MetaFilter posts tagged with games

"It will cost you a piece of yourself."

jbickers — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:14:13 -0800

Destructoid has posted a full video play-through of the controversial "No Russian" level from the newly released Modern Warfare 2 (warning: possibly disturbing). The level, in which the player is asked to infiltrate a Russian terrorist group and, as a result, take part in a terrorist attack on civilians, has divided gamers and journalists. Destructoid's Brad Rice is disgusted by the level, saying that "what the scene actually does is take the will to fight out of me." Kotaku's Michael McWhertor also hated the scene, saying it "puts the player in a very uncomfortable, disturbingly violent situation that may offend or upset some players." Australian game blogger Jarno Kokko says the developers "crossed a line here and went for the distasteful. It'll put the game into headlines, Grand Theft Auto style, but it may also cause a backlash that harms mature games as a whole." And the timing of the release - days after the incident at Fort Hood, hours before Veterans Day - has not gone unnoticed. On the other side, Simon Brew raises the "games are art" argument, asking "Shall we all just play Tetris, then?" And Destructoid's Jim Sterling counter-points his colleague, saying the scene is a statement "that videogames don't need to invent fantastical worlds of elves and goblins in order to portray violence. It's a statement that videogames can affect emotions and provide stories that don't just entertain, but also shock, surprise and even disturb."

Novel Chess

carsonb — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:49:40 -0800

Reading to the Endgame: Algorithmic translation of classic nineteenth century novels into chessboard slugfests. Select the opponents from a list of fifty-five novels in five languages, and watch each text maneuver across the battlefield.

bop the alligator

speicus — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:11:11 -0800

DroidQuest, Gate and Logicly are modern logic puzzle games based on the classic educational games Rocky's Boots (1982) and Robot Odyssey (1984). Originally conceived as a sequel to Warren Robinett's Adventure (1979) for the Atari 2600, Rocky's Boots became a revolutionary educational game that combined Adventure's interactive graphical environment with gameplay that taught the player how to build more and more intricate digital logic circuits. And as you might expect from the creator of one of the first Easter Eggs, it also contained a few secrets (like a hidden room with an alligator that would eat your cursor). Robot Odyssey was the fiendishly difficult sequel to Rocky's Boots, in which the player tries to escape from the labyrinthine Robotropolis by programming and reprogramming three robots named Sparky, Checkers and Scanner. (Perhaps in response to Robot Odyssey's difficulty, its successor Gertrude's Secrets (1986) was much simpler and did away with logic gates entirely.) While these games have nearly faded into obscurity, thankfully there are a few nostalgia-driven games in the same style that run on modern machines. DroidQuest is an incredibly faithful remake of Robot Odyssey made in Java, while Gate presents robot rewiring puzzles with a simpler, slicker interface. Finally, if you just want to hook up some logic gates in a sandbox environment, Logicly is a bare-bones but pretty Flash implementation.

Dodongo dislikes wasted blocks

BlackLeotardFront — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:04:27 -0800

In a revelation that, to some, is on the order of realizing there is (or isn't) a god, it turns out that all the dungeons in The Legend of Zelda were part of the same enormous map. This seems to have some sort of transcendental importance that I can't quite put my finger on. Actually, they are part of two non-overlapping maps, each measuring 16x8 rooms, as described in this breakdown of the storage method. No map has been made of the second quest, but you can see how they fit together from the maps on this page (i.e. the yin and yang of levels 7 and 8). Interestingly, Half-Life fits together remarkably well in this manner. It is whispered that A Link To The Past does this with its dungeons as well but as they are divided into floors it is more difficult to check. Smaller backup image in case MIT goes down. Content and extra links via Reddit.

Step 1. Make an utterly fantastic game. Step 3. Profit!

straight — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:24:08 -0800

2D BOY made around $100,000 in a week. That’s $50,000 each for writing a blog post about a game they finished a year ago. By letting people pay whatever they wanted. 2D Boy stirred up a lot of discussion (previously) about game piracy when they used online scoreboard data to estimate an 82% piracy rate for their fantastic indie game World of Goo (previously). For World of Goo's first birthday, they decided to try the Radiohead model and let people buy the game for any price they choose. Now they've released extensive data about the results. Short version? "A huge success," even though the most commonly chosen price was only a penny. Don't miss the excellent analysis in the Rock Paper Shotgun article (that first link), including the comments where one reader has created a chart showing that the bottom 40% of the downloads account for 1.5% of the profit and the top 30% of the downloads account for 83% of the profit.

Artificial Intelligence?

flatluigi — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:24:47 -0800

Hell is Other People "Fight the ghosts of those that have come before by moving in two dimensions and shooting missiles. The fiercer you fight, the harder it shall be for those that come after. How much past can you cope with before you are overwhelmed?"

Have fun storming the White House!

bardic — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 00:36:33 -0800

"Join in NOW and help Capture Obama and the renegade Cong. Defeat the Union Troops and other allies of the former President and help safeguard American Freedom. " It's the online survivalist game/wish fulfillment entitled "2011: Obama's Coup Fails" (via) Who wouldn't want to play with event like this one: "Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck Found Dead in Camp March 5, 2011 – Clark County, VA – A FEMA camp was liberated today, one of two still controlled by the war criminals loyal to Obama. Rush Limbaugh was executed over a week earlier, we are told, and Glenn Beck was found in his cell and has died, incredibly of an ‘aspirin overdose’, the preferred way to send a message to the enemies of Obama."

