Penny Arcade juxtaposes World of Warcraft with Christian mythology
The title of this comic is “Remove Sandals (0/2)”, which is a reference to the World of Warcraft quest goals mechanism. The expectation here is that the bearded character will have to remove both his sandals upon acceptance of the quest from the burning bush in the cartoon.
The cartoon itself is a reference to Christian mythology when a man named Moses meets a god who delivers a message through a burning bush—and, of course, back to the World of Warcraft mechanics, that’s what the yellow exclamation point is all about. The various gods and goddesses of World of Warcraft also deliver quests using this mechanic (the exclamation point, not the bush.)
Link,
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SyFy’s WCG Ultimate Gamer show a little bit of a dud
I would like to direct everyone over to an article by Kit Dotson at SiliconANGLE about SyFy Channel’s second season of WCG Ultimate Gamer.
So I watched the second season opener for SyFy’s WCG Ultimate Gamer reality show last Friday. (Starting this autumn, it airs on SyFy channel, Thursday nights at 11pm.) I haven’t had a chance to check out the first season, so as I watched it buffer up on Hulu I expected the staid reality show formula: manufactured drama, Machiavellian political maneuvering, two arbitrarily formed teams, and some sort of single elimination culminating in a walk of shame for some poor schlub at the end of the show. When it came to this angle, SyFy Ultimate Gamer did not disappoint me.
But, much like CrunchGear reviewer, Nicholas Deleon, it did let me down when it came down to pure
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Blizzard Real ID fiasco fallout: Escaping ourselves online
With the Real ID burnout basically over, and Blizzard wisely chose to take the feedback backlash from the community seriously, there’s still some discussion to be had about why that feedback is inherently correct. The implementation of displaying people’s legal names on a forum would have a profound impact on all of the users, in a very negative way.
One especially important aspect of being part of the social community of the Internet is the ability to escape ourselves. While first-world countries have certainly grown into a strange new sense of privacy—the concept of private spaces and private lives—which is all but unheard of in small communities, especially tribal communities, it has actually become paramount in our lives. With employers looking to the web to discover our thoughts and natures, we find sudden necessity in cloaking our personal lives away from our professional lives.
In the programming world,
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Monopolies are bad, mmkay? The rising behemoth of Steam
An article over at GAMESbrief came to our attention outlining “Five reasons why Steam will destroy the PC games industry” and while the points are fairly valid, the reasons at the end are basically a litany on why monopolies are bad. These reasons of themselves do not display why steam might destroy the PC games industry.
However, that’s not what this article is about. This article is an attempt to persuade game developers to go with a shotgun approach to their own distribution and avoid signing in exclusively with Steam. The fine points (reasons) why monopolies are very bad for the industry become excellent warnings after the article is read in this fashion. Developers happen to hold the keys to the industry as much as customers—if they all go with Steam and won’t support other channels of distribution to spread it
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Jelly-baby anyone? Dr Who free downloadable games announced
First, we started seeing results about Doctor Who games on a Games Blog on the Guardian. And here’s what we found:
The BBC has announced that it’ll be releasing four Doctor Who Adventure Games to tie in with the latest series of the hit sci-fi show. Mac and PC owners will be able to download each episode from the Doctor Who website, starting in June.
Following through we wandered our way into the BBC article “Doctor Who: The Adventure Games” and then, suddenly, amazement flooded.
Now this should catch our attention.
These four new adventures will take the form of free downloadable computer games available for PC and Mac, in which players assume control of the Doctor and Amy as they embark on new adventures which complement the new TV series.
Doctor
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Cute ideas: RPG styling for text book learning
Us voces can translate a little Nipponese but not quite enough to read the article behind this blog’s post—but the story still intrigues us.
It looks like Namco Bandai—a company that we love simply from all the enjoyment they’ve brought us—is looking into educating children using a translation from the digital world of video games into the analog world of textbooks.
It sounds like Namco Bandai is layering a choose-your-own adventure into the basic work/textbooks most students use in elementary school. Students follow an RPG storyline by, say, solving math problems and each right answer nets them a key. Scoring enough keys wins the student some kind of prize — but it’s not clear if the prize is contained within the book or something physical the teacher distributes. It could be pretty entertaining edutainment if it’s not too easy to cheat the game like you
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Video games as crime inhibitors, redux
Long has been the road of shrill, concerned citizens claiming that video games are the root of all evil—as with the long history of bad moral panics about new media from comic books to the invention of the novel—and like the past they’re starting to fall short of irrational. An article posted at the Economix blog of the New York Times suggests that an economist suspects that the drop in crime may correlate to video game usage.
A new claim, especially on the heels of discovering that video game usage does not correlate with crime statistics rising—primarily because violent crime rates have been dropping and video game usage is rising. Of course, as any good friends of us voces correlation does not imply causation, but a lack of correlation does have a tendency to point squarely away from it.
Lawrence Katz, a labor economist, has
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Video games as painkillers
Us voces have certainly discovered that certain types of game playing can aid us with trying to get some much-needed rest while sick. Especially for dealing with certain types of pain – let’s say, for example, stomach cramps – the distraction has a particular placebo effect when it comes to setting pain aside.
Well, it looks like it may not actually simple placebo effect, new research seems to be showing actual analgesic effects!
When children and adults with acute and chronic pain become immersed in video game action, they receive some analgesic benefit, and pain researchers presenting at the American Pain Society’s annual scientific meeting reported that virtual reality is proving to be effective in reducing anxiety and acute pain caused by painful medical procedures and could be useful for treating chronic pain.
"Virtual reality produces
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Black colored Nintendo Wii to be released
Looks like we’ll be seeing an ebony colored Nintendo Wii console. Us voces, of course, have a black wiimote already (because we’re like that) but the Wii here happens to be the standard ivory.
Earlier in the month, Nintendo announced that they were going to start shipping black versions of the Nintendo Wii. What’s new? Not that much other than the color. It will though, be shipping with both of the Wii Sports games for users to enjoy. What’s in the box? Well included is the Wii console of course, nunchuk, and the controller. But, the new model will also include a Wii MotionPlus accessory along with the Wii Sports games. The price and what’s in the box deal will also be
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DIY Game console pad into USB keyboard mouse
A little bit of solder, ingenuity, and direction can go a long way for any geek. So when us voces stumbled across this fun little article, we figured that our readers would like to know about it. Here on Instructables, is a little set about how to make something really cool out of those old school controllers so that you can use them with your computer.
Whether playing video games with the keyboard just doesn’t do it for you, or you’re really trying to recreate that old game console feel, this is a mod sure to bring back memories from simpler times. You don’t need any super deep knowledge of electronics to pull this off, although be forewarned that there is a bit of soldering involved. Other than that, though, the project isn’t too difficult— it’s just a matter of connecting ribbon cable to each individual
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