Daily Linksplosion: Saturday, May 28, 2011
- giantmecha – Parents upset about adoption in Portal 2"RATED E FOR EVERYBODY EXCEPT FOR ORPHANS"
Daily Linksplosion: Wednesday, May 25, 2011
- guardian.co.uk – China used prisoners in lucrative internet gaming work"Labour camp detainees endure hard labour by day, online ‘gold farming’ by night"
- Superlevel – Goldfish – We Come TogetherThis could be the dorkiest video I’ve ever watched, but it has style to spare.
- GameSetWatch – Doctor Who x Doctor Octoroc SNES IntroNew Fun Hypothetical: Modern-day Doctor Who in 16-bit
- Tiny Cartridge – Sunglasses-wearing badassesPaul Robertson makes Squirtles look tough
- Official Portal 2 Website – MusicPortal 2 Soundtrack, Volume I: free to download! Plus, ringtones for iPhone and Android.
- MAKE Magazine – Honduran High Schooler’s Low-Cost Eye-Controlled InterfaceTeen’s electrooculography prototype a low-cost alternative for people with physical disabilities
- Brandonnn – A World Within (by againstbound)Ah! What I would do to have this on my living room wall! But I guess it’s only a T-shirt.
Daily Linksplosion: Monday, May 23, 2011
- Reddit – Against all odds I’ve yet to be banned from City of HeroesHere’s a superhero you should avoid on White Pants Days, ladies! Its creator, longtime City of Heroes player Scott "Sharkey" Sharkey, tweets: "Who has two thumbs and frontpages Reddit with stupid bullshit he posts while drunk at 1AM?" Good lord, Reddit. I mean, really.
Don’t you think Sharkey should put together a whole City of Heroes Field Guide? He could revisit all his old superheroes, too, like Darth Underpants, Disco Fett, Inside-Out Girl, Ground Chuck, Grannyatrix, and Proofreader. This is a thing we would want to see, right?
Canabalt cross-stitch
The weather is strange: a real dog day, overcast and grey and still; perhaps a steady hail of cogs and caps and casings; here and there, a garble of boards and wiring, spat out of the sky, maybe.
Overhead: some sort of roaring gyrodyne or helibus, chopping through the smog sideways; a thin soupy ring of cloud where the sun was. In the distance, a bank of steeples stretch heavenward, bellowing tines of smoke. A fibrillation underfoot; a structural undertow; a gnashing of architectural teeth. Just beyond the next concrete cliff, a window, a promise, a torii framed in steel and sealed with plate glass.
Only a terrible fairy tale. So rest easy tonight, young Charlie, little Jamie, tiny Tilda—the apocalypse is nigh, but it is not yet here. For now, there are only the signs: a pigeon, a dove, an office chair.
Daily Linksplosion: Wednesday, May 11, 2011
- Reddit – Port of the Week #51 – PsychonautsThe PC version of ‘Psychonauts,’ flawlessly (?) ported for Mac gamers!
- IndieGames.com – Opinion: The Gods Of GooMichael Rose on ‘World of Goo’: "It’s a belief that keeps me living purposefully, that makes sense of the world, and that gives me hope for the future. But sometimes I wonder if this belief places me squarely in the midst of a cruel game, wherein I am merely a pawn, used for the sadistic purposes of a cruel God."
- Arcade Heroes – Teaser videos for TRON PinballWhoa, hey now! Has Stern been hard at work on a licensed Tron pinball machine? This YouTube video certainly suggests so.
- Digital Tools – CityHero: Real-urban gaming for iPhoneIts developers describe the app as a mix between Foursquare, Sim City, and Monopoly. Hmm!
- The Hairpin – Nine Things to Name Your Oregon Trail FamilyThis is just horrible.
Daily Linksplosion: Thursday, May 05, 2011
- 1UP – 31 Homebrew Games Worth PlayingYep!
- Kotaku – But I Don’t Play Video Games! Don’t Worry. Portal 2 Will Teach You HowSee, James? You can play Portal 2! It’s safe! It’s fine!
