John Paul Titlow of ReadWrite has a compelling idea.
Nintendo should stop being a bunch of fuddy-duddies and make its NES and SNES games available for smartphones.
Author Archive
Distraction: Slate’s ‘Great Gatsby’ mini-game
Check it out here. It could very well be The Old Man and the Sea, with all the paddling and what not.
And when you die, this happens:
The full quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 classic is “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
I couldn’t “attain the American dream” despite a lot of loud keyboard banging. But if you do, let me know what happens when you reach the green light.
Game On 2.0: A link to the past
More than 60 years of gaming history is available for sampling at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto.
Game On 2.0 — a hands-on exhibit — features more than 150 playable console, PC and arcade games.
Dad hacks Donkey Kong so daughter can save Mario
Game developer Mike Mika’s daughter Pauline had played the NES classic Super Mario Bros. 2 as the Princess, so she had assumed that would be an option in Donkey Kong, he says. (Fine choice, young Pauline — Toad and the Princess are the only playable characters.)
Blind gaming — the ultimate difficulty setting
A visually impaired gamer is calling on the industry to make games more accessible.
Not that his disability has stopped Ben Breen, 19, who says he can consistently beat his sighted friends at Rock Band.
But how does a guy blind from birth — he was born four months premature — even play?
Fair game? Investigating a real kidnapping
As we learned from B.C.’s provincial budget simulator, games are popping up in unexpected places all the time. And last week, the boundary between news and gaming was blurred by CBC’s: Kidnapped: The Search for Graham McMynn.
It’s a Flash-based game where you gather clues in a police probe of a missing young man. It looks, well, flashy, and it’s kind of fun, but what makes it noteworthy is the fact that Graham McMynn is a real dude. He was kidnapped in 2006 and spent eight days in the hands of captors in Vancouver, and the game is based on evidence from the case.
According to a 2008 Canadian Press article, McMynn was “stripped, bound with plastic zip ties, blindfolded with duct tape, threatened with rape and dismemberment and feeling a pistol put to his head.”
At that time, his father said his son might never get past it. (McMynn describes his ordeal in detail here).
The game is part of an interactive package CBC put together for a season finale episode of The Fifth Estate, which aired Friday.
But is the game a cutting-edge experiment in news entertainment or is it a trivialization of one man’s horrific ordeal and his family’s suffering? What’s next – Russell Williams RPG? Or is this any different than the many film adaptations of major crime stories?
But while games have had a long history of challenging ethics and taste, at least Leisure Suit Larry wasn’t based on a true story.
‘Mega band’ upstages Dr. Wily
These days NES cover bands on YouTube are as ubiquitous as Duck Hunt guns at Value Village, but this video is a must-watch.
Bit Brigade performs all of the critically-acclaimed Mega Man 2 soundtrack on stage while one member does a speedrun of the game in about 40 minutes.
The performance – behind the instruments as well as the controller – is pretty serious stuff.
In their own words:
Bit Brigade elevates game music to its proper place in the foreground of epic technical rock and plays the games like they don’t need the extra lives. Which, for the record, they don’t.
And with the crowd demanding high fives, screaming and chanting “holy s–t,” dare I say the whole thing plays out like a sort of unintentional “It Gets Better” video for nerds. (I found it quite inspirational, anyway.)
When you’re done, check out their Ninja Gaiden set from August.
