4 seconds, go!

Four Second Fury is all about the minigames. Surprisingly fun even if it encourages ADD.

SF0 on CNET

CNET gives a write-up to one of my favorite city-ranging games going on now. And they say I took one of the game's tasks "seriously" when they used a photo of my lantern-wallet. Hell yeah, I took it seriously, I was going for bonus points. And it paid off.

To one of the architects behind alternate-reality games, however, "SF0" has some of the same kinds of multimedia elements but provides players with an all-new game mechanic.

"It's more in the category of urban superhero gaming, because they're not really doing a narrative," said Jane McGonigal, a lead designer at 42 Entertainment, which has made several of the best-known alternate-reality games. "I really like the modular missions. You can do them any time and at any place, and that's really different from ARGs, which tell you what to do and where to do it."

Advertisement

Wow, thanks for the show, K-unit (emphasis on “unit”)

I'm quite excited that the new Katamari game for PSP is out, even if it doesn't translate 100% well to a handheld. I'll be happy to battle it out with the locals for Katamari supremacy.

However, I gotta ask the King of All Cosmos… what's with the spandex fetish?

Yeah, "accidental tsunami," sure. We know what happened, King, you rascal.

Super Mario joke leads to potential criminal charges

Five teenage girls in Ravenna, Ohio planted 17 boxes around town, each painted to look like a power-up box from the Super Mario Bros. games. You know the ones: you jump into or knock them and they release a coin or a power-up.

Apparently some people freak out at gold boxes with question marks on them, and now the girls could face criminal charges because the bomb squad was called in to deal with some of the boxes.

I'm seriously hoping the charges get dropped. I can't say that they're outright ridiculous; if I were leaving thematic public art around, I'd place it a little more strategically, where those who would come across it would appreciate it for what it was. But still. The Super Mario line has been out for over 20 years; you can't tell me that there's not a single person on the bomb squad who's ever played Nintendo. C'mon.

The site that details how to make life-sized power-up blocks now has a preface that touches on that: "Not everyone has the same cultural context." Okay, that's fair, but… with computer games being as prevalent as they are nowadays, some electronic cultural literacy could do the authorities some good. This stuff's just going to keep on happening.

Most of my innocence was lost during the years during my education

Your Ultimate Roleplaying Purity Score
Category	Your Score	Average
Hacklust	70.75% Enjoys the occasional head-lopping	53.5%
Sensitive Roleplaying	67.09% Will talk after everyone important's been killed	54.6%
GM Experience	82.61% "Um… You guys are in a 10'x10' room…"	69.5%
Systems Knowledge	88.98% Played in a couple of campaigns	90.4%
Livin' La Vida Dorka	50.57% Has interesting conversations in public	63.3%
You are 74.06% pure Average Score: 68.8%
Take The Ultimate Roleplaying Purity Test and see how you match up! (By The Ferrett)

Sigh.

Sara Andrews revisited

Washington Post finally comes to the table and talks about gay gamers and virtual spaces. No new territory is covered that hasn’t been covered if you follow this sort of thing.

D&D Online review

More than one person has sent me today to Slashdot’s review of Dungeons and Dragons Online, which towards the end kind of echoes my feelings about what I’ve gathered from what I’ve been seeing/reading: it’d be great if we (and I’ve been talking to some people about it, so theoretically, we) had a regular party of people we like, and we made a bowling night out of it (like, say, every other Tuesday or whenever), but otherwise it seems kind of unfeasible. It could be made more palatable if most people playing this were fun people or great roleplayers, but I’ve already read some of the DDO forums, and, uh, no. It’s the internet, people are dicks.

Translating games into other media

Sent to me all this morning: Final Fallacy, WOW: the Text Adventure, and last year’s demo of Spore at GDC. All the gaming links lately make me think I should be working in the games industry, or covering it, or something.

Final Together

Turns out that Tara Strong, who voiced Rikku in the Final Fantasy games, also voices Toot and Princess Clara in Drawn Together. Cree Summer (whom I’ll always associate with the character Freddie on A Different World) also shares credits as Foxxy Love and some characters in the Final Fantasy games as well. (And just about every other cartoon and video game over the last few years, from the looks of it.)

Spellcaster-angst is probably not worth an iPod

I wrote this spinoff draft of the Switch/World of Warcraft parodies for 1up’s WoW blog contest. I doubt I’ll win, it’s derivative and mostly me bitching more than I normally would. (But the Uldaman story is true and seriously, wtf, punks.)

Maybe it’s good to win an iPad, though. Who can say.