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Nice Ms. Pac-Man Glitch
I’m a big Ms. Pac-Man fan. I even ran the East Bay’s largest Ms. Pac-Man tournament of all time last December (I think about 7 people showed up). I really enjoy glitched Ms. Pac-Mans too. Hegenburger on Hegenberger in Oakland has a nice Ms. Pac-Man with no power pellets. You can’t clear a board, but just running from the ghosts on level one is pretty fun. (It’s actually one of the hacked Ms. Pac-Mans, which is also glitched — a 2fer!)
This weekend after the SF Zine Fest, we hid from the fog at a bar in the inner Sunset that had a nice glitch — all the sprites were rendered as solid colored blocks. I desperately tried to get to the Jr. Intermission to see that, but I was kind of in a hurry and rushing and I didn’t make it. In addition to all the sprites being blocks, you couldn’t see the bottom of the maze, which was a nice challenge modifier. Eric Eberhardt managed to grab some video of me playing so you can see the glitching in action!
INCREDIBLY STRANGE GAMES will be at the SF ZineFest this weekend. You should be too, if you like fanzines, DIY efforts, good art, comics, or anything else remotely interesting or cool. I didn’t get an exhibit space because I thought I was going to Pax, but you can get a limited-edition, no-color version of ISG #1 there if you run into me!
For more details go to this link: www.sfzinefest.com
Awesome Hats
Any rhythm action game that features anthropomorphic drums is OK with me, but I was reminded on Namco’s fetish for character hats while trolling www.pictureisunrelated.com, when these Taiko Drum Master hats burst back into my consciousness . Sadly, the only US source for these hats (and the likely source of this image), NCSX, has been sold out since, basically, forever.
Luckily, you can still pick up a Pac-Man hat via Club Namco’s website.
PQ: Web Edition has a nice XP backdrop
My Progress after ~3 hours
My Progress after ~6 hours. Huge stats!
PROGRESS QUEST
created by: Grumdig
platforms: PC, Web, Linux or something
Take everything important about fantasy RPGs, distill it down to its essence, and you have Progress Quest, a fire-and-forget RPG in which you kill monsters, complete quests, level-up, earn items and gold, sell items, buy new equipment and generally progress, all without ever having to do anything other than start the executable.
Watching your quests happen and your experience points and levels accumulate is about 110% more fun than having to do a lot of needless clicking to see the same thing happen in WoW or Ultima, and the game retains an intentionally old-school look. The web version even comes with a helpful default XP backdrop to lend to the nostalgic experience.
Needless to say, there is a very active guild and forum community, as well as a good deal of fan fiction written about the game’s world(s). I was an early player of PQ, and for a while I was in the Top 100 on the Knoram server. While a PC crash stopped my Progress, I still visit fairly frequently. I’ve considered getting back into it, but PQ is a demanding game — the leaderboard page doesn’t auto-refresh — so I’m on the sidelines these days, although I try to stay current with the forums.
With detailed stat and leaderboard tracking, and one of the best FAQs online, ProgressQuest is, like most online RPGs, well worth a few hundred hours of your time.
Play free here: www.progressquest.com
woo ooh...
this is the world you save
this is the line you need to duplicate
this gets a caption so it's not lonely
Via Frank “1up” Cifaldi comes news of one of the strangest license tie-ins yet. Just in time for the 25th anniversary of Katrina and the Waves seminal pop hit “Walking on Sunshine” is the Walking on Sunshine app. The game itself is pretty neat — based on repeating line patterns through grids of clouds. If you’ve ever noticed the patterns that on the dial pad from phone numbers (my favorite number of all time: 642-3125), this is the game for you! You can buy it at the iPhone app store for $1 or try it free here: http://primarywavegames.com.
A few years ago a friend and I were walking in the Mission district when we discovered what looked like a page from a Choose Your Own Adventure stenciled on the sidewalk. It was — an amazing location-based interactive narrative that told (maybe) a love story. The prose was a little purple for my low-brow tastes, but it was such an stunning effort that it really captured your imagination, and had you running all over the city trying to find the beginning, and then the end! You really needed to be at the locations to get the maximum effect of the story, and it’s all gone now (as far as I know), but some of the tiles are preserved on Flickr.
Nothing goes with Klax like a Mild 7
Helpful anti-drug message on the side
It is the 90s and there is time for Klax
Presented for your consideration, what may be the strangest videogame schwag of all time. Genuine, sealed, KLAX-brand cigarettes. Passed to me by Dave Akers, creator of Klax, these re-badged Mild 7s were given out at a Japanese arcade show. Klax was created in the “Winners Don’t Use Drugs” era of arcade games, and these cigarettes have a helpful anti-drug message as well, right where the pesky warning label would be on a pack of US smokes!
