E3 Roundup, Tellin' it like it is

http://www.demonpigeon.com/2011/06/08/e3ccg%C2%B2/

"Microsoft’s conference engaged a simpering sycophantic baby audience in a soylent green haze. As with last year’s E3, Microsoft are continuing to attempt to convince a load of simple minded idiots to STAND UP and MOVE, both two of my least favourite things."

Queen of Hearts

http://scrap.oldbookillustrations.com/post/4577260343/caldecott-queen-hearts-cover

Mario Underworld

http://manusupra.tumblr.com/post/4469443854/voici-les-entrailles-dun-niveau-de-super-mario

Amazing Fallout 3 History Article

http://www.playthepast.org/?p=459

"Fallout 3 offers much to swoon over. In hindsight though, the most memorable moments from my game play are not slow-motion replays of exploding super mutant heads. Most of the in-game moments that have stuck with me involve interactions with, Apple II-ish green-screened in-game terminals. Computers that have apparently been running since before the nuclear holocaust.
....

"What strikes me about these logs is the layers of authenticity they provide for the kinds of thinking that historians and archeologists use to produce histories. As players unearth and develop a sense of what happened in this world from these kinds of records they do so in strikingly similar ways to historians and archeologists.

"For example: 

Dealing with gaps: There is no complete record. The game requires players to extrapolate from disparate and scant sources. This in part creates the mystery that drives the history game (both for fallout players and for real life historians.)


The documents are full of relevant and irrelevant information: The documents contain all kinds of potentially relevant and irrelevant technical information. Players need to be able to tell what does and doesn’t matter in the morass of materials they come across.


Relevance of the information is connected to what you want to know: The above documents include information about personal reactions, about strategic decision making, about attempts to get into the Vaults. Depending on what you are interested in you will need to pay attention to different parts of the documents."

This has me thinking about why I always said I enjoyed comics so much, because I like to fill in the spaces between the panels.

The Psychology of Shooters

"Why shooting feels so good." by Jamie Madigan of Penny Arcade fame.

Try this experiment: go outside and find some wild animal babies, like wolves and/or toddlers. Got them? Great. Now, watch them play. Many animals, including humans, engage in play fighting where they only pretend to savage each other. In real fights even victors can get hurt, so any risk-free practice is valuable. Of course, no psychologist will tell you that dragon-punching Zangief is going to help you when some bully comes out swinging-but there's a parallel to play fighting in another part of our imagination that can have real benefits.

http://www.gamepro.com/article/features/217312/the-psychology-of-shooters/

The most ground-breaking video games of 2010

Which video games had that little bit extra? New Scientist asks the cognoscenti.


http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/the-best-video-games-of-2010

Ein's PA Minecraft Server: Welcome to Rapture, Part 1

HAPPY NEW VEGAS DAY!!!!!!!!!!!

GROOOOOAAAAN is it 5pm yet??!! why didnt i take the day off???!

broox: life sucks when you have to playout fallout new vegas at 11:40AM
tats: oh shut UP
tats: oh my god
tats: you bastard
broox: LOL
tats: Tatiana Gill cries
tats: you got it?!?!
tats: i cant beleive it
broox: yeah
tats: youre using VATS?
tats: and not crying?
broox: we will see
broox: im going with a fresh start approach to this one
tats: excellent
tats: free your mind and your thumbs will follow[12:15:45 PM] broox: any pro tips before i jump into this?
tats: oh fallout?!? yeah the perks and stats you dole out, thats important
tats: but its designed to groom to taste so you mite want to just find out what you like...but basically pick perks and stats that give you more perks and stats points at the beginning, if possible
tats: standard technique
tats: and dont throw too much away, like in fallout 3 i drank some nuka cola quantium and then it was a collectible, so, careful what you use if youre into unlocking achevements :)
tats: i mean youll probably have to throw away 1000 tin cans so
tats: just dont throw away glowing shit i guess :D
broox: do do certain perks and stats just plain suck?
tats: totally
tats: haha or yano you might not need for a long time
tats: but most are helpful
tats: like at least in fallout 3 'big guns' arent an issue until youve played a while
tats: its all small guns at first
tats: but i started a game of both fallout 1 and 2 on the pc, last year
tats: and i noticed it was the same intense beginning of stat and perk alottment
tats: like, cant i choose once i know?!?!
tats: but its fun too
tats: b/c its really customized that way
tats: and you can play thru again differently, etc
tats: i like to go for a lot of lockpick and science fast just b/c im curious what will happen
tats: or whats behind the door, etc
tats: i wonder what the mini games are like!!!!
tats: oooh
broox: so funny that you said basically this same thing:
broox: "Anything that will give you bonus stat points early on. In Fallout 3 you started out getting 15 points per level, but if you took the "Quick learner" perk early on you could end up with 21 stat points per level after level 4."
broox: via GG
tats: haha
broox: im going to jump into this. ill probably be back on to bug you guys later
tats: rad!!!
tats: go west, young man!
tats: to vegas

Generated by im2html.