Tim Curry is 65
Happy birthday, Tim Curry! The English character actor, acclaimed on stage and screen, is 65 years old today. Let’s pause for a moment to silently celebrate his myriad voice-over and FMV contributions to the world of computer games.
Here he is, hamming it up with both class and gusto in 2008’s Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3:
Update: Aww! I really like Luke Plunkett’s commemoration of Tim Curry’s Special Day over at Kotaku! A lot of fun clippy-clips there (and none of them are Gabriel Knight which, beloved as that work may be, is really too obvious a go-to, IMO). As my mom always writes in her emails, “Smiley face!” I love these clips! Go see!
Daily Linksplosion: the Art one!!
- Retropoly – The Pit: Super Mario Bros."Das passiert, wenn Mario in einen Abgrund fällt"
- GamOvr – Biker SamusBadass.
- The sketch blog of Mads Herman – Sci Fi Scummin’Fun Hypothetical: Duncan Jones’ ‘Moon’ as a LucasArts game (via Kyozo Kicks)
- Wonderland – World of Geekcraft"Geek meets craft in this fun collection of 25 kooky projects for geeks of any affiliation, from D&D dice earrings, Star Trek pillows, and Super Mario cross-stitch to Star Wars terrariums, a Morse code quilt, and much more!"
- Fashionably Geek – Sesame Street FighterOh, my gosh! It’s almost TOO MUCH
- Back of the Cereal Box – Adolescent Wet Dream Gone Wrong: The Video Game‘Drop Rock Hora Hora’ and its misleading box art
Daily Linksplosion: Wednesday, April 06, 2011
- Waxy.org – Metagames: Games About GamesI managed to miss this the first three times I saw the link, but never again! A catalog of games-about-games, enumerated by the Internet’s Andy Baio.
- LA Weekly – A History of TrollfaceAlso titled "Trollface Artist Carlos Ramirez Talks 4chan, Incredible Hulk and Viral Fame," which is great for SEO but not very poetic
- McSweeney’s – April Fools’ Day Pranks to Play On an Unemployed 20-Something Male Who Still Lives at Home With His Parents.Hurr hurr, I laughed at this a whole bunch
- The Daily Nail – The Wind Beneath My Tiny WingsA ‘Tiny Wings’ -inspired manicure! (via the comments at If Style Could Kill)
Daily Linksplosion: Wednesday, March 30, 2011
- Reddit – GamePro, G4TV and VGChartz GamrFeed have been abusing multiple accounts to spam and manipulate /r/gaming for monthsI hope not to alarm you, but plenty of websites employ "power users"—not for actual money, I don’t think, because that would be illegal—to boost articles’ scores on social content sharing networks. But Digg always seemed to ban users just as soon as the site suspected something fishy happening, so it isn’t as if Digg were in on it. So is gaming the system, in the interest of pageviews, really so bad? Because as an ex-community manager, I really struggle to make any judgments here.
LTTP: ‘Be Aggressive’
See, this is one of those moments wherein I’m so Late to the Party I’m just baffled by myself. Thanks for IMing me a link to it, Mike! Where were you two years ago, huh, bro? (Just kidding! Thanks, Mike!)
Brad Neely (Washington) made this video about the Competitive Spirit. I have no idea whether this is safe for workplace viewing. Probably not. Probably your boss will catch you fullscreening it and she’ll be like, “Wow, that video is two years old; you’re fired.”
Daily Linksplosion: Thursday, March 24, 2011
Zelda Master Key by 8bitclassics
- The Rumpus Interview With Mike RosenthalThe Rumpus talks with one of the makers of the ‘Waiting for Godot’ video game.
- The Bygone Bureau – The Affair to RememberKevin Nguyen saves his files. He compulsively presses command-S. What is he scared of? What is worth holding onto?
- NYTimes.com – Don’t Call Me, I Won’t Call YouWe are all terrified of our own phones.
- Gawker – The Greatest Fake Girlfriend Story Ever ToldUpdates galore! This is so crazy!
