So is the standard Rubik’s cube so easy that you’re bored with it? Can you solve it in 12.1 seconds?
Well, try your hand at a 4D Rubik’s cube.
Then, if your head hasn’t exploded, check out the 5D Rubik’s cube! From the site: “In the spirit of taking things too far, here is a fully functional 5-dimensional analog of Rubik’s cube.”
Sadly, 5 people have already solved the 5D cube. You can’t be first.
Curmudgeon Gamer shows a History of Console Prices, trying to show that in inflation adjusted terms, PS3 isn’t going to be so expensive.
But the price comparison between it and the XBox360, wow. And the XBox ain’t cheap either. I can buy a PC for that kind of money.
The guy that brought us a documentary on Bulletin Board Systems is now at work on documentary on text adventure games. I believe it’s going to be released under the Creative Commons license, and shot in stunning HiDef, those talking heads are going to look really nice. Adventure games are, apparently, known as interactive fiction. I never thought of it like that.
Ah, Zork. Is there anything you can’t teach us about ourselves? Not like that goddamned HHGTTG, with it’s prescriptive plotline – what a POS.
GameDevMap is a map, an index of the physical location of developers, publishers etc in the gaming industry. It’s fascinating that it’s happening all over the planet, in the oddest of places.
You may not have heard of Neil Raine… sadly neither did I until today. He died on Wednesday in a hang-gliding accident in Spain. His role in the geek world? He was a contributor to RISCOS, the operating system of the Acorn Archimedes range, the first consumer computer to use a RISC processor, way back in the late 80s.
He also contributed a number of games that BBC users might recall, including Hopper, Planetoid and one of my personal favourites, Magic Mushrooms, a platform game that allowed you to design your own levels.
Neil may not have been rich or famous, but geeks like him make an untold contribution to the world of computing. Here’s to you, Neil.
I’ve discovered that though Way Of The Rodent started publishing Jeff Minter’s auto-biographical history of Llamasoft, there’s actually more on the Llamasoft web site.
I’d thought I was good at Space Invaders until I met Chico. He was so good at Space Invaders that he could play it forever – it was no longer a challenge to him at all. So if he played the game at all he’d set himself some task that us mere mortals simply could not even begin to comprehend. Shooting all the Invaders was too simple. He’d time his shots so precisely that he could shoot individual Invaders out of the flock to eventually form his initials from the remaining attackers.
EFF highlights an Australian House Standing Committee report on the US DMCA, and whether or not it should be adopted wholesale by Australia under the Free Trade Agreement.
Meanwhile there’s an open letter to the OFLC about the banning in Australia of the grafitti video game Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure. (Mind you, Metacritic only gives it a 73/100 on XBox; 70 on PS2).
OPML 2.0 is out. Let’s hope it doesn’t break OPML 1 like RSS 2 broke RSS 0.9?
The Age on the retro games boom.
Pah, this sucks. After 64 years in Swanston Street, the Technical Bookshop in Melbourne has moved out to the boondocks of LaTrobe Street near Queen Street.
Obviously if you’re playing in MAME you can just press P to pause, but on a real Pacman arcade game, what do you do if you’re playing a mammoth game and you want to rest? Go just to the right and up from the starting position.
The ghosts won’t find you, you can rest for a while.
That’s certainly something I wish I’d known 20 years ago…
The XBox-360 is out in the States. Those of us in AU will have to wait until March to get it. A$499 for the non-HD version, or A$649 with it.
Meanwhile some sneaky people on eBay have been selling what appears at first glance to be an XBox 360, but upon closer examination is actually an email address on Hotmail/Yahoo mail. Pity the poor fools that have bid for them. (via Lex)
Okay, now why does an eBay AU listing have a “Report This Item” link, but the same auction on the US site doesn’t? Ah, turns out it’s being trialled in Australia, with the rest of the world hopefully getting it soon…ish.
When I was 17 or so (year 11, 1987), I had spurned my Commodore 64 in favour of a BBC B micro. At the end of year 11, some of the departing year 12s gave me the code to a little project they’d been working on: a clone of Ultima for the Beeb. It was really just the core of such a game: the display routine for moving about the map, obscuring objects out of view (such as behind walls), and showing monsters.
At a time when I should have been out pursuing girls, this caught my imagination (I’d played a LOT of Ultima in my time), so I took the code and expanded it. A friend who was into role playing games wrote a basic story for it. Another friend supplied some music for the title screen.
I re-wrote the main display routine in 6502 assembly language for speed, and added maps, extra characters to talk to, weapons and fighting. “Quest I: The Wrath of Mægenmund” (egads, it sounds like something out of Spinal Tap) wasn’t anything special, and was never finished, but it was pretty cool.
It ran in the Beeb’s graphics mode 4, so it was monochrome, 320×256 pixels, I think. It used a lot of loading in and out from the disk, with a main (outdoor) map, and lots of separate maps for dungeons, towns and villages. There was no sound to speak of, but there was a lot to explore. You could buy drinks from bartenders (to gain strength), talk to the villagers, buy weapons and supplies, then go out and fight monsters to get more treasure. The money was measured in pounds, shillings and pence, and the language and fonts of the characters and the interface was a wacky mix of olde English, gothic script and runes.
I kept working on it for a couple of years after high school (the Beeb saw me through part of university, until an IBM PC arrived in our house), but it fizzled out in 1990, when other interests overtook it.
That’s it, ladies and gentlemen, it’s over: the High Court has ruled that mod chips for video game consoles are legal. All six judges of the High Court held that widely used mod-chips are legal and that playing a game on a consumer’s machine does not constitute an illegal copy.
This effectively clarifies that using mods to get around regional coding is legal — something important to consumers of video games and with clear ramifications for DVDs.
Pirated games, of course, are illegal. But mod chips are a legitimate technology.
BBC: A film version of popular video game Halo is being made by two Hollywood studios, its developers have confirmed. (IMDB page for the movie.)
Let’s hope it’s a bit better than the usual standard of video game to movie conversions.
