Pokemon:
Game Freak and Nintendo's series of cartoony monster-training RPGs that kicked off huge crazes among the kids of both Japan and the U.S. In these games, children take up the calling of "Pokemon trainers," capturing the titular animals and then keeping them as pets or fighting them against either wild pokemon or those of other trainers.
Nobunaga's Ambition:
An even-longer-running classic series of historical strategy/simulation games produced by Koei. Noted for their realistic approach, their difficulty, and a high level of dryness. You grow rice, distribute it to your population to keep them happy, send out spies, guard against assassins, raise and train a military, and ultimately attempt to unite feudal-era Japan.
And now...
Pokemon + Nobunaga's Ambition, a Real Thing that will Soon Exist.
posted by JHarris
on Jan 1, 2012 -
26 comments
Photofly is a cloud based service that will construct 3D models of objects based off of a handful of digital photographs.
The NYT ran this story in June providing a bit more detail. Photofly can be used to capture
People (
more,
more, and
more),
Places (
so on, and
so forth), and
Things (
etc.,
etc.,
etc). It's also been used to create unreal effects in
this music video. Shaan Hurley, of autodesk,
explains the technology in this video.
posted by codacorolla
on Sep 21, 2011 -
15 comments
Do you like video games? Have you ever wanted to
comprehensively reenact the daily life of a double-decker bus driver in 1985 West Berlin?
Your prayers have finally been answered. Aerosoft's impressive
Omnibus Driving Simulator allows you to take command of the venerable 1980s-vintage MAN SD200 and SD202 double-decker buses (in 20 authentic 1980s advertising liveries) along West Berlin's Omnibus Route 92, complete with an accurate simulation of all four production-runs of the SD200's transmission, drivetrain, climate control, and passenger information systems. If the SD202 doesn't cut it for you, or you want to escape the clutches of West Berlin, there's
a comprehensive map editor and scripting engine at your disposal.
(via) [more inside]
posted by schmod
on Feb 22, 2011 -
46 comments
You are in a warm, dark, comfortable place. This has been your place since you became aware that you are alive. It's almost time to enter a different world now.
In 1986, Activision published a roleplaying computer game called
Alter Ego. Unlike the action and fantasy titles that ruled the day, this game simulated the course of a single ordinary life. Beginning at birth, players navigated a series of vignettes: learning to crawl, reacting to strangers, getting a first haircut. The outcome of each scenario subtly influenced one's path, and with every choice players slowly progressed through infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age.
Graphically minimalist -- one's lifestream is represented by simple icons, and the scenarios are all text -- the game was nevertheless engaging, describing the world in a playful, good-natured tone tinged by darkness and melancholy. And it had quite a pedigree; developer and psychology PhD
Peter Favaro interviewed hundreds of people on their most memorable life experiences to generate the game's 1,200 pages of material. Unfortunately for Dr. Favaro, the game didn't sell very well. But it lives on through the web --
PlayAlterEgo.com offers a full copy of the game free to play in your browser, and the same port is available as a $5 app for
iPhone and
Android.
More: Port discussion group -
Wishlist -
Vintage review - Original game manual (
text or
scans)
posted by Rhaomi
on Dec 31, 2010 -
46 comments
Only in Japan, Real Men Go to a Hotel With Virtual Girlfriends: Dating-Simulation Game a Last Resort For Honeymoon Town and Its Lonely Guests. "Some devoted fans will go so far as to pay twice the rate—most hotels in Japan charge per guest not per room—to indulge the fantasy that they are not there alone. A night's stay, at most, can cost $500 though many rooms are cheaper.
In Atami, the Love Plus+ fans—mostly men in their twenties and thirties—stand out. Unlike the deeply tanned beach crowd wearing very little, they are often pasty and overdressed for the heat in heavy jeans and button-down shirts."
[more inside]
posted by Fizz
on Sep 5, 2010 -
49 comments
They were one of history’s greatest teams. But by the late 2000s, Pro Vercelli were entrenched in the lower leagues, their glorious past forgotten. Until one day, a man bought a video game. Read the uplifting saga of a small-town Italian club, an unknown American manager, triumph, betrayal, passion, and several extremely good recipes, from start to finish [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese
on Jul 3, 2010 -
26 comments
The sequel to Warfare 1917 (
previously) has been released:
Warfare 1944. I was going to save this for tomorrow, but it seems that we've had a Flash Thursday today.
posted by Hactar
on Jul 2, 2009 -
18 comments
According to the
Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS, by the Institute For the Future) - a simulation based on "the worlds’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game" - by the year 2042 AD there is a potentially terminal combination of five so-called “super-threats” which represent a collision of environmental, economic, and social risks. Acting together, the five super-threats may irreversibly overwhelm homo sapiens ability to survive. Spokesperson for United Nations Secretary General “We are grateful for GEAS’ work, and we treat their latest forecast with seriousness and profound gravity.”
