Miss Cakehead writes, "This set of Zombie Swimming Pool Rules was comissioned from graphic designer Pictographik to promote the Resident Evil Revelations blood swimming pool, and was based on an the iconic traditional British swimming pool rules.
The pop up 'blood' filled swimming pool opens in London next week to mark the release of Resident Evil Revelations. In addition to its bloody appearance the swimming pool will offer floats in the form of human torsos, feature brains and intestines as lane markers, have Zombie lifeguards on duty and even offer a diving board in the form of a 'freshly killed human corpse'."
Noah Swartz writes, "Aaron Swartz was the 'answer' to the final 'question' in the 'Techie Dropouts' category on last night's episode of Jeopardy, preceded by other famous techie drop outs like Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg."
— Cory
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Sissyfight, the groundbreaking 1990s online game of playground politics, is to receive an open-source, crowdsourced remake: "We've gotten some “interesting” press about how the game delves into uncomfortable territory around bullying and sexist stereotypes, but we've always meant Sissyfight to be an intervention into the male-dominated culture of games," writes co-author Eric Zimmerman. It'll be a launch title on Venus Patrol's Indie Arcade; Sophie Prell at Penny Arcade and Leigh Alexander at Gamasutra take a look at how the game fits in a decade on.
This amazing retro-gamer wedding cake was made by Wedding Cakes By Nicole of Bunbury, Australia. The cake pays homage to many of the arcade greats:
I created a 3 tier square cake, with each of the sides representing a popular retro platform game. Topped off with a game off Pong, with the score depicting Stephen's "30" years. The board had a joystick, buttons and coin slot.
Pacman (my favourite), Donkey Kong, Frogger & Tetris
Papers, please is the latest from Lucas Pope, creator of unsettling developing world newspaper sim The Republica Times. A "dystopian document thriller", Papers simulates the pleasure of immigration inspection in a grim Soviet-style republic: "Among the throngs of immigrants and visitors looking for work are hidden smugglers, spies, and terrorists. Using only the documents provided by travelers and the Ministry of Admission's primitive inspect, search, and fingerprint systems you must decide who can enter Arstotzka and who will be turned away or arrested."
— Rob
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Just a heads up on a cool indie game in development right now. It's a village simulator called Banished, and it looks pretty neat. It hasn't been released yet, but I'm following its development pretty closely and almost certainly buying it when it comes out.
What's great is that the developer is doing a lot of detailed blog posts about how he's developing the game, and the decisions he's making re: pathfinding, features, etc. And there are some YouTube videos of gameplay that are making me very excited.
James sez, "The boys of Viva La Dirt League (a New Zealand boy-band parody group specialising in songs about Starcraft!) have just released this funny, awesome, video about the pleasures of buying indie games. I think their work deserves your viewing!"
I concur. This is what boy bands should all be about: cussing, indie game references, and fursuits.
The Humble Indie Bundle is back again, with the The Humble Double Fine Bundle: name your price for three DoubleFine games, pay more than the average and get a fourth, pay $35 or more and get backer access to the Broken Age Kickstarter, and at $70, you get a t-shirt, too! It's all DRM-free and cross platform (Win/Lin/Mac); as always, you can earmark some or all of your money to EFF and/or Child's Play, the bundle's two nominated charities.
An illustrator and games publisher have teamed up to kickstart "Adventure Maximus!", a streamlined, cards-and-dice RPG aimed at kids eight and up (though there's an endorsement from a six-year-old on the site). The gameplay looks pretty clever and I really like the art. It's a minimum $35 pledge to get a finished game, though you can get a PDF of it for a pledge of $15. They're looking to raise $12K for manufacturing, marketing, and administration.
Adventure MAXIMUS! is a card based, introductory Role Playing Game for players 8 years-of-age and up. Players can take on roles from eight different races. Working together as a famous "Adventure Company" based in the fantastic, post-apocalyptic world of Ex-Machina where they can become heroes of legend.
When there is trouble, or innocent people need protection from the fierce creatures that populate Ex-Machina, they call on Adventure Companies to save the day!
Adventure MAXIMUS! follows the classic role playing game format consisting of someone who runs the adventure (who we call a Maximus Master) and 2 or more players who interact with the adventure. Inexperienced Maximus Masters will find using our Adventure Creation System helpful when making their first adventure. Also, the role of Maximus Master can be taken over by a player in mid adventure so that everyone gets a chance to play!
Players will be asked to make heroic actions fueled by Action Points. Players receive a limited amount of Action Points each round, so they must be budgeted. The bigger the action, the greater the cost. Action Points replenish each round. Racial Abilities, Class Abilities, Action Powers, Spells and Items all have Action Point costs printed on their cards.
As with all Kickstarters, you should be aware that you may get nothing for your money, in the event that the creators of the project flake out or just totally underestimate the amount of money they'll need to meet their obligations.
Disunion is a guillotine simulator that uses the Oculus Rift VR headset to bring you a realistic experience of being beheaded (this experience is enhanced by a strategic neck-chop!). It was created in two days at the Exile game jam by Erkki Trummal,
André Berlemont and
Morten Brunbjerg, who clearly enjoy making people feel like they're had their heads lopped off just a little too much.
Over time, the rules governing classic role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons changed and took on a weight of their own. Role-playing elements sank into a mire of charts and tables and special abilities. This rules-heavy play really took hold when, in the late 1990s, publisher TSR was suffering financially. Wizards of the Coast, coasting on the sales of card game Magic: The Gathering, bought them out.
Not surprisingly, D&D—the way it was packaged and the way it was played—started to look a lot like Magic. The emphasis was heavy on combat, skills, and special feats. For many people D&D became more about creating quasi-Medieval superheroes than adventurers looking for the simple things like treasure, or a little boost in their archery ability.
Given a standard Tetris engine (which drops pieces in a pseudorandom order, has previews, and allows holding), this method will allow you to play Tetris forever. As always, the most fascinating thing about this is the specialized vocabulary used to describe the method:
Worst case bag distributions such as H?XX?X? and H?XXX?? deserve a special mention. The first piece 'H' denotes a piece which must be placed in Hold in order to follow the STZ loop procedure. Pieces from the LJO loop are denoted by '?', and the remaining pieces are denoted by 'X'. Using 3 previews and Hold, it is only possible to see the first 4 pieces of the bag before the second piece enters the screen. This means you only see H?XX, and only know the first piece of the LJO loop. Because H must be put in Hold, you are forced to make a decision without knowing the order of the rest of the LJO loop. If the O comes first, you can follow the procedure above without problems. The rest of the time you will run into complications like this:
I created a 3 tier square cake, with each of the sides representing a popular retro platform game. Topped off with a game off Pong, with the score depicting Stephen's "30" years. The board had a joystick, buttons and coin slot.
Pacman (my favourite), Donkey Kong, Frogger & Tetris
