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Posts Tagged “

Videogames

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space chimps

Space Chimps Kick Your Ass, Over and Over

If you're getting amped for simians to go into the black, then you're going to freak out over the new images and trailer we've got for the Space Chimps videogame. You play one of the heroic space chimps, zooming across the galaxy and kicking ass for all monkeykind. Click through for the action-packed trailer. More »

6:57 PM on Tue Jun 24 2008
By Annalee Newitz
791 views, 8 comments

Latest by n/a: video doesn't seem to play very good. more »

cool and crap awards

Cool and Crap Awards of the Week

At least two things happened last week in the worlds of science fiction and science. One was cool and the other was crap.

Coolest way to generate new technologies for colonizing the solar system while also demonstrating once again that China and India represent the future of the world: Last week, India's Chief of Army Staff, General Deepak Kapoor, announced that his country would be entering into a kind of space race with China. Though Indian officials had already talked about sending a crewed mission to the moon by 2020, the nation has deployed very few satellites and has never sent a person into orbit. Increasing tensions with China, plus the show of force represented by China shooting down one of its own satellites last year (see picture), has apparently kicked the Indian space program into high gear. Though it's hard to be thrilled about the idea that India and China might be ramping up to a cold war situation, there's no denying that there's nothing like a good defense budget to make gains in space. If we're lucky, the space race between the two great emerging techno-powers of the twenty-first century will have the unintended side-effect of helping ordinary people of the future gain access to planet-colonizing technologies and space-going vehicles. Click through for the crap.

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2:49 PM on Sat Jun 21 2008
By Annalee Newitz
3,435 views, 14 comments

Latest by twophrasebark: I am very concerned about India's space penis project. more »

spore

Spore's Creature Creator Lets You Seed the Galaxy with Life

Spore, the upcoming 6+-years-in-the-making project from Will Wright (Sim City, The Sims, and Sim everything else) is releasing its fabulous alien species design tool, the Creator Creator today as a free download. Spore is Sim-Rise-of-Intelligent-Life-In-The-Galaxy, and it is a fountain of scifi awesomeness. I've followed Spore’s development for a long time, and feel licensed to talk about what I’ve seen and speculate irresponsibly about what I haven’t. (I should disclose at this point that periodically I work as a freelance game designer for Electronic Arts, which owns Maxis, which makes Spore.) More »

8:00 AM on Tue Jun 17 2008
By Austin Grossman
4,783 views, 42 comments

Latest by n/a: Damnit! That's what I get for posting before giving it a good read... that email says you get $10 off "merchandise" (Spore t-shirts and such)when you pre-order Spore, not $10 off of the price of Spore when you order the more »

apocalypse

Post-Apocalyptic Videogames that Real-Life Terrorists Play

Here you can see some gorgeous concept art of a post-apocalyptic Washington, DC, recently released by the company making much-anticipated videogame Fallout 3. The art was so cool that it went viral in a way its creators never intended: It started showing up on Al Qaeda message boards as what you might call aspirational imagery. SITE Intelligence Group, a private company working with the US government, found the image on a password-protected board for terrorist wannabes. More »

10:05 AM on Mon Jun 2 2008
By Annalee Newitz
3,754 views, 32 comments

Latest by n/a: Fallout 3? When is this coming out? Why does Al-Qaeda know about Fallout 3 before me?? more »

pmog

You Are Already in a Game. Right Now.

My favorite new mind-bending idea is an extension for Firefox released today by brainy game designers Merci Grace and Justin Hall. It's called PMOG, for passively multiplayer online game, and it turns the entire web into a fantasy world where you can go on quests. Like all cool art, PMOG makes apparent something that you knew unconsciously for a long time. Browsing the web is just a game. Gathering knowledge is a game. Finding cool new pieces of information by reading is a game. PMOG just makes those games literal, by letting you earn points for web surfing — erm, questing. And io9 is part of that quest! More »

2:39 PM on Mon May 12 2008
By Annalee Newitz
4,935 views, 39 comments

Latest by n/a: I just thought about if a friend saw the toolbar at the bottom of my FireFox window and me saying, 'ah, yes, they worked out a way to make the Internet even geekier'. more »

dead space

What If You Ripped a Planet Apart and Something Was Inside?

