Some cherry-picked stuff from tech/games sites this week to save Slog’s lazier geeks the trouble:

* Closure is the best free Flash game of the week. Hand-drawn white-on-black look with a clever gimmick—the world around you only exists if it’s lit up. Try it. (ht Joystiq)

* There is a college course at UC Berkeley dedicated entirely to the art of competitive Starcraft. A student in the class is blogging about it:

40% of the final grade comes from the final project where students must attempt to make a new contribution to the StarCraft community in the form of an analysis of some part of the game. These final papers will be public and subject to peer review—no doubt incredibly merciless peer review, given the tone of most gaming communities.

See, it’s not “flaming” when someone calls you an “Xbox fanboy faggot” on the Internet. It’s peer review.

* The dude who made Braid recommends ten video games that you’ll typically never see on a top-ten list. Some of them are free. All of them are strange (except for Ultima 4, the first RPG that actually took the words “role-playing” seriously).

If there had been a #11, I would’ve hoped for Bolo—arguably the first-ever network-multiplayer PC game. I attended a school whose computer lab had this thing networked for the nerds to play while they skipped lunch. Way better than sitting at the teacher table in the cafeteria.

* New-ish MMO Warhammer Online announced that it’ll soon pump out big chunks of free content for the people who are still playing it. Having heard this news, I logged on—my account is apparently still active—and noticed the “massively multiplayer” portion of this game is missing. Shame. When WAR debuted, I could barely play the game thanks to graphics bugs; now that the thing runs smoothly, I have nobody to enjoy it with. Hell, I can find more players on Tabula Rasa, and that MMO’s shutting down for good in three weeks.

* Generic preview videos: The February expansion to Grand Theft Auto 4, the Final Fantasy sequel coming out in 2010. Yawn.

* Better preview video: A base-jumping simulator called, no fooling, “AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!”

* And in Microsoft blunder news, the PC version of Gears of War stopped working on January 28th. Wait, what? Is 2009 a leap year, too?

10 replies on “Game News/Blog Roundup”

  2. I still have to restart GTA4 after every mission. I am still stuck at 13%. Play for 15 minutes, reboot, play for 5 minutes, reboot, play for 10, fuck this I’m playing Rock Band 2.

  3. That basejumping game looks like it could be awesome. It makes me miss Pilotwings. When is Wii Pilotwings (or whatever they’re calling it) going to come out?

  4. what massive lay-offs ? that info has been publicly denied by the vp of mythic many many times. ea had some lay offs across all the studios but hardly massive. having that said, the reason why you cant find anyone is because you’re probably in tier1 or 2 and everyone is in T4 already.

    and probably because you’re not in a good guild where people actually play with each other. blame yourself for having no friends

  6. @4: Your best defense for the game is to attack his social skills?

    WAR biggest problem is it’s main selling point: you can level up while doing pvp. You can queue for pvp anywhere. The pve interface is clunky and all the quests are boring fetch quests, so pvp is the logical way to level up as well.

    Sadly, the pvp feels like Team Fortress in it’s execution, but with static rewards. I could play WAR for 100+ hours and get to the content where the bulk of the population is at, or I could just pop in TF2 and get the same experience in 15 minutes, then go find something else to do.

  7. @4 for the win.

    Just because your guild sucks doesn’t mean the game sucks – it means your guild is steeped in suckiness and needs to be taken out back and put out of its misery.

    Suck it up and find a decent guild and quit whining.

  8. BOLO!!

    Everyday during lunch in K-8 school, about 2 dozen of us would play that game on Macintosh LCs… Every other day the computer lab teacher would come in and bust anyone that hadn’t done some kind of “lab chore” to earn the right to play games during lunch, which was usually the majority of us. We’d stop the game, apologize profusely, make future lab chore commitments, beg for forgiveness and do it all over again the next day.

    w00t! good times.

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