This is a playthrough of a Metal Gear Solid-themed adventure game in HyperCard, made by William Greenawalt in high school.
Man, I miss doing shit like this in HyperCard.
Every single second of every single minute of every single day of my entire life.
The iPad 2 version of Machinarium was released today. Here’s the trailer.
If you haven’t played Machinarium yet, you’ve missed on an incredibly beautiful game, one of my favorite games of 2009. If you have played it and you have an iPad 2, buy it again!
The Secret History of Donkey Kong
Travis Fahs of The Next Level put together a nice piece for Gamasutra on Nintendo’s subcontracting of the development of Donkey Kong to Ikegami Tsushinki and their subsequent copyright infringement battle.
What, you hadn’t heard about any of this before? Don’t blame you, I hadn’t either. This doesn’t appear to have been particularly known at all in countries outside Japan until quite recently. Japanese game writer Masumi Akagi wrote a book in 2005 titled Sore wa “Pong” kara Hajimatta which appears to be the definitive source on this. Fahs put together his piece with research from the book and GDRI.
Ikegami Tsushinki produced the initial shipment of boards, just as they had done for Radar Scope, but Donkey Kong was a huge hit and Nintendo needed more. Demand was so high in America that Arakawa began manufacturing new units in Nintendo of America’s warehouse.
But Nintendo didn’t actually own the manufacturing rights to Donkey Kong. Although their game was still a Nintendo product, and the characters, name, and brand all belonged to it, the development contract gave Ikegami Tsushinki the exclusive rights to manufacture and sell boards to Nintendo for ¥70,000 each. After the initial order of 8,000 units, Nintendo ceased to buy boards from Ikegami. Although the contract was unclear with regard to actual copyright of the program code — still new territory for the law — Ikegami was named as the sole supplier for Donkey Kong boards.
Nintendo didn’t see it that way. Before long, Nintendo had manufactured about 80,000 additional units without Ikegami’s involvement, burning the bridge with the company that had developed its biggest hit, and opening themselves up to a bitter legal battle that would drag on for almost a decade.
Joseph Rard also translated the relevant part of Akagi’s book on his blog.
Spend a few minutes of your day playing Untris by increpare (Stephen Lavelle).
Given a chance to play games, Nevada prison inmates use PlayStations to watch porn
Associated Press:
Corrections officials at Nevada State Prison have pulled the plug on a pilot program allowing inmates to use PlayStations at Nevada State Prison after inmates were caught using them to watch pornographic movies.
…
Prison spokesman Steve Suwe said inmates were allowed to buy the PlayStation II units along with games rated “E” for everybody. No violent games or those with sexual situations and nothing above PG-13 were permitted.
“The problem is the PlayStation II can play DVDs,” Suwe said.
I don’t think anyone could have possibly predicted this outcome.
So far, 18 inmates have sued in Carson City’s small-claims court, demanded to be reimbursed for their costs.
They accuse the prison, Warden Greg Smith and Cox of “wrongful confiscation of authorized, approved personal property.”
“I want full reimbursement for what I paid through the canteen, a total of $601.16,” wrote inmate Albert Dawson in his claim petition.
Oh dear.
Some crazy sonsabitches are porting the N64 GoldenEye 007 to the N64 Perfect Dark’s engine. Yes, they’re basically inserting a N64 game’s content into another N64 game.
Why would they do this? I’ll let Wreck of the project explain:
The end goal is to take everything from GoldenEye and put it into Perfect Dark. Why, you ask? Because the Perfect Dark engine is an enhanced version of GE’s. Many new things are possible running on this engine.
Combat Simulator offers players a chance to play what would normally be considered multiplayer mode all by themselves – against computer controlled opponents. New scenarios are available, such as: King of the Hill, Capture the Flag, Hacker Central and Pop a Cap. PD even allows for better customization of player settings. Characters can also have heads swapped, so nothing can prevent you from using the Terrorist’s head on Boris’ body. If all of the excellent features that the Combat Simulator has to offer isn’t enough, think about some of the great upgrades that could be made to missions…
Weather elements, suns and moons, interactive lighting, guards who can see through and over railings, character speech and voice overs, and many others. Want to play with a friend? No problem! Both Co-operative and Counter-Operative modes are accessible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u59dVe67eFc
Here’s a, uh, what I guess is a ROM hack of Super Mario Bros. So from a literal standpoint, I do in fact know what the fuck I’m watching. But still, what the fuck am I watching.
This is a screenshot from an early development version of LucasArts’s excellent adventure game The Dig. ATMachine of Adventure Gamers has collected a huge amount of pictures showing development of the game under Noah Falstein and Brian Moriarty and later under Sean Clark, as well as a textual description of the path the game took to release. All three of these pages are must-reads if you’ve played the game, and if you haven’t, you should go do that too.
New Spider-Man trailer looks really familiar
Can’t quite place where I’ve seen it before though.