Lose/lose

Here’s an interesting idea for a game I heard at Flash on the Beach. The idea is that you download the game and play to your heart’s content. The only catch is that your actions have real life impacts for you. Each alien represents a file on your computer. Every time you destroy an alien that file will be deleted from your machine. If your ship gets destroyed the application itself is deleted. Suffice to say I haven’t actually played the game. But it might be a fun thing to do if you were ever planning on doing a hard reinstall of your operating system or selling your machine on.

lose/lose from zach gage on Vimeo.

Tweet This

David Braben talk at BAFTA

Elite

Had the opportunity (thanks Paul) to go to BAFTA last night to watch a talk by David Braben the author of the classic space trading game Elite. It was fascinating to watch this man who at the age of 18 had broken the mold of traditional home computing games that up to that point had very much followed the three minute coin drop mentality where you needed three lives and got an extra at 10,000 points. Watching this animated fellow talk you can see the passion he has for games as he talked about creating such a time defining game as Elite. It was  unique  in many ways. It was the first proper 3D game for a home machine. It allowed you to explore a vast universe. It allowed you to carry out missions in whatever manner you preferred with no particular narrative dictating your moves.

Braben went on from this to create his own gaming company called Frontier Developments that now employs over 200 people and creates games for many platforms.

Tweet This

Derren Brown Zombie Video Arcade Game Hypnotism

In preparation of tonight’s Derren Brown lottery prediction reveal here is a classic from the Brown vault. Classic stuff.

Tweet This

The Hat Game

I really like this idea…

Tweet This

ZX SPECTRUM GHOSTBUSTERS

Tweet This

Top 3 PONG mash-ups

1. Whiteboard PONG – “why?” is not a question you should ask.

2. Oscilloscope PONG – for those bored days in the lab.

3. Real life PONG – I mean c’mon…

Tweet This

The smallest advert in the world?

Ok I’ve made some small ads in my time. Microsoft has some crazy little buttons it likes to scatter on its sites on occasion. But this takes the biscuit. 16×16 pixels! Ok what they’ve done is create some arcade games and put the game inside the tiny box you’re used to seeing to the left of your browser bar. It’s called a favicon and is usually there to show your logo. The fact that they’ve put a game in this space is a incredible feat of engineering. Or at least it would be had it not been done before. The eagle eyes amongst you will remember my previous post on Defender of the Favicon. Are there any original ideas left out there? And yes it’s an advert. For the incredibly small Smart car. It’s a great idea in that it is amazing what you can fit into a small space. So all in all it’s a great campaign. Just a bit weird they’re shouting this loudly about their incredible feat in designing this ad.

Tweet This

Second Person Shooter

I really like the idea behind this game. It’s called second person shooter and is a two player game in a similar style to Quake. But this has a twist. Your view is what your opponent sees. So whilst you can navigate the environment you will only see what the other person is seeing. In this way your goal is to track and kill yourself. Not only does this go against our intuition and methods of self-preservation but it is wholely un-natural for us to view the world in this way and we have to combat our biological senses to overcome this challenge. It’s an interesting experiment and I game I hope to have a play at at some point.

Tweet This

Defender of the favicon

A favicon is one of those tiny 16×16 pixel wide images that sit in your browser address bar that help define the look of a website. Lots of sites have them and they are a useful way of organizing your browser bookmarks. But being such a small size there is only a limited amount of image space for your creation. That is until this person came along and created the game ‘defender’ in this tiny space. Absolutely ingenious and technically brilliant. Once you give the favicon focus by toggling from main page to browser bar by pressing the Enter key you can start a new game by pressing ‘N’ and then using the WASD keys to navigate. Okay so it won’t be keeping you playing for very long but it will have you shaking your head in wonder as to how this was created. Click on the image above to go to the developer’s page.

Tweet This

Play Auditorium

This is just a phenomenal flash physics based game. What is brilliant about it is the simplicity. There are no instructions. You learn as you play. As is the case with all the best online games out there. Think ‘Flow‘ and you’ll know what I’m talking about. Given a set of nodules with arrows your task seems to be to direct a flow of energy using the objects on screen. By guiding the flow of energy into certain areas you activate an orchestral soundtrack with each activated area representing one track of the sound. It’s ingenious and will have you wasting a good portion of your day.

Thanks to Raf for the heads up on this.

Tweet This