Hey, you taffers!

dunkadunc — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 11:19:21 -0800

The Dark Mod, a total conversion for Doom 3 in the spirit of Looking Glass Technology's Thief series, has finally been released after years (and more years) of development and is now available to download.

Star Gard!

The Devil Tesla — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 19:19:34 -0800

All those who have gone before you have perished. Star Gard! Retro-shooty platformer for PC and Mac that rethinks character death. Rock, Paper, Shotgun explains how it's respawn system is unique..

Luke Paakh makes some lovely flash games

Kattullus — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:11:29 -0800

Particlasm is home to the browser games of Luke Paakh. He first caught my attention with fine space shoot'em-up Ether War but I also enjoyed his other games, shooter Ether Cannon, tree defending games Phoenix and Shen Long, puzzle game blue and petri dish action game Amoeba. His new game is my favorite. It's called William and Sly and it's a beautiful platformer is about an adorable fox who likes mushrooms and his quest to recharge some runestones with fairyflies.

The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion

Pope Guilty — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 10:27:26 -0800

Douglas Crockford, who oversaw the porting of Maniac Mansion to the NES, would like for you to know how the game changed in the porting process and why.

Not now James, we're busy

Artw — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:38:40 -0800

Robert Yang on the homophobic response to his Half-Life 2 mod Handle With Care.

RunMan: Race Around the World, donationware pc platformer

The Devil Tesla — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 22:47:22 -0800

RunMan: Race Around the World is a donationware PC platformer made of bright colors and public domain folk, blues and jazz. The trailers (final and preview) are made of happiness. The download page is here. (via RPS) The game plays kind of like Sonic the Hedgehog but with two buttons instead of one (charge and jump) and charge is the one you use to kill baddies (and also to bounce off walls!). To get a good score, and also to survive the boss chases, you have to run as fast as you can through a level without stopping. One of the game's developers, Tom Sennett, also made When the bomb goes off, a game where everybody's got one last thing to do before they go. The other developer, Matt Thorson, made some cool games too, like the previously mentioned An Untitled Story (direct download link here). Previously on MeFi there was Archagon's big list of free 2d for the PC. More recently there has been Spelunky, Randy Balma Municipal Abortionist, Journey to the Center of the Earth and a whole bunch I'm probably forgetting.

Ultramarines!

fearfulsymmetry — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:32:34 -0800

In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future, There is Only ~~Skulls~~ War... the movie!

Sesquioxidizingfragalisticexpialadocious

minifigs — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:57:18 -0800

Scrabulizer lets you enter the current state of your game in Scrabble and shows you all possible moves. They've also discovered a move worth 2044 Points

Unique HL2 horror mod, Korsakovia

The Devil Tesla — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:18:05 -0800

Korsakovia is a Half Life 2 mod from research driven developer The Chinese Room. It melds the abstract driven story of their previous mod, Dear Esther (previously), with more traditional gameplay. The end result is an equally distinctive horror FPS with minimal narrative cues. Rock, Paper, Shotgun had a nice write up about it. The mod's ModDB page includes a comments section that is a mix of loving adoration and extreme frustration. Korsakovia lack of narrative clues means it's never clear that you are going the right way, and the game has a few bugs. I personally wasn't able to get through without cheating (remember, you have to type "sv_cheats 1" before any of these will work). Consider yourself warned.

Pay me now, my Lord

mippy — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 10:12:03 -0800

We've covered web-based game Evony's peculiar advertising previously. Now intrepid gamers are playing/observing the thing, and finding a lack of both freeness and heaving bosoms.

Anyone can make music.

empath — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:33:54 -0800

iNudge Is a software music toy that lets you create and share short snippets of music.

Pirates and cake? Yay!

sarcasticah — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:15:05 -0800

Hey, Tower Defense fans: do you like cake? How about pirates? Want to combine the three? Just in time for (almost) Friday, it's Cake Pirates!

Lose/Lose: The Game That Deletes Your Files

Plutor — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:24:07 -0800

"Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the player's computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted." via

Journey to the Center of the Earth, indie game edition

BlackLeotardFront — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 16:43:04 -0800

Journey to the Center of the Earth - or DonDon (?) is an excellent exploration-based platformer game with fabulous little pixel graphics and a solid 45 minutes or so of gameplay. Think Diet Spelunky, or La Mulana Lite. A little more info and hints at Indie Games Blog.

Sorry, Windows only (direct link). F4 for fullscreen (but it's better in 1x windowed mode)

Cobra Mk 3

Artw — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 09:51:39 -0800

This month marks the 25th aniversary of Elite, the groundbreaking 3D space trading game. The making of Elite. More on the making of Elite from The Backroom Boys. Emulate the original BBC Micro version. The Dark Wheel.

Vintage Cycling Board Games

OmieWise — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:35:34 -0800

A huge collection of vintage cycling board games. The main site also has resources for rolling your own cycling game.

Edmund

Foci for Analysis — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 14:27:35 -0800

To jump straight into it, what made you decide to make a game involving rape? Inspiration was mostly personal, I’ve known a few girls who have been through similar situations, which sparked the concept. As far as the experience, I wanted to inspire emotion in the player, even if its vile and disgusting.

Edmund is game designer Paul Greasley's contribution to indie PC gaming web site TIGSource's competition's adult section. Gamers react. In 2006 RapeLay became notorious as it simulated the rape of a mother and her two daughters.

Monopoly and Google maps mashup

pompomtom — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 22:01:58 -0800

Tomorrow, Monopoly City Streets begins, introducing a world-wide game combining google maps and the classic family fight-starter. Buy any street in the world, build houses, hotels and more. Remember, property always goes up, and your siblings always cheat.