[[press release]]. The game runs from Oct.8 to Nov. 6,
players wanted.
posted by stbalbach
on Oct 8, 2008 -
31 comments
An Interactive Space Simulator "Smash planets together, introduce rogue stars, and build new worlds from spinning discs of debris. Fire a moon into a planet or destroy everything you've created with a super massive black hole. You can simulate and interact with our solar system: the 8 planets,160+ moons, and hundereds of asteroids, the nearest 1000 stars to our Sun, and our local group of galaxies."
[31Mb, Windows only, sorry, but see inside for similar Mac and Linux apps] [more inside]
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken
on Jul 11, 2008 -
27 comments
bouncing ideas: “an infographically inspired, 1 take, top shot videoclip with professional trampoline gymnasts simulating typical video editing effects.” They had me at the spinning umbrella. (via
crabwalk)
posted by whatnot
on Jul 28, 2007 -
11 comments
First Responder Training Sites. For police training purposes, in Southern California ten locations have been set up to look like "anytown, usa", where target practice & hostage situations are acted out. These areas are known in the industry as situation simulation villages, tactical training sites, or Hogan's Alleys (
?).
Emergency State is an online exhibit of over 200 photographs of these strange prop towns.
posted by jonson
on Apr 9, 2007 -
18 comments
See one, do one, teach one. This has been the mantra of
medical education on the wards for a
very long time. But is it fair to the patient on the receiving end of that third-year medical student's awkward physical exam? Since their first use over forty years ago at the University of Southern California,
standardized patients (or
simulated patients,
medical actors or
teaching associates) have been employed to help medical students learn how to examine patients.
This internist signed his own mother up and much to his surprise found it helped her as much as her students
[NB: requires registration or BugMeNot; .pdf available here].
A special subset of these teachers, called
gynecologic teacing associates, bravely allow medical students to go where they've often never been before (with a white coat on). One 2nd year medical student found the experience helpful enough to write about it in the
Village Voice [clinically NSFW]. And naturally, as technology marches on, even teaching associates may be
downsized [technically NSFW].
posted by scblackman
on Sep 24, 2006 -
20 comments
DHS's CyberStorm-- --Recognizing the imminent threat hippies and assorted leftists obviously pose to us all, a massive cyber terror simulation (international and involving 115 organizations) recently came to light:
...The attack scenario detailed in the presentation is a meticulously plotted parade of cyber horribles led by a "well financed" band of leftist radicals who object to U.S. imperialism, aided by sympathetic independent actors.
At the top of the pyramid is the Worldwide Anti-Globalization Alliance, which sets things off by calling for cyber sit-ins and denial-of-service attacks against U.S. interests. WAGA's radical arm, the villainous Black Hood Society, ratchets up the tension on day one by probing SCADA computerized control systems and military networks ...
posted by amberglow
on Aug 17, 2006 -
28 comments
Sodaconstructor. "Looking at the fluid, lifelike way these creatures walk and roll and slink across the screen you might think that there must be some very complicated stuff going on behind the scenes. well fear not, it's actually very simple. it only looks complicated because lots of simple bits are working together." Be sure to stop at the
sodazoo to see others' creations.
posted by AstroGuy
on Jan 9, 2006 -
27 comments
Are computers counterproductive to a child's development? Wittenberg University education professor and former computer teacher
Lowell Monke thinks so, and has written a provocative essay arguing that, among other things, computers render children "less animated and less capable of appreciating what it means to be alive, what it means to belong in the world as a biological, social being," and "teach children a manipulative way of engaging the world.” His polemic is partially supported by
evidence (.pdf academic paper; BBC gloss
here) indicating that, above a certain threshold, computer use is correlated with lower test scores. The latest salvo in the continuing debate over education and
the culture of simulation.
posted by googly
on Oct 5, 2005 -
46 comments
Noctis is a free space simulation program/game written mostly in assembly by Alessandro Ghignola, an Italian programmer. It is
downloadable for Windows and MS-DOS, but be warned there is quite a learning curve. It features a planet lander, onboard ship computer, a Fido Net style method of communicating newly named and discovered stars and systems with other users, and a haunting sense of being alone in an immense universe.
Fan fiction.
Screenshots reveal the outdated resolution of the program.
posted by nervousfritz
on Jul 10, 2005 -
19 comments