Electronic Arts has a new game coming out for Halloween called Dead Space whose backstory sounds as good as any scifi book. On an Earth with scant natural resources, mining companies go to remote planets, and rip them apart for any and all natural resources. The problem is that one mission has discovered that something isn't too happy about its planet being ripped apart. We've got exclusive video, below, of some of Dead Space's developers talking about creating the backstory for the game. More »

11:52 AM on Wed Apr 30 2008
By Annalee Newitz
6,175 views, 40 comments

Latest by n/a: @tamoko: Hell yeah it's got that vibe. Especially when you see the artwork of a medical bay with nothing but blood splattered around it, or when there are corpsey monsters randomly showing-up around every corner in a dark spaceship. WTF more »

milliways

Secret History of Infocom's Never-Released "Restaurant at the End of the Universe" Game

One of the coolest text adventure games of the 1980s was Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, based on Douglas Adams' bestselling novel of the same name. Though the game was wildly popular, and a sequel to it was rumored repeatedly, nobody has ever known exactly what happened to that sequel. Until now. Andy Baio, the investigative journo-technologist at Waxy, has received a mysterious network drive from which he recovered all the notes, plans, emails, and information about what Infocom was going to do with the sequel that would have been called Milliways. And he's published it for all to see. More »

3:16 PM on Fri Apr 18 2008
By Annalee Newitz
2,681 views, 13 comments

Latest by n/a: @Liz Henry: True enough, and much of the non-linear game design of current RPGs, contemporary games and even quests in MMOs owe a nod to Infocom games and the old choose your own adventure novels. Sure what was once done with text more »

found footage

Dennis Hopper with a Deevolution Machine -- What Could Go Wrong?

The curse of videogame movies goes far beyond the horror of Uwe "Bloodreign" Boll's oeuvre. The Super Mario Bros. movie, made in the early 1990s and starring the most unlikely Bros ever: Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo. The filmmakers took a lot of liberties in adapting the videogame, creating a parallel Earth where dinosaurs evolved into intelligent beings but resources are scarce, germs are rampant, and King Koopa (Dennis Hopper) controls everybody with his de-evolution machine. This is a great clip of the machine in action. More »

5:10 PM on Tue Apr 15 2008
By Annalee Newitz
2,684 views, 45 comments

Latest by n/a: Guess i'm just too old to unerstand why ANYONE would like thismovie..but then again you all probably think "JACKASS, The Movies " is Great entertainment..go figure.. more »

found footage

Getting a Spinal Implant in a Gas Station Just to Play a Videogame

The movie eXistenZ is many things: a commentary on videogame madness, a chance to see Jennifer Jason Leigh caress a nipple-covered biological game controller, and a seriously weird "what is real" tale that doesn't always work. It's one of David "The Fly" Cronenberg's lesser films for a good reason. And yet there are moments in it that truly shine, such as this one when the squeamish Jude Law decides he needs to get a bioport — a game port in his spine — so he can jack into virtual reality and play Jennifer Jason Leigh's cool game called (what else?) eXistenZ. Unfortunately, he needs an untraceable gameport in the middle of the night, so he visits a local gas station to get one under the table. Who better than Willem Dafoe to shoot that sucker into his spine? [eXistenz]

7:16 PM on Fri Apr 11 2008
By Annalee Newitz
3,410 views, 43 comments

Latest by n/a: I have to weigh in with the 'loved it' camp, although it is in my second tier (with The Fly, Scanners & Dead Zone). The Matrix (3/99), eXistenZ (4/99) and The 13th Floor (5/99), now that was a good year for more »

dead space

Videogame Space Zombies Headed To Your TV

It's just like the good old days when you couldn't launch a new toy line without there being an attendant Saturday morning cartoon series. Electronic Arts has announced that fans of their upcoming new SF/horror game Dead Space will have an animated prequel to watch while flexing their fingers in anticipation. More »

