A very happy birthday to my Dad, who turned 60 over this past weekend (and celebrated with some inter-clan Halo 2…the family that slays together stays together.)
Category: Gaming
Floyd, get the frelling board.
By way of Boing Boing, a collection of text-adventure responses to cursing. Should bring back some memories, even if Infocom is woefully underrepresented.
All Quiet on the Unggoy Front.
“More pointedly yet, the aliens refer to their defeat in the first game as ‘The Atrocity at Halo.’ Who wrote this thing, Noam Chomsky?” Slate‘s gaming writer Clive Thompson speculates on the political economy of Halo 2. I’m still traipsing about San Andreas at the moment (finished all storyline missions and only 65% complete), but, to no gamer’s surprise, I expect either this or Halflife 2 will be my next time-suck of choice.
Color of Knight.
By way of Usr/Bin/Girl, a chess program that draws what it’s thinking. (Not surprisingly, it still worked me.)
Gone ‘Til November.
“I’m not going to beat around the bush. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is the single best PlayStation 2 title I have ever played.” Six — SIX — times bigger than Vice City, and featuring an all-star vocal cast running from Samuel L. to Axl, it’s finally here. So I’m off to San Andreas in what moments of free time I have these days, and I don’t expect I shall return. In fact, I mean not to!
What happens in Venturas, stays in Venturas.
Rockstar updates its site for GTA: San Andreas (due out Tuesday) with a new trailer and an interactive map of Las Venturas (Las Vegas), the third of the game’s major cities. In case you missed them, Los Santos/LA and San Fierro/San Fran are also worth a gander.
The Sounds of San Andreas.
As GTA: San Andreas edges closer, the gang at Rockstar preview the ten in-game radio stations to be had this time around, and as expected the selections seem as deep and diverse as they were on Vice City. More info will be out Monday, but the artists featured so far (along with G’n’R and A Guy Called Gerald, which we already knew about) include James Brown (“Payback”), Slick Rick (“Children’s Story), Bel Biv Devoe (“Poison”), Rage Against the Machine (“Killing in the Name”), The Ohio Players (“Funky Worm”), Eddie Money (“Two Tickets to Paradise”), Max Romeo (“Chase the Devil”), Willie Nelson (“Crazy”), 2Pac (“I Don’t Give a F**k”), and Raze (“Break For Love”). Good driving music, that. Update: Rockstar reveals the official soundtrack listing, which includes a lot of the songs above, and extends many of the radio station previews to include tracks by Heart, Cypress Hill, Eric B & Rakim, and others.
Sim and Simulacra.
Two choice links courtesy of Tomb of Horrors: The Infocom Hitchhiker’s Guide game gets a 20th anniversary makeover, and a site emerges to preserve the correspondence between Dave Sim and Neil Gaiman.
Welcome to the Jungle.
“Cock-a-doodle-do, we’re a huge corporation. Cock-a-doodle-do, we can’t be stopped…” Rockstar continues its tantalizingly slow rollout of GTA: San Andreas with an interactive map of San Fierro (a.k.a. the Bay Area) and a spiffy new trailer (which reveals that G’n’R, at least, is on the game soundtrack.) As with Los Santos, the map is ripe for exploration. It already seems pretty clear this game is going to eat my life for a few weeks.
Paranoid Eyes.
In the trailer bin, Robin Williams edits memories for a living in the sci-fi thriller The Final Cut, while you (a.k.a. Carl Johnson) build a criminal empire in a first look at the much-awaited Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (and specifically the peril-filled city of Los Santos.) If you’re a GTA enthusiast, the interactive map is worth playing with.