Infinite Lives

• Offworld – Game/art: see the artwork from Giant Robot’s Game Over/Continue exhibit
  Follow all the links at the end of the blog, too.

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• Hardcore Gaming 101 – Gabriel Knight
  This really makes me wish I still had all those Gabriel Knight Angelfire pages I made. Via a Retronauts tweet.

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• Acid for Blood – ‘Expert’ Consulted on RE5 Racism Issue: Not an Expert on Race After All
  Pretty good reading recommendation from Jason Gajd.: "Why are gamers so afraid of people taking a critical look at games, of people questioning games, like we do with other media? Many gamers have a chip on their shoulder about being misunderstood; they feel embarrassed that their hobby is still considered juvenile, looked down upon, and poorly regarded amongst many non-gamers. They wish people would respect games, but really, ‘gamers want games to be taken seriously until they’re taken seriously, and then they don’t want them taken seriously.’"
• 1UP’s The Tilt – iPhone Review: Eliss
  "Eliss is the kind of game that gets me excited about the iPhone as a game platform. It might be the fart-noise apps that are getting the press, but it’s games like Eliss, Edge, and Zen Bound that truly define what the iPhone represents for gaming. As long as the significant challenge doesn’t scare you off, I’d pick this one up in a heartbeat."

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• IGN – Bit.Trip Beat Review
  If other writers are as on-point with their reviews as Mark Bozon is, I’m going to start reading IGN again.
• WIRED – SXSW: LoudCrowd Turns Music into Social Video Arcade
  Oh, here’s something I kept meaning to mention, and forgot. (Sorry, Loudcrowd!) So, OK. Loudcrowd is this really fantastic social gaming music website. In the beatmatching game—the one I played endlessly last December—you "dance" and chat with other players. Often, one of the players acts as a "guest" DJ, spinning tracks for everyone else on the site. And Wired.com is right: for someone sitting around waiting for Justice tracks, Loudcrowd is MIGHTY addictive.
• Bliterations – Like an Opera Singer with a Chastity Belt
  Relegating this link to a delicious.com cron batch is utterly painful for me, because Kurt Shulenberger’s "Like an Opera Singer with a Chastity Belt" is absolutely one of the best nonfiction pieces I’ve read this year. Posing as a retrospective of the bizarre NES title ‘Gumshoe,’ the essay soon turns to the game’s 8-bit soundtrack—which, apparently, is all that grounds this otherwise inexplicable game. "The game’s dirty jazz tunes (which, admittedly, only make up a fraction of the score) are the only ligature holding the game’s gritty detective narrative together. Without it, it’s just a fever dream hodgepodge of raining boulders, giant armadillos, jumping swordfish, and other mid-80’s videogame idioms designed to kill you as quickly as possible instead of fleshing out the environment." Shulenberger helpfully provides mp3s, too. "Complex in their harmonies but rhythmically inviting," he writes, "these pieces make Gumshoe almost worth playing through. Almost."

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• The Arcade Flyer Archive
  What the…! "Our database represents the world’s largest archive of coin-op amusement machine advertisement flyers. It is our on-going mission to digitally archive each and every flyer and preserve this aspect of coin-op history. There are three different archives that you can browse freely for video games, pinball machines and amusement & arcade games. You can also download Mame™ Flyerpacks for use with most Mame™ front end applications."
• Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog – Scott C’s Home Slice
  Not really games-related, I guess, but Scott C (of Double Fine!) is, at this point, pretty much my favorite.
• Forbes.com – Revision3 Revives Videogame Show
  It’s yesterday’s bacon, but it’s Fooooorbes! "Then, last December, UGO Networks, which owned 1UP Show, cancelled the series because it could not figure out how to attract meaningful advertising revenues from such a small pool of viewers. Fans were so distraught that they donated $17,000 to Chandronait’s new production company, but ‘1UP Show’ was not revived. ¶ Today, thanks to a new distribution deal with Web video pioneer Revision3, the beloved videogame series is reborn. The series, renamed ‘Co-Op,’ will post every Tuesday to www.revision3.com/coop and will be syndicated via BitTorrent and iTunes. The launch of ‘Co-Op’ marks a strategic shift for Revision3 to more narrowly targeted, niche-focused programming."