8:00 AM on Mon Mar 24 2008
By Graeme McMillan
918 views, 1 comment

mass effect

New "Mass Effect" Aliens Are Jacking Your Asteroid

Addicts of the game Mass Effect, which focuses on the discovery of cool alien tech about 150 years from now, have no doubt been spending this week inside. They're huddled in front of their screens, playing the first downloadable addition to the game, "Bring Down The Sky," released earlier this week. The pack - available via the Xbox Live Marketplace - introduces players to an entirely new alien race, the Batarians, who clearly don't come in peace: They've hijacked an asteroid station and are about to crash it into a colony on a nearby planet. More »

7:30 AM on Fri Mar 14 2008
By Graeme McMillan
1,546 views, 16 comments

Latest by zenpoet: I love Mass Effect, though most of the time I feel I am playing KOTOR without the word Jedi, but that's beside the point. @Epaminondas: Thanks for the heads up on that. I will get the patch before I finish the more »

concept art

When Monsters Squirt

A monster from the scifi MMO Tabula Rasa has something worth squirting about. I'm pretty sure that's poison and not whatever you were thinking. In fact, squirty monsters are a regular staple of scifi — there were even squirting dinosaurs in dino-genetic engineering thriller Jurassic Park. So cut this squrty guy some slack. Tabula Rasa monster via UGO.

8:20 AM on Tue Mar 4 2008
By Annalee Newitz
1,024 views, 9 comments

Latest by cde: That alien monkey just slung poo at you! more »

futurism

Rise of the Passively Multiplayer Online Game

What if everything you did online was part of a game? A company named Gamelayers is built on the idea of a PMOG, Passively Multiplayer Online Game. The idea is that everything you do while surfing earns experience points, and the play experience seamless overlays your online life. I was struck by this idea of the internet as a connected ludoverse, so I talked to Merci Victoria Grace, Chief Creative Officer/Lead Game Designer of Gamelayers. The other principal is ur-blogger Justin Hall who, full disclosure, once put me up in his converted garage for three months. More »

1:13 PM on Tue Feb 26 2008
By Austin Grossman
2,746 views, 22 comments

Latest by FunkyJ: hehe... I'm playing PMOG right now and a mission led to this article... more »

weird psychology

World of Warcraft "Guild Therapy" On The Rise

A new kind of group psychology is emerging — guild psychology, which is much more concerned with fights over dragons skins than dealing with abandonment issues. Your fellow warriors and monster-smashers can feel supported and validated without using "I" statements. An expert in guild psychology says the groups should have quality time together on a night "when people can convene to get their gear enchanted, their gems cut, their swords made." She adds: More »

1:45 PM on Tue Oct 9 2007
By Annalee Newitz
140 views, Comment

the last starfighter

Must See: The Last Starfighter

Must-see movies are futuristic classics that shouldn't be missed. Of course, not every must-see is perfect. That's why we've rated them 1-5 on the patented "crunchy goodness" scale. Written by Sherilyn Connelly.

Title: The Last Starfighter
Date: 1984

Vitals: A bored teenager in a trailer gets the high score on a video game and is recruited into an actual space battle. (The original premise, in which he gets laid because of the high score, was rejected as too far-fetched.)




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2:15 PM on Tue Oct 2 2007
By Annalee Newitz
109 views, Comment

tron

Must See: Tron

Must-see movies are futuristic classics that shouldn't be missed. Of course, not every must-see is perfect. That's why we've rated them 1-5 on the patented "crunchy goodness" scale. Written by Sherilyn Connelly.

Title: Tron
Date: 1982

Vitals: A roguishly handsome computer genius (it's a fantasy, for sure), looking for evidence that his video game designs were kifed, gets zapped into a computer by an evil mainframe and has to play video games to survive. Irony! Programs physically resemble their programmers, and he shares a kiss with a program written by a woman he used to sleep with. Is that like kissing your ex-girlfriend's clone? Or daughter? Or...




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10:06 PM on Mon Oct 1 2007
By Annalee Newitz
86 views, Comment