Real life video games

Spotted these excellent photos by Hamburg photographer Partrick Runte of video games brought to life and figured it was as good an excuse as any to update this old thing again.

This shot especially speaks to me, as it reminds me of Pac-Manhattan, “a large-scale urban game that utilizes the New York City grid to recreate the 1980’s video game sensation Pac-Man.”

Also, the figures in the Tetris photo (specifically the square and the L shape in the foreground) look like an 8-bit version of Romeo and Juliet, discovering that they fit together despite their differences, while their various-shaped family and friends look on.

All Animal Crossing, all the time

Yes, all I have been doing of late is playing Animal Crossing: City Folk. As soon as I get home, I check in on my little village, speak to the neighbors, pull weeds, and check the shops for new items.

Pandtown is a beautiful place to live, and you can bet your golden watering can that in a few months I’ll be gridding this sucker out to make it as perfect as possible.

For now, though, I’m concentrating on collecting – I’m working on fossils, fish, furniture sets (though I don’t have a favorite yet), hats, glasses and umbrellas. I found a very useful spreadsheet that was created for Wild World and am using Google Docs to tick off items, adding in City Folk inventory as I go along.

Perplex City pal Andrea Phillips wrote a very good article comparing village maintenance in Harvest Moon to grinding in World of Warcraft, and I thought it rang very true for my Animal Crossing experience as well. The grind is all there is, and it is so deeply satisfying to know that if you put in the time, you will get the rewards.

T-MINUS THREE DAYS

STOP THE PRESSES, PEOPLE! Animal Crossing: City Folk is out on Sunday!

I am so excited about this it requires the use of caps AND multiple exclamation points!!

Look out fossils…HERE I COME.

p.s. I have just discovered an official contest which asks players to dress their pets as AC characters. Whichever Nintendo employee thought this up deserves an award of their own: “Most Awesome.”

Da da da da DO DO DO

I was rather tickled earlier when a song from the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra’s Game Concert came on while I was listening to last.fm radio. And browsing those tracks is made even better by learning about the history of the Final Fantasy music from the Game Trailers FF retrospective.

Tonight I watched part 1 of 13. I have a soft spot for Final Fantasy – FF7 is the reason I bought my first console, the PS1, starting me down the long, dark path that’s ended at this blog – so the story of the game series’s origins and evolution is surprisingly fascinating.

Do games reflect life, or does life reflect games?

In the days following the Nov. 4 election for President of the United States, the internet exploded with more memes and lols than the human mind can fathom, many related to grinding, leveling and trophy hunting:

From WoW on Livejournal – read the comments for detail-oriented hilarity

This man, who is now keeping a blog and whose campaign posted election night photos to Flickr, truly appeals to today’s younger generations. I wonder what game systems the family and daughters will use in the White House?

Gamespotting – Wii in HBO’s True Blood

I always thought Bill Compton being into technology was a nice little quirk (he was into computers in the Sookie Stackhouse novels, and in one of the pre-air promotional videos, he asks the cameraman about the HD camera he’s using), and this scene from last Sunday’s episode was great. I was like, “Of COURSE Bill has a Wii.”

Finger food plates – literally

As regular readers of this blog know, I am a big fan of clever, purposeful items attached to rings. So you’ll understand that when I found these adorable finger food plates, it was love at first sight.

The next time you’re headed to a dinner party, pick up the Finger Food Plates! The handy little plate slips onto your finger like a ring, so you can hold your snack and glass in the same hand. How neat! Now your other hand is free for eating, shaking hands or general conversation. These Finger Food Plates come in a set of 10, and are certainly conversation starters. Each “plate” measures 3″ in diameter, and come in a 6″ x 2″ box.

I often gesture with my hands when I’m speaking, so these are perhaps not the most realistic item for me to purchase and use…but no one can deny that they are fantastic.

Cute, <30 min. Halloween point-and-click

What more could you want from a game like “Gatuno In Halloween”, by Federico Rutenberg?

“Gatuno” asks you to explore a two-room home/potion laboratory to discover the concoction that will help turn your cursed cat from stone to flesh.

The game is short and sweet, not too complicated, and has some charming translations from the original Spanish (though I’m not going to ask about what a “male stone” is or how one might acquire it).

It’s always satisfying to reach the end of a game but that pleasure doubles when you don’t have to refer to the walkthrough. I needed a tiny hint for something I’d overlooked but the whole game was smooth sailing. Ahhh.

Thanks to Mike J. for the link! In exchange, I offer you a link to the deliciously gruesome Corpse Craft, a combo of block-sorting, Tower defense and twisted anatomy class. My favorite part is the squishy sound effect.

An essential tool for the Roman tabletop gamer

For sale by Christie’s, the oldest 20d in the world (via).

Funnily enough, in high school I had a set just like this.

Lot Description

A ROMAN GLASS GAMING DIE
Circa 2nd Century A.D.
Deep blue-green in color, the large twenty-sided die incised with a distinct symbol on each of its faces
2 1/16 in. (5.2 cm.) wide

The lot notes describe it thus: “Several polyhedra in various materials with similar symbols are known from the Roman period. Modern scholarship has not yet established the game for which these dice were used.” I’d wager a guess, but I don’t know if the Romans believed in dragons and dwarves.

If Richard “Lord British” Garriott wasn’t fulfilling a lifelong fantasy by traveling into space, I’d think this would be right up his alley. Any other millionaire gamers out there?

Professor Layton and the Awesome Game

I just finished playing Professor Layton and the Mysterious Village (DS), and despite having taken fewer than 10 hours in total to complete, it’s firmly among the top of the list of my favorite games of all time.

Everything about it is frankly just great. The story, setting and tone are engaging – you play as the Professor and his assistant Luke, invited to a village to investigate the mystery surrounding a very strange inheritance. The game is set in a non-specific time period, and Layton might as well be Sherlock Holmes (he even has a funny tall hat) except that there are cars around.

The music sets a great mood, too – one of my favorite tunes can be heard here (YouTube link).

I even like the way the puzzles are integrated. The characters just dig puzzles and want you to help them solve a few stumpers, for the most part…but perhaps there’s more to this odd habit than meets the eye. At any rate, it’s a change from other puzzle games I love (like the Monkey Island series), where you find yourself “putting different fluids in balloons so you can put them in a mail tube so you can flood a communications room so you can etcetera.” [1]

The puzzles were frequently challenging, often trick questions, and two or three times involved geometry, the answers for which I caved and googled. (Length of a side of a triangle, my foot!) Plus the illustrations are hella cute! [2]

Anyway, I finished the game so quickly because I couldn’t get enough of it, and by the end I was wishing there was more. Luckily while searching YouTube for videos of the cutscenes I found that Layton is part one of a THREE part series (not two as I’d heard before).

I do wish they would make a full length anime film or series out of these characters, though. It could be the new and improved Detective Conan/Case Closed.