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• Guardian Gamesblog – Growing with fl0w: Flower creator Kellee Santiago on indie gaming for the man
  Aleks Krotoski: "After the [Being Indie and Successful in the Video Game Industry] panel, I spoke with Kellee Santiago, one of the creative minds at That Game Company, the folks behind the PlayStation Network’s indie hits fl0w and Flower, about her thoughts on the academic track, being indie and working for the man."
• WIRED’s GameLife – Weekend Thrifting: I Think I’m a Famiclone Now
  This weekend, instead of getting plastered with the rest of the Bay Area, Kohler went to a local thrift store. There, he found just about the most peculiarly convincing Famiclone ever. One commenter suggests that it isn’t really a Famiclone at all. Curious! Can anyone identify this machine?
• 1UP Blogs (RSS) – Specialized blogs about games and game culture.
  Levi Tinney (@vsrobot) sez: "Hey, you can subscribe via RSS to all the 1up Blogs in one feed!" Includes columns like ‘A Taste of Homebrew,’ stuff by Ray and Jeremy, and a ton of Apple stuff.
• Offworld – PlayPower turning NES/Famicom clones into learning tools for the developing world
  "The PlayPower organization’s mission is to turn cheap, ubiquitous 8-bit ‘TV computers’ (read: NES/Famicom clones) into ~$10 games-enabled learning devices for the developing world (versus manufacturing custom hardware, as with the OLPC), and they’re enlisting a lot of familiar names to help kickstart the program."
• Bohemian Gamer – Gyakuten Meets Jay-Z
  Chris Person sez: "I don’t know why, but I’ve been listening to this mashup of Phoenix Wright and Jay-Z that @gkokoris forwarded to me. Like, over and over. It’s not even very good, I just can’t stop listening to it!" This really is terrible. I’m hooked.

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• Push the Button – Embarrassing
  "The following is a list of news outlets, including ones I write for, that ran erroneous information about BioShock 2, based on a message board post inaccurately summarizing a Game Informer feature. This prompted both Game Informer and publisher 2K Games to vaguely attempt damage control." Oh, come on, now. Everything on the Internet is true.

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• Variety – The Cut Scene – Investment in casual social gaming booming
  I know, right? It’s just nice to hear Variety say so.
• WIRED – Getting Lucky: Hard-Core Gamers Penetrate Peggle’s Physics
  Clive Thompson writes: "For a casual gamer, Peggle seems too heavily based on luck. You aim the ball, but once you’ve dropped it and it hits the first peg, all bets are off: It bounces and careens through the forest of pegs in crazy, zigzagging patterns. For casual players, there doesn’t seem to be a clear enough correlation between how they aim and the results. But hard-core gamers see the game quite differently. When they look at the Peggle board, they see the Euclidean geometry that governs how the ball falls and pings around."

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• New York Observer – Foursquare, Hot New Phone App, Is Dodgeball on Steroids
  "’If you’re have a slamming Saturday night, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t feel like a game of Legend of Zelda,’ said Dennis Crowley, who was presenting his new mobile social networking application, Foursquare, on March 9 at the monthly New York Tech Meetup. ‘What we wanted to do is turn life into a video game. You should be rewarded for going out more times than your friends, and hanging out with new people and going to new restaurants and going to new bars—just experiencing things that you wouldn’t normally do.’"
• The Week – Is writing for the rich?
  "By some lights, this a golden age for writers, who can launch a blog, post their views online and reap the rewards of community, commenters and cross-referencing colleagues. This is all true. In addition to expanding the audiences of experienced writers, the web has created a showcase for extraordinary young talent like Matthew Yglesias, Ben Smith, Marc Ambinder, Ross Douthat, and Ezra Klein. On the web, no bureaucracy makes them wait their turn, no dunderheaded editors hold back their talents. ¶ But for a host of other young writers, there is still the problem of getting paid. Newspapers are no longer an option. The New York Times pays $300 for an op-ed piece today, less than it did a decade ago—and it wasn’t real money then. With more than 1,000 submissions a week, The Times’ opinion pages (for which I’ve done short stints both writing and editing) really needn’t pay anything at all. After all, the number of people willing to write for free is vast."
• IvyGate – Yale Student Wants $1 Million from Airline for Missing X-Box
  I know we’re all rolling our eyes, but I totally get this. If US Air stole my Xbox, I would be so bummed. I’d be all, "You jerks owe me a billion kajillion dollars," and I would be sobbing. You can’t replace that thing. It’s a perfect creature, perfectly broken in, just the way I want it. Also: I realize a lot of people saw this article through actual, legitimate game news outlets. I, however, read about it on IvyGate, my favorite Ivy League gossip site. Here is the link.
• Wired’s GameLife – Three More Professor Layton Games Coming to DS
  You know how Professor Layton was supposed to be a game trilogy? Guess what! Now it’s TWO trilogies.