Got a stranger tchotke? Lemme know about it!
Strange Sonic flyers were plastered all over the seaside California resort town of Cambria last weekend. I think this one was posted on some public restrooms in a parking lot. Kind of awesome to see videogame culture percolating everywhere you look. You know that pizza party would have been killer to attend!
Strange E3
Honestly as E3s go, there weren’t many strange occurrences, although there was a four-fanzine convergence one night when me, Mathew Kumar (.exp), Frank Cifaldi (Lost Levels) and Raina Lee (1up zine) were all at the same bar, so that was cool — maybe 80% of the entire world population of people still making videogame fanzines in one place! (The new .exp is unspeakably great, by the way, with a faux old-school EGM review of Other Ocean’s faux old-school DSi game Dark Void Zero.)
One of the things I love about the game industry is it puts people in situations that have probably never existed before in nature. I’m pretty sure thumbing through a tourist Japanese phrase book desperately trying to figure out how to convey the sentiment “the dinosaurs are placeholder” is a singularly unique moment in human existence, for instance.
Likewise, if five years ago you had told the gentleman below that he’d find himself in 2010 wearing a tie in 100 degree heat while carefully positioning a spray-painted plastic guitar on top of a steaming, foam-rubber, crystal-encrusted asteroid…
Rock of the Dead was one of the strangest games at the show. An homage to Sega’s Typing of the Dead, it pits you and your Guitar Hero guitar against a horde of zombies. You’ve got to pull off riffs to destroy zombies (who grow crystals out of their bodies, of course). The game is voiced by Neil Patrick Harris and his Dr. Horrible co-star Felicia Day, and the design is as campy as allowed by California law.
Normally I’m not a huge fan of “intentionally weird” games, but Rock of the Dead has a good heart. It’s fun to play, and the team was so into it that it’s hard not be excited, even though the noise level on the outdoor concourse where the game was demoed meant it had to be played by sight only, as the TVs were totally inaudible. Even their models seemed nice and into the game! Plus, I mean… using a plastic guitar to kill crystal bedecked zombies? What’s not to love?
To me as a gamer, Ubisoft owned E3. They had the best attract videos (by like three orders of magnitude), the highest quality jumbotron hardware (including picture-in-picture live footage during world cup games) the most slick press conference, and some of the best games. They also upped the Strange quotient with Battle Tag. In the midst of a press conference filled with the latest Kinect games, Assassin’s Creed, Child of Eden, Ubi suddenly busted out with Battle Tag, a real world laser-tag game that’s enhanced by your PC (which acts as the score-keeper) and real-world virtual objects like a plastic box that gives you more “laser ammo” when you touch it to your gun. On the one hand, it was Ubi’s debutante as a serious toy hardware company. On the other hand, it was a totally strange, mind-bending interlude to an otherwise videogame-focused event.
Try to be less pathetic than last time!
I never saw the strangest game I heard about at E3. One guy, one night, was like “Dude! I saw the strangest game, it was insane!” It was “some Kentia Hall thing,” but the best location I could get was that it was “behind the Microsoft booth sorta.” I never found the booth with the game (and I think now it may have been some looping animation from a Hong Kong licensing fair), but I spent a good couple hours trolling the edges of South Hall looking for it.
That’s where I found the strangest game of the show, hands down. My new love, Cube Shooter. I’m obsessed with games that use LEDs only to interact with players — Mattel Football, Namco’s Flamin’ Finger, the Entex M.A.C. Mini computer, the Gakken GMC-4 — so to discover a new LED game made me really happy. (For more on LED games, uh… watch this space!) Anyway, back to Cube Shooter.
Cube Shooter is a totally insane 10 x 10 matrix of squares, each with a kawaii animal line drawing on it, and a 3-color LED behind it. Squares light up and you shoot them with a realistic looking gun. Simple and even more strange in person than it is on the sell sheet below, Cube Shooter ruled. First, it was HUGE. Second, it was unspeakably low-tech. Third it appears to have a needlessly complicated rule set. And finally… the sell sheet. The sell sheet, jammed into my hands by a friendly but non-verbal, suit-clad man, makes me love Cube Shooter more than I can possibly say.
There’s no pricing, and there’s nothing on ZeroPlus’s website that even hints at its existence (the site is very focused on electronics testing hardware). Is it just some crazy non-commercial project to demonstrate their Accurate Position Technology Sole Patent and OEM light-gun hardware? It’s a mystery, and that makes Cube Shooter even more enticing.
