Don’t Blame Me, I Voted For Grommash.

Aaahoo, Warlords of Draenor, aahooo… On top of all the other busy-ness of late, WOW’s latest expansion, Warlords of Draenor is now off and away as of last Tuesday, meaning more off hours shoring up the garrison and leveling my almost-nine-year-old rogue (and his army of alts) to all-new, rarefied three-digit heights. (I dinged 100 last night, with three more zones and lots more content to explore.) Aaahoo…

Ready Player One.

“Dig Dug, Berzerk, Frogger, Tetris, Donkey Kong, Street Fighter II — they are all there.” In the spirit of preservation, killing productivity, and saving me trips to, and quarters spent, at the Columbia Heights laundromat, the Internet Archive — keepers of the always useful Wayback Machine — now offers 900 old-school, browser-ready arcade games for your nostalgic pleasure. “Firefox [is] best optimized to run these free games.”

Obviously, You’re Not a Golfer.

“The rug is a moveable barrier which move backwards to reveal more of the rug as the shot is repeatedly hit. Unrolling the rug really pulls the room together and starts one of the modes featured below.”

Speaking of the brothers, it might be a really good time to kidnap yourself, dude: The Dutch Pinball team just made us all privy to the new sh*t at a launch party for their all-new, fully licensed, and very spiffy Big Lebowski pinball machine — available 2Q, 2015 for the ransom of 8500 simoleons (tho’ for your information, the Supreme Court has roundly rejected multi-ball.)

Here’s the official site. If I had ridiculous money/room to burn and were the sort to treat objects like women, man, I’d buy one in a heartbeat.

The Grandmasters.

“To you and me, going unbeaten and undrawn in five straight tournament games sounds impressive. But to chess aficionados, Caruana’s performance is nigh on miraculous. It’s frightfully difficult to straight-up stomp another top-10 international grandmaster…Yet Caruana wasn’t merely avoiding draws and losses. In the words of one commentator, he was ‘spanking’ his opponents.”

Need a new sport in these corrupt-NFL, steroid-ridden MLB times? (I myself have opted for EPL and MLS futbol.) Old friend Seth Stevenson makes the case for chess from the 2014 Sinquefield Cup in St. Louis, “one of the most emotional, dramatic, newsworthy chess events of the past 40 years…I encourage you to tune in for some of the championship series in Sochi…Perhaps you’ll get swept up in the beauty of this 1,500-year-old pastime. Start to learn a few openings. Maybe some defenses. Eventually yearn to execute a perfect smothered mate. It really is a seductive game.”

Gashlygame Over.

“Video game characters are always getting stabbed, burned, blasted, electrocuted, and crushed — when they aren’t falling to their dooms. So they’re perfect for this macabre poem in the style of Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies.” (Via io9).

You Win or You Restart/Discard.

Now here’s a Super Mario land that Bob Hoskins would’ve been more at home in — Game of Thrones, Mario-style.

Update: Now, Hyrule gets the same treatment.

Kill Me Again.

“Imagine Zelda and Link et al. being brutally, graphically murdered, over and over, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Now you’ve basically got it: The Souls games are like 50-hour playable Red Weddings in which you are the victim. These are, to put it mildly, games in which you die…The jokesters at From Software, the Tokyo company that makes Dark Souls, have put in the new game’s central hub an obelisk on which is written a constantly updating count of the global number of deaths. As of last Wednesday night, the count was 4.3 million. The game came out on Tuesday.”

At Buzzfeed, Joseph Bernstein sings the praises of the highly deadly Dark Souls games. “Basically, the Souls formula is to put a very difficult boss at a very far distance from a checkpoint with many difficult enemies in between who come back to life every time you save or die. It’s devious.” He spends entirely too much of the piece fretting about gaming’s respectability, and I think he oversells the uniqueness of the Dark Souls franchise, but still worth a read nonetheless.

Be the Batman.

This still ain’t no place for no hero: The Scarecrow threatens Gotham, and Bruce Wayne gets a spiffy new Batmobile, as Rocksteady Games announces Arkham Knight, the fourth and final installment in the excellent Arkham series, now enhanced with XBox-One-level graphics. There goes another fifty hours.

For Want of a Checkmark…

“The Battle of B-R5RB was the largest and bloodiest in the history of warfare. More than 20 million soldiers were killed and more than 600 warships — some of them kilometers long and capable of destroying lesser vessels with a single shot — destroyed in a battle that raged for 22 hours…[But] The biggest battle in the history of forever started with a clerical error.”

By way of Dangerous Meta, it has happened again. Wired‘s Bo Moore explains the tactical snafu that precipitated the costly Battle of B-R5RB in Eve Online last month. “Though it was just a game, the 7,548 people who fought the Battle of B-R could not have taken it any more seriously — and not simply because they lost virtual ships worth more than $300,000 in real-world money fighting it.”

For Want of an Eggplant.

“To watch Rex play Spelunky is to watch someone who has spent hundreds of hours — entire days — with the game, training his muscle memory, familiarizing himself with every possible situation, memorizing Spelunky arcana and honing techniques. Yes, he’s naturally gifted, but his talents are clearly bolstered by a colossal amount of experience. If anyone were going to pull off a solo Eggplant run, it was going to be Bananasaurus Rex.”

By way of longtime reader Jared Dunn, Polygon‘s Douglas Wilson tells the story of a successful solo eggplant run in Spelunky, 30-For-30 style. “[T]o someone who’s played Spelunky, those times aren’t just impressive — they’re superhuman. They’re like the four-minute mile of video games. And watching Rex use the Teleporter, one of the game’s most lethal tools, is like watching Michael Jordan play basketball with a bomb, successfully.”

I’ve never actually played, or even heard of, Spelunky until this article, but thought this was a fascinating deep-dive into one particular gaming subculture.