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• Laughing Squid – Video Game Themed Music Videos
  Doctor Popular compiles a list of some of the Internet’s very finest video game -themed music videos, including that brand new Röyksopp one.
• Technotica at MSNBC – Watch out. The Internet will cut you
  "A couple of years ago, the hot trendy thing on the Internet was to be a well-versed technology writer of the female persuasion with a tech blog so popular that for some reason unknown to sane people, it inspired commenters to respond with vile and misogynistic threats of sexual violence and imminent death." Why do people on the Internet send death threats to, uh, tech writers? No, really, why?
• CNN – In a recession, tech gadgets become a luxury
  "Ignoring what you want. Recycling the old. Fixing what can be saved. Is this the new American way when it comes to tech toys and electronics—an industry in which new gadgets can become outdated within months?"
• Popular Mechanics – 5 Oregon Trail-­Style Classic Games We Want for the iPhone
  With the iPhone version of SimCity already here and a port of Oregon Trail on its way, my pal Seth names five more classic games he’d like to play on his iPhone. (The last one is a weird one.)

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• Attract Mode – Animated Pixel Portraits by Enso
  This is ridiculous. That actually looks like Mark DeNardo.
• Edge Online – Why Metacritic Doesn’t Matter
  "The worst part about these reviews, says Mona Hamilton, SVP of marketing at Capcom, is they are suggestive—and their scores often depend on how drunk you got the media at a Street Fighter event."
• The Guardian – Not all in the game: It’s the gaming community’s loss when those who identify themselves as women or minorities are bullied into silence
  "Why is it so hard just to have a conversation? What are we afraid of?"

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• Game|Life – Hands On: Retro Game Challenge Sequel Bigger and Better
  You know that new DS game, Retro Game Challenge? I didn’t want to say anything, but frankly, it’s last year’s news. And it’s nowhere near as good as its sequel, Arino no Chosenjou 2, which Chris Kohler is playing. Thought you should know.

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• 1UP – Games for the Unemployed
  "Hideo Kojima and his hour-long, near-nonsensical, soap opera cut-scenes don’t value your time. Fortunately, your time is now worth next to nothing." It would be just another diggbait trash piece, but it isn’t. Robert Ashley is just that good.
• The NY Observer – Hey, You Media Wimps! If You Want to Save Newspapers, Learn to Love Your iPhones, Then Go Join Facebook
  "’I think a lot of the conversation these days is myopic,’ said Marcus Brauchli, executive editor of The Washington Post. ‘The problem is how to monetize all content, which is not simply how to solve newspapers problems. Our problems are ultimately the same as the movie industry’s, the book industry’s, the magazine industry’s, the music industry’s. We all meet on a vast, flat digital plane, which is a sort of Hobbesian, anarchic, unordered place.’"
• Hit Self-Destruct – Domestic City, Part Three
  "Selecting a bootleg CD-R of Gravitation, she walked back to the counter where she overheard two guys discussing the copy of BioShock that they were buying and in particular what a deep story it was supposed to have. Emily rolled her eyes." (via)

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• The Believer – Heather Chaplin in conversation with Tom Bissell
  "For a long while she was, in my mind, ‘that cool, good-lookin’ girl who is into video games.’ This is not to say I walk around equating moral worth or coolness with good looks; it is merely in recognition of the fact that cool, good-lookin’, girl, and video games do not often find themselves in the same sentence with the same referent. Video games began as a form intended for children and young people." Real Actual Writer Tom Bissell interviews Video Game Journalist Heather Chaplin in the most recent issue of The Believer.
• Retro Thing – 10 Reasons To Own A Tube Television
  "If you haven’t taken the plunge into the murky world of high definition television, here are 10 good reasons to keep an old-fashioned tube TV around. Perhaps it won’t be your primary set, but there are solid reasons to keep a CRT as backup."
• Abandonia – "Lost in Time" finally un-lost
  The ESA finally stopped caring about "Lost in Time," an unsung DOS classic now available for download at Abandonia.
• 1UP’s Retro Gaming Blog – The Mystery of Falcom
  "Further compounding the problem is that Falcom’s design philosophy has evolved very slowly since the debut of games like Dragon Slayer and Ys; ‘stubborn’ might be the best way to describe the company’s approach to game design."
• 4 color rebellion – Lawyers Attack, Ness is Knocked Out
  "It turns out that the death knell for EarthBound’s Virtual Console release was Nintendo’s own legal team. Fearing possible copyright repercussions (especially over the soundtrack, which borrows liberally from bands like The Beatles), they demanded changes to the game from the Japanese side of Nintendo."
• Ars Technica – Atlus goes steampunk with free-to-play MMO
  "Kicking of its recently unveiled Atlus Online service is a brand new free-to-play MMO that will use the always-interesting backdrop of steampunk." Whoa. Later, Babbage.
• Attract Mode – Free Style Scraps 08 Pixel
  "Perfect for the lonely chiptune artist in need of some quick cover art, or for anyone that needs a little bit of retro videogame inspiration."
• Kounter Kulture – Wii Tag
  "Now you can bomb a set from the comfort of your own home."

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