Infinite Lives

• Marcus Boesch – Previous examples have also been accused of sensationalism and cruelty against the victims
  Marcus Boesch’s tumblog is great. Here, he isolates a paragraph from a longer blurb about ‘1378 km.’ (‘1378 km’ is a recently-released Half Life 2 mod set sometime before the fall of the Berlin Wall.)

  The excerpt that Boesch singles out, though, is a catalogue of other controversial shooting games set against real-life backdrops—games in which you, as a fantasy gunman, repeatedly reenact some real-life crime against a facsimile of a real-life victim. Boesch includes a screenshot from the 2004 game installation ‘Waco Resurrection.’
• ASCII – Archiveteam! The Geocities Torrent
  Exactly one year has passed since Geocities’ close, and Jason Scott (yeah! The ‘Get Lamp’ guy!) is readying the DOWNLOADABLE TORRENT OF GEOCITIES. I love this, I do, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but maybe not every little bit of history needs to be saved. So: if you find a precocious-but-obnoxious 14-year-old girl running a webcam somewhere in SoHo/Studios, I only ask that you avert your eyes. Thanks.
• O’Reilly Radar – Gaming Education
  A nice overview of the current trend toward "gamifaction" in schools, although I wish it had gone beyond competitiveness and ‘achievement points’ and into talk about virtual learning spaces etc etc (via @betajames)
• Superlevel – Action Escape Kitty
  Action Escape Kitty is a long-in-the-works 2D free-to-play Flash-based shoot-em-up. It looks good and plays great. I did experience some serious slowdown, but then again, I was on the La Quinta Inn WiFi, so who knows. Anyway, Action Escape Kitty is a must-play. But rather than sending you directly to the game, I’ve decided instead to link to Fabu’s critique ("Ich vergebe 4 von 5 Katzenfutterdosen," he writes).
• Experience Points – Suspect Stewards
  When Good Old Games dot com faked its own death, I went from surprise to horror to annoyance in a matter of hours. It wasn’t until GoG published its "We’re sorry we freaked you out" downtime website that I actually became livid. But at the time I also struggled to understand my own ire. Scott Juster gets it: "Does GoG or anyone else truly believe that the kind of people who are looking to play King’s Quest are the kind of people amused or impressed by PR stunts?"
• Technabob – ben heck’s portal t-shirt is not a lie
  Ben Heckendorn, inventor of the portable Atari VCS (among other handheld mods), has rigged up this "see-through" Portal T-shirt. Very nice.

Follow us on Delicious! »