We’ve been playing Go during lunch at work lately. Mark Lentczner, one of our engineering directors, is a long-time Go enthusiast, runs the Go center in Second Life, and has been teaching us.
So when Jens mentioned iGo for the iPhone, I bought a copy, stayed up late one night this week working on beating the [...]
Building a Calculator in Little Big Planet: am I intrigued enough to get a Playstation III? I don’t know, but there is a lot to be learned from the casual building tools in that game. Reviewing the premiere of the seventh, and last season of Firefly: now that’s fan fiction taken to the meta level. [...]
In a couple of hours’ play, I’ve reached stage 13 of Portal, and it’s that sing-song computer voice, goading you along, that makes it work. Tim Bray’s assessment is dead-on: Dear Marketing Professionals; when you think ‘message control’ several generational cohorts of geeky target demographics are thinking about the Portal voice. Portal may be a [...]
The 2.0 firmware update ships with a web browser. I hope the browser works with Bloglines. Then I can justify that PSP I bought in June. Wipeout Pure comes with an HTTP widget, but it’s been hardwired for downloading patches and skins for the game. Hopefully the update will also improve the interface for setting [...]
I have my panel assignments for WisCon 28, this coming Memorial Day weekend in Madison. Saturday, 2:30-3:45 p.m.: Feminist Comic Books and Games Saturday, 9:00-10:15 p.m.: Square Pegs – One Size Does Not Fit All! Sunday, 10:00-11:15 p.m.: Was it Good for You? : Buffy, “Chosen,” and the End of an Era This will be [...]
Zendo’s a fun little logic game played with Looney Labs’ Icehouse pyramids. I played a few rounds last Friday night and loved it. A ‘master’ picks a rule: “all arrangements of pieces with characteristic X have Buddha nature.” See Karl von Laudermann’s Zendomizer for example rules. She then makes two arrangements of pieces: one with, [...]
If I played more console games, I’d get more of the jokes, but the Bode meets Mobius art in Pockybot is great.
Simon St. Laurent asked the XML-Dev list for interesting and offbeat uses of XML, and got some interesting responses: Hero Games has a role playing game character designer that uses XML as the native format. Ari Nordström manages multiplex cinemas with XML. The Flight Gear uses XML to describe aircraft and control systems. Len Bullard [...]
Independent of Clarion West students, Iraq has developed its own version of the game of Mafia. Mafia, you see, is a game of bluffing, played by ten to twenty people. Mahabis is a game of bluffing, played by 50 to 250 people.
Lexicon is a parlor game, where a group of ‘scholars’ take turns writing entries for an imaginary historical encyclopedia. This would be a great exercise for creating the background in games like Shadows in the Fog. [ via Ginger Stampley ] She’s part of the new collaborative weblog on role playing games:
The Interactive Way To Go is a introduction to the game, translated into several languages. The rules and basic concepts of strategy are introduced through Java applets embedded throughout the site. Some of the applets walk you through play, while others present trivial and non-trivial puzzles where you’ll need to figure out how to keep [...]
In preparation for a playtest of “Shadows in the Fog”, a role playing game set in late Victorian London, I’m reading Sherlock Holmes stories. Project Gutenberg’s encoded most if not all of Doyle’s stories. Sherlock World has a nice readable web version of the stories in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes built from the Gutenberg [...]
John Kim proposed using Whimsy Cards in our current RPG campaign. These are cards with plot devices printed on them. The player characters receive one each at the start of a session and can play them on one another to make things more interesting. Hum, so what happens when you combine them with the Seattle [...]
[ via Chad Childers ] Think of live action role playing meets ClubMed.
One of the damned shames about the first round of layoffs at 2Roam was losing Judy. She’s a great developer, and a wiz at Dance Dance Revolution, that arcade game where you match steps with the people onscreen. DDR Freak provides the steps for the songs and games, so you too can have mad DDR [...]