilliant!
- Link (via Boing Boing)
Action video games improve eyesight
Wednesday, February 7th, 2007Not really surprising, but playing action games can help improve your visual processing abilities.
In an article to be published in Psychological Science, they have shown that people who played action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month improved by about 20 percent in their ability to identify letters presented in clutter—a visual acuity test similar to ones used in regular ophthalmology clinics.
In essence, playing video game improves your bottom line on a standard eye chart.
Pong: The Text-Based Game
Friday, February 2nd, 2007StarForce Must Die
Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006The Escapist has written an article on the world’s most hated copy protection.
In any forum topic about StarForce, embittered players across the spectrum speak in one voice about crippled operating systems and ruined CD drives. Many players report they bought honest, legal copies of StarForce-protected games, could not make them run and finally, in desperation, visited pirate sites to download no-CD cracks or warez versions. A dominant theme in these posts is resentment toward StarForce and game publishers for screwing up their customers’ computers without warning. Publisher representatives seldom post to apologize or ask details.
- Link
- Boycott Starforce keeps a running blog and has a list of games and publishers that continue to use StarForce
- Another site urging you to boycott StarForce-protected games
- Boing Boing’s reaction to being bullied with legal threats for criticizing StarForce
- At least one publisher has dumped StarForce due to the public outcry and a $5 million lawsuit brought on by gamers with crippled machines
World’s hardest Sudoku puzzle
Tuesday, November 7th, 2006Supposedly, this is one of the hardest Sudoku puzzles to solve.
It’s times like these that the internet makes me most happy. When respectable online publications publish entertaining and interesting stories about the world’s hardest Sudoku puzzle, you’d at least expect them to give you a link to it, or a picture of it. Oh, yes, you guessed it. They don’t. But I couldn’t find it anywhere! So I undustriously hunted, and eventually found the secret formula hidden away in an ASCII-like tomb of Sudoku knowledge.
Minesweeper in 38,240 PixelBlocks
Friday, November 3rd, 2006Check out this gorgeous reproduction of Minesweeper using PixelBlocks.
Completion of the minesweeper sub-project. 38,240 pixelblocks and over 6 feet tall. Bigger than the window!
Antiriddle: The New Hardest Riddle on the Internet
Sunday, September 10th, 2006A new web-based riddle, similar to Notpron, and the Python Challenge.
The goal of the Antiriddle project is to not only entertain those that enjoy intellectual challenges, but also to teach a certain degree of computer literacy and to foster a sense of cooperation in solving an issue.
First Person Shooter Glasses
Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006
An Algorithm for Compressing Space and Time
Wednesday, July 26th, 2006This article presents a significant optimization for Conway’s Game of Life.
Making a slow program fast can lead to both joy and frustration. Frequently, the best you can do is a low-level trick to double or maybe quadruple the speed of a program; for instance, many readers may have implemented John Conway’s “Game of Life” using bit-level operations for a significant speedup. But sometimes a whole new approach, combining just a few ideas, yields amazing improvements. A simple algorithm called “HashLife,” invented by William Gosper (“Exploiting Regularities in Large Cellular Spaces,” Physica 10D, 1984), combines quadtrees and memoization to yield astronomical speedup to the Game of Life. In this article, I evolve the simplest Life implementation into this algorithm, explain how it works, and run some universes for trillions of generations as they grow to billions of cells.
How Lara Croft Steals Hearts: The Final Girl
Tuesday, April 25th, 2006An article at Wired News explains why the Lara Croft games are appealing to more than just the usual horny, teenaged boys.
The Final Girl theory emerged in 1985, when Carol Clover — a medievalist and feminist film critic — was dared by a friend to see The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Back then, most feminist theorists loathed slasher films, and regarded them as classic examples of male misogyny. It wasn’t hard to figure out why: Thousands of young men were trooping into theaters to cheer wildly as masked psychos hacked apart screaming young women. That really didn’t look good.
But as Clover sat in the theaters, she noticed something curious. Sure, the young men would laugh and cheer as the villain hunted down his female prey. But eventually the movie would whittle down the victims to one last terrified woman — the Final Girl, as Clover called her. Suddenly, the young men in the audience would switch their allegiance — and begin cheering just as madly for the Final Girl as she attacked and killed the psycho.
How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days: Tips and Tricks from 4 Grad Students Who Made Over 50 Games in 1 Semester
Friday, March 24th, 2006Gamasutra has a great article on how to enter rapid prototyping mode. Each game was developed by one grad student in under a week.
We lay it all out here. Through the following tips, tricks, and examples, we will discuss the methods that worked and those that didn’t. We will show you how to slip into a rapid prototyping state of mind, how to set up an effective team, and where to start if you’ve thought about making something new, but weren’t sure how. We hope these well-tested guidelines come in useful for you and your next project, big or small!
Very interesting read.
Minesweeper is NP-complete!
Tuesday, March 14th, 2006This article argues that Minesweeper belongs to the class of NP-Complete problems (see “Complexity Classes P and NP” in Wikipedia to brush up on P and NP).
My result in the Mathematical Intelligencer states that a decision problem which I like to call “the Minesweeper Consistency Problem” and which is exactly equivalent to the problem of playing the minesweeper game, is yet another one of these NP-complete problems.
For the current discussion, it suffices that the problem of simply detecting which squares are or are not mines is equivalent to the Minesweeper Consistency Problem, and the fact that it is NP-complete means, for Minesweeper fans, that their favourite game can be seen as being right at the cutting edge of mathematical research. There are two possible viewpoints one might take on this.
The more “sober” viewpoint is that the NP-completeness of Minesweeper shows that Minesweeper really is a rather good game. The fact that it is NP-complete means that it is very difficult to spot when it is possible to clear a square safely in full knowledge that that square is clear, and when some guessing is required. In fact, even if you are told in advance that guessing is not required, it may still be difficult to decide what squares to clear. In some sense, when you play the game you cannot be expected to do much better than the hundreds of very good mathematicians who have worked on the P=NP? question for many many years.
101 Free Games: The Best Free Games on the Web from 1UP.com
Saturday, March 11th, 20061UP.com has a nice list of free games you can find on the web, compiled by Computer Gaming World.
You don’t care how you get your fix. You just want to play a new game right now and you don’t want to pay a lot for the privilege. Thank God for the Internet, where everything (and its mom) is available for free. So, taking a break from downloading patches and porn, we set upon a journey to gaming-freebie Mecca.
- Link (via Lifehacker)
Concerned: The Half-Life and Death of Gordon Frohman
Friday, March 3rd, 2006This is a fantastic and hilarious comic set in the Half-Life universe and rendered using the Half-Life 2 engine along with Garry’s Mod.
Concerned is the story of Gordon Frohman, former Black Mesa entry-level employee, survivor of the Portal Storms and the Seven Hour War, and now earnest and hard-working citizen of City 17. Frohman is a simple guy trying to earn an honest buck in a post-apocalyptic world ruled mercilessly by hordes of heavily armed alien hybrid soldiers (called Combine) bent on draining the Earth of its last natural resource and exterminating the human race. He also enjoys playing backgammon.
Gordon Frohman arrives on the scene a few weeks before Doctor Gordon Freeman — scientist, hero, anti-citizen, and star of Half-Life and Half-Life 2 — first appears in City 17. Due to the similarity in their names, Frohman is often initially mistaken for the crowbar-wielding Freeman, though due to Frohman’s chatty nature and general incompetence the error is usually sorted out fairly quickly.
Very funny and incredibly well done.