- Xiaxue.blogspot.com – On the Internet, nobody knows you’re YOUR OWN IMAGINARY GIRLFRIENDI tweaked the link’s title a little bit, but only because I worry I’ll have to trick you readers (??) into clicking on it. Trust me, it’s worthwhile.
Usually cyberdrama is neither hilarious nor uplifting. But some hot Internet girl I’ve never heard of (sorry?) has turned into a one-woman Smoking Gun. I would not dare mess with her.
And this isn’t games-related, no, but since I’m trying to provide more reading material about gender, identity, avatars, and HILARITY, this passes my test.
Stress, pubs, and rock and roll
I’d had influenza for exactly one week and was beginning to feel the symptoms of crazy, and I think that is why I accidentally double-booked myself for bar trivia. I’d never done trivia in a bar before, and then somehow I managed to join two different quiz teams, each playing at 8PM CST on opposite sides of the city. Whoops! But I was very committed to meeting my friend Robyn for the quiz because, put together, we are a dainty, shrieking Ken Jennings.
I read somewhere that pub quizzes are more stressful than first-person shooters. I think I read that somewhere, anyway. (No, I just checked. It’s an actual video game called Pub Quiz, I see, that is so stressful, as opposed to a digital pub quiz.) But this sounds believable, right? Studying for the GRE is stressful. Taking tests is stressful. Public speaking is stressful. If I could only be on Jeopardy!, I could at long last fulfill my dream of vomiting on television. Without Robyn to steel me, I am not much like Ken Jennings at all. I have a numb brain and a slow trigger finger.
I felt both social and bloodthirsty, so I started my shit-talk well before the quiz began. But then, as our competitive spirit waned, Robyn and I decided to combine forces with our friends Brian and Ben. They let us join their team even though I had been emasculating them for an hour. That was a pretty shrewd move by all of us, though: Brian and Ben are versed in politics, movies, and history, but especially sports. They both are writers, too. Four writers at a table! And for as smart as we are, we are awfully loud and awfully good-looking.
I don’t mean to be a creep, or smug, but I did announce that we had the best-looking team by miles.
The quiz started. Guess what! Just one member of the team had two thumbs and zero idea who Clarence Darrow is: this gal!
The actress from Saving Grace? I started to write down “Brenda Blethyn.” Robyn slapped my hand. “Holly Hunter!” she hissed. Oh, a TV show! Not a movie!
“Oops, there is also a movie,” I told Robyn. Which I took my parents to see! Eleven years ago! I picked it! I drove us there! I’d already seen it once before! It’s about marijuana! And! My parents loved it!
Midway through the quiz, Robyn and I, who do not have the sports streak or zeal for self-improvement and exercise that Brian and Ben have, admitted that we each had become incredibly competitive. We had gone from giggling and slacking in round one to MIGHTY by round three.
“I have tasted blood, and I liked the flavor!” I said to Ben.
“See?” Ben said. “Now you are thinking like a winner.” Ben high-fived me.
Read the rest of this entry »Daily Linksplosion: Tuesday, March 15, 2011
- Jude Buffum – Painting with Pixels at GDC 2011Buffum’s installation at GDC.
- The Rumpus Interview With Peter Smith And Charlie Hoey, The Brains Behind The Great Gatsby GameI cannot believe the Rumpus did this…!
- Magical Wasteland – Why We Don’t Have Female Characters"Women are difficult to model because they have—they’re sort of put together—well, let me put it this way: male bone structure is mostly made up of ninety-degree angles. Right? Maybe a couple forty-fives here and there. But it’s simple, and that makes it easy. I guess I shouldn’t say ‘easy,’ but I mean more straightforward."
- The Hairpin – Throw This Party: Game NightThe Hairpin’s Katie Walsh on dragging your friends into an evening of board games, card trysts, and Pictionary.
Daily Linksplosion: Monday, March 07, 2011
- Chungking Espresso – How To Write A Book About GamesThis made me squirm uncomfortably at the specter of my own obviousness. (via Critical Distance)
- The Morning News – Who You Are and Who You Say You AreMore on anonymity and identity’s fluidity, but this time, prettily written.
