Crap Shoot: The You Testament. Richard Cobbett has a deeply bizarre religious experience with one man's attempt to bring The Greatest Story Ever Told to life via the medium of... a hacked up wrestling game engine. Yes. Really. Everything went wrong when I accidentally kicked Jesus in the balls. "Hey, what's your problem? " demanded the Lamb of God. "Touch me again and I'll kill you! " The You Testament is the best worst game ever. Dan Brown must never, ever find out about this. Where to begin... where to begin? Oh, and it's a game where you can opt to play an integral part in the Gospels as an effeminate disciple called Lucifer. (It also quotes Jay-Z. Manage to get started without doing what the Pharisees could only dream of and the craziness really starts to unfold. For the world is crappy, and I have touched the sky... But let's not get ahead of ourselves. See, it's just like science - only not!
Take an early scene where, having met up with Jesus, you track him down again to become a fully fledged Disciple. Uh, Lord?
無料で遊べるフラッシュの麻雀ゲーム「麻雀 Flash」 Coffee Chinese Chess. Written by Pham Hong Nguyen, Coffee Chinese Chess is a customizable freeware Java applet for playing Chinese Chess. It is also good for displaying games and practicing with an openingbook. At his own website for this applet, he gives permission for others to include it on their own websites. Since the graphics can be customized, I have customized it for use with various graphics I have designed for Chinese Chess.
Below the applet, you can select different piece sets. Some will automatically use different boards than the one shown below. This applet will let you play against a computer program. To use a different piece set, click on one of the piece sets shown below. You may customize this applet as much as you want by entering parameters in the URL Query String. Coffee Chinese Chess Note that this page changes some of the defaults of Coffee Chinese Chess. Written by Fergus Duniho WWW Page Created: 28 September 2003. /home1/chessvar/public_html/play/coffeecc/index.php Credits See also. Warfare 1917 | Strategy Games. Feign. Evacuation. Sky Island - Neutronized - Play Free Flash Games. 1916 :: Der Unbekannte Krieg. Ice-Pick Lodge. The Frip And The Dead. Butchering Pathologic – Part 1: The Body. By Quintin Smith on April 10th, 2008 at 7:42 pm. [Wandering RPS-associate Quinns went native in a Russian art-videogame called Pathologic and has been exciting us with rants about it ever since.
It's an enthralling game that, when I reviewed it, felt compelled to give a mark in the low fifties ("This will be someone's favourite game of the year. That somebody almost certainly won't be you. "). John gave it a 6/10 review which nevertheless left anyone with a soul desperate to play the thing. It's a brilliant game that the traditional reviewer has to condemn. This may, to some eyes, show a weakness in traditional reviews and reviewers. Okay. …okay. I’m going to explain, right now, why a Russian FPS/RPG called Pathologic is the single best and most important game that you’ve never played. But enough is enough. This article will be in three parts. Which is a bit pretentious, but it can’t be helped, as it’s the only way to show you what this game showed me. You ready? But things are wrong. Butchering Pathologic – Part 2: The Mind. By Quintin Smith on April 11th, 2008 at 12:24 pm.
[Following on from yesterday's installment, Quinns continues his examination of the award winning Russian obscurity Pathologic. Spoilers abound. Oh - and if all this has tempted you, it turns out it is available as a digital download from GamersGate.] Butchering Pathologic Part II: The Mind In a single word, Pathologic is dark. And not “we’re going to make our sequel a darker, more adult experience” dark. And yet as distant as morals seem to be, Pathologic still manages to feel like the most impossibly vibrant battle of good versus evil as you defend this wretched place, simply because of the sheer horror of your antagonist.
Ultimately, every obstacle you face in the game is caused by the virus. Now, when you first end a day in Pathologic a message comes up on screen. Now, to begin with this is comforting. Then, on one tired night midway through the game as your character staggers to bed, you find yourself thinking. What ends? What ends? Butchering Pathologic – Part 3: The Soul. By Quintin Smith on April 12th, 2008 at 9:49 am. [Following on from the first two parts, this is the grand finale of Quinns' evisceration of the game Walker described as "Oblivion with Cancer". As a compliment. Lots of spoilers, but you should read it anyway.] Butchering Pathologic Part III: The Soul There are two themes that run through Pathologic like a couple of sharks lurking in a swimming pool. By themes I mean something that’s vital to the vision of the game yet is detached from the structure of the game proper- something like Half-Life 2′s Orwellian influence, or Beyond Good and Evil’s cartoon imagery.
In the case of Half-Life 2, there’s nothing about City 17′s hi-tech tyranny that directly affects your running and gunning. In the case of Pathologic, the two themes are meat and theater. Subsequently, when you start playing the game proper it’s difficult to see yourself as anything other than an actor fretting upon a stage. Or maybe I’m being unfair. Okay. An awesome game. The 6 Most Ominous Trends in Video Games. Our generation will be remembered for our video games. Every generation is remembered by its popular art; when you think of the 60s you think of Woodstock and hippie music. When you think of the 80s, you think of Miami Vice and the birth of music video. So when your grandchildren think of the 2010s, what will they picture in their minds? Let's put it this way: Seriously. Regular readers know I made a similar graphic based on last year's games.