Ten Minutes of Nonstop Paradise

http://kotaku.com/5644075/ten-minutes-with-bioshock-infinite

SWOOON. Oh my stars I've never been so excited for a game!

bragging rights

Brave New World Around the Corner

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/08/24/microsoft-working-on-real-time-windows-phone-7-to-console-gaming/

I'm really looking forward to a world with realtime Mobile Multiplayer. I'd like it PSP style please, with tactile buttons instead of touchscreen.

Kane and Lynch:

http://www.thealistdaily.com/news/kane--lynch-2-making-ugly-marketing-look-good/

This is a fascinating interview. I'm LOVING Kane and Lynch 2, my my my.

I Confess!

I had to cop to my h/c gamer buddy last week that I've been playing nothing but nonstop FARMVILLE! Ever since they gave me a bakery I can't get enough of that damn game. I need so much money to afford an ice cream shoppe and only 5 more days until its gone! I will never enter in my CC number but damn, if I didn't have such principles. My farm has gotten TOO adorable!

 

Subtle Games Marketing

Cooking Mama

http://kotaku.com/5138566/nuka-cola-recipe-omits-rads



This is all fine and good, but once you have a taste of my Nuka Cola Pie, there will be no substitutes.

Why are Dead Men okay but Dead Women upsetting?

Is it the rules of warfare at play? Or a kind of weird sexism? I'm glad guys in general don't actively want to kill me. But does that mean women 'don't count' in warfare? I assure you honey, if it's a matter of war, you will fear me.

Also it pisses me off that violence in video games is ok for men, but not women and children. Again, the ancient rules of warfare. Human life counts no matter who is getting a facefull of lead. Artists and designers and concept makers: if you don't have the balls to depict dead women and dead children, it doesn't make sense to be okay with depicting dead men. It's all dead people.


Gamazon: Dead Girls Have More Fun

I don’t think the idea of making a “dead girl” prop would ever have occurred to them.

Is that because they don’t like women? Or have some agenda to deny the existence of women? No. It’s actually because they have not even the tiniest shred of a subconscious urge to hurt a woman. Nor does it give them even the slightest pleasure to imagine a woman suffering or dying, or to envision what a dead and partially devoured woman might look like. This is not about talent, about dev time, or about sexism: it’s about a man’s own emotional limits as an artist. There are some things that just don’t necessarily make a person happy with himself after a day’s work. Fiddling with the mutilated corpses of women is high on the list.

Arkham City

http://gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2010/08/05/september-cover-revealed-batman-arkham-city.aspx

Can the Sci Fi epic "Arkham Planet" be far behind? Let's hope not! If I have to draw it myself...

This Video is Serious Business

The Insane Console History Video 2.0

Creator of Flickr creates a New Startup, makes her coworkers play Dominion

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/07/ff_caterina_fake/all/1

Caterina Fake, Hunch’s chief product officer, instigated the weekly game night shortly after she arrived at the Internet startup in June 2008. But on this particular spring night, the whole thing threatens to fall apart. Fake has brought Dominion, a game with such byzantine rules — something to do with monarchs using gold, militias, and witchcraft to seize unclaimed land — that even the MIT-trained engineers struggle to make sense of it. Fake furrows her brow as she studies the rule book. After 20 minutes, it looks like her coworkers are ready to forget the whole thing and head home, but Fake cajoles them into staying just a little longer. “Could somebody turn this music down?” she asks, shooting a glance at the office stereo blaring Girl Talk. “I can’t concentrate.”

WUSSBAGS! Dominion is easy.

Hunch learns about its members through “Teach Hunch About You” questions. These queries can cover anything — exercise regimens, the ethics of SeaWorld, zombies — and the more of them people answer, the more complete a profile Hunch can create. (Since the site launched in June 2009, it has collected 55 million answers to these questions from its 1 million active users.) Once Hunch’s algorithm collects enough data, it can start finding surprising correlations. For instance, people who swat flies have a thing for USA Today. People who believe in alien abductions are more likely than nonbelievers to drink Pepsi. People who eat fresh fruit every day are more likely to desire Canon’s pricey EOS 7D camera. And respondents who cut their sandwiches diagonally rather than vertically are more likely to prefer men’s Ray-Ban sunglasses

This is just like OK Cupid, only with more of a product angle than a human behavior/desire angle. Also, its getting more like Artificial Intellegence ...

But Hunch is arguably the most ambitious social search service. Ultimately, it isn’t just helping people shop for cars — it is getting its users to volunteer a truly impressive amount of unique psychographic data. Just as Google built a vast index of the Web and Facebook constructed a model of our social connections, Hunch is assembling an extraordinarily rich and detailed picture of each user’s taste. From there it can claim to know or extrapolate everything that a person likes or would like. “The ultimate goal of the company is to map every person on the Internet to every object on the Internet, be that a product, a service, or a person,” Fake says.

SKYNET! SKYNETTTTTTT