The problems with gaming go beyond the fact that every major blockbuster game coming in the next year seems to involve looking through glass sights at a terrorist or zombie. (We're worried that you might not see our new Star Wars mini-series. The Technology is Going Backward I remember a time when I had absolutely no worries about the future of gaming. Via Nintendo.com"Gaming is saved, and the global economy ain't never gonna collapse, baby! " But more than four years later, nothing on the Wii has equaled it. "Waaaaait a second! "Kill me next! " A. B. Cultivated Play: Farmville. [This essay was given as a talk at SUNY Buffalo, 28 January 2010, the day after Howard Zinn’s death. I have left the text unaltered, to better reflect the spirit of the talk.]
“I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing.” — Howard Zinn The great social historian Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, died yesterday of a heart attack. Zinn devoted his life to educating Americans in their country’s history, that they might better understand their place in its present. Such understanding is today at a premium. Ours is a time of confusion, of unprecedented changes that outpace our perceptions. As Zinn might have said, the wheel keeps spinning faster, and the faster it spins the harder it is to see. At such times, and at such speeds, the task of educating ourselves becomes all the more urgent. Features - The Deaths Of Game Narrative.
It's been quite a year for epic, narrative-driven games -- titles vast in scope, grand in ambition, and gorgeous in execution -- and I have fought my way through a few of the best. In recent months I have transformed into an exiled Florentine nobleman thirsty for vengeance in Renaissance Italy; I masqueraded as a continent-hopping, chiseled chunk of vainglorious derring-do in search of lost treasure; and I traveled the western wilds of the United States as a battle-scarred loner fighting to restore his dignity and return to his family. To the ear of an outsider, this might sound like a pretty diverse scrapbook of experiences, and I'd say this was half right.
But there's one element that draws all these titles together under a cozy umbrella. In each game, the protagonist -- my avatar -- is a mass murderer. Perhaps this is an unfair choice of words. After all, the moral compass of these men points true. They have murdered dozens, if not hundreds, more people than they have befriended. GDC 10: Theme is Not Meaning. Soren Johnson spent five years working on the Civilization series for Firaxis, eventually landing the job of lead designer for Civilization IV.
He also did work on Spore, amongst many other things. He also gave the keynote address of the 2010 Serious Games Summit. Johnson's talk, "Theme is Not Meaning," opened with a simple question: who decides the meaning of a game? The designer, or the player? Hit the jump for the answer to that question, and a summary of Johnson's keynote. It's the player. The designer might want a mechanic or a story to mean one thing, but the player is the one intimately dealing with that game, and so his decision as to what the overall theme is will always be the correct one.
When comparing a game's theme versus a game's mechanics, though, what defines that game's ultimate meaning? So, thinking about theme, which is the true successor to Warcraft: World of Warcraft, or Starcraft? The actual mechanics, however, don't jibe with this. But can games be scholarship? Pixel Poppers: Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement. When I was old enough to care whether I won or lost at games, but still too young to be any good at them, I decided RPGs were better than action games. After all, I could play Contra for hours and still be terrible at it - while if I played Dragon Warrior III for the same amount of time, my characters would gain levels and be much more capable of standing up to whatever threats they encountered.
To progress in an action game, the player has to improve, which is by no means guaranteed - but to progress in an RPG, the characters have to improve, which is inevitable. As I grew older, this conclusion lay dormant and unexamined in my mind. RPGs continued to be my favorite genre. I relished the opportunity to watch interesting, lovable characters develop and interact in epic storylines.
. , again in Lufia II , then again in Chrono Trigger Then, one day in a Child Psychology course, I learned something interesting. It turns out there are two different ways people respond to challenges. 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted. So, the headlines say somebody else has died due to video game addiction. Yes, it's Korea again.
What the hell? Look, I'm not saying video games are heroin. I totally get that the victims had other shit going on in their lives. Oh, hell yes. . #5. If you've ever been addicted to a game or known someone who was, this article is really freaking disturbing. "Each contingency is an arrangement of time, activity, and reward, and there are an infinite number of ways these elements can be combined to produce the pattern of activity you want from your players. " Notice his article does not contain the words "fun" or "enjoyment.
" "...at this point, younger gamers will raise their arms above their head, leaving them vulnerable. " His theories are based around the work of BF Skinner, who discovered you could control behavior by training subjects with simple stimulus and reward. This sort of thing caused games researcher Nick Yee to once call Everquest a "Virtual Skinner Box. " So What's The Problem?
#4. Jesse Schell: Visions of the Gamepocalypse. ALEXANDER ROSE:I'm Alexander Rose; I'm the Director of the Long Now Foundation. As some of you know who come to these talks every month we do a little short film before each talk which we call a "long short". This is a shortterm film that exemplifies longterm thinking. Our long short this month is called "Pixel". Alright enjoy. STEWART BRAND:I'm Stewart Brand from the Long Now Foundation. Product Placement, it's a good book. Trespasser: wow, this is great stuff - comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.adventure.