All Hail the Physicists!

As in my previous post about the ArcAttack madmen, here is another lovely example of physicists (who are quite possibly a little mad – I mean this in the nicest possible way) taking something that would ordinarily have quite dull scientific properties and uses, and turning it into something highly entertaining. Tennis For Two is (depending on how you see it) either the first, second or possibly third computer game ever created, but it’s certainly the first to have the entirety of its gameplay and its visuals contained within the game and displayed electronically, and was created by physicist William Higinbotham in 1958.

William was working at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and observed that it was a tad dull for its visitors, so in his spare time he developed and built Tennis For Two with bits of equipment he had lying around. It featured an oscilloscope for a screen, was around the size of an old microwave oven, and had two handheld controllers with two functions – a push button to hit the ball, and an analog dial to adjust the ball’s trajectory. Hundreds queued up to play this infuriatingly addictive game and loved the game’s surprisingly realistic physics – even balls hitting the top of the net received a little drag, slowing them and altering their trajectory.

He never made any money from the game because had he filed a patent, it would have belonged to the US Government (as it was made in their lab with their equipment) but you have to love that he took the time to do this as a technical exercise and simply as a bit of fun, so William Higinbotham, we salute you, and here for your enjoyment, is his masterpiece:

Can you really play games on a PC?

Now that might seem like a silly, even ridiculous and redundant title, but bare with me. It was all in the interest of keeping titles snappy and short, but what I’d really liked it to have said was:

‘Can you really play games on a PC, in the sense that it is comparable with the full gamut of consoles and handhelds in terms of variety, performance and ultimately entertainment?’

Or rather more succinctly, and what I was actually shooting for in the title I used, but unable to completely convey due to the lack of formatting available to me:

‘Can you really play games on a PC?’

Admittedly, it still seems like a somewhat silly question, but I’m nothing if not persistent. I know that Dell XPS, Mesh, Voodoo and Alienware will tell you differently, and that your ‘enthusiast’ gaming PC builder (with a couple of Intel Core i7s, 64GB of RAM, two dual-GPU graphics cards and more water-cooling tubing than a Wet and Wild splash park) will be adamant that you can, but I’m going to have to rock the boat on this one. You simply can’t get the gaming experience on a PC that you can on other formats, and you haven’t been able to for, well, forever.

As much power as eight XBOX 360s riding a nuclear missile, but is it all futile?

What ever happened to the world map?

I’ve been playing Crisis Core on PSP a lot recently. In actual fact, I bought a PSP pretty specifically for this title, and I have thoroughly enjoyed it. Although when I say I’ve played it ‘a lot’, what that means in reality is that I’ve played it for 17 hours and have already beaten the game. “17 hours? That’s pretty respectable for a £15 platinum title” you might be thinking, but for an RPG, and a Square-Enix RPG at that, I’m actually quite disappointed. I think the problem stems from the removal of the world map, and its replacement with those awful blue dot floating lines from Final Fantasy XII that signify where one area joins another. Now I know the argument that J-RPGs are considered quite old hat, and it may be true that if you don’t evolve and move with the times you wither and die, but please, stop messing with the important stuff, the fun stuff, the stuff that adds longevity and the feeling of exploration and actually having a choice in how the game pans out.

Save crystal and blue dots - disembodied blue entities abound in FFXII!

My beef with the blue dots is this…

I’ve Seen The Future, and It’s 2D

Power is king in this day and age. Our processors must be faster, our graphics cards must have more memory, and our consoles are about to become self aware. The quest for higher frame rates, more polygons on screen, and the most spectacular explosions is all-consuming in the gaming world. Why is it, then, that I get such a warm fuzzy feeling inside from 2D games?

It’s probably because I remember them the first time around, and at the risk of sounding really old, I long for that simpler time (I’m not that old, honest – I just started gaming early). I don’t always want my games to be massively multiplayer, to require peripherals costing more than the console itself, or to be so crushingly realistic that instead of just giving you a limp and slowing you down, a gunshot wound to the thigh causes you to bleed out in under three minutes, then have to wait an hour for the next round to start. Sure, if anyone asks, I’ll tell them that Fallout 3 was the best title released in the past couple of years, but if I’m honest I’ve probably gleaned far more enjoyment from New Super Mario Bros. and Yoshi’s Island on DS than I ever could from Fallout’s wasteland, in spite it being more than light years ahead in terms of, well, everything.

It brings joy to my heart and puts a spring in my step then, that on top of the fantastic looking A Boy and His Blob, we’re soon to be graced with the 2D games that we have all been waiting for – a new Mario, and a new Sonic, and I’m not sure which I’m most excited about! The Mario title (New Super Mario Bros. Wii, shown off at E3 last month) looks fantastic in that it’s essentially a ramped up version of the DS title (which was in itself a ramped up version of the old NES games). It looks slick, it looks pretty, it looks fun to play, and includes four-player-on-one-console action! Super Mario Galaxy 2 is due to be released at roughly the same time, and it’s going to cause some real internal conflict as to which I play more, as I already love both the ‘New’ and ‘Galaxy’ games immensely.

The Sonic title is a little more mysterious, however, with SEGA having only released a teaser promo video that doesn’t include any gameplay, or really, any concrete information at all. What it does allude to, though, is the important stuff: it’s Sonic, it’s 2D, it’s fast, and they’ve scrapped all their dreadful attempts at 3D and pseudo-3D in favour of an old school style. It’s also cleverly titled ‘Project Needlemouse’ (the SEGA codename for the original Sonic title in the days of pre-history) and I can’t wait to get my hands on it. I have a sneaking suspicion that because they’re simplifying things and getting back to their roots this will just work in the way old Sonic titles used to (and new ones don’t). Deep down, I feel they’re going to absolutely nail this one.

Symantec: ‘Protect Your Chicken From Dokken’ Not Random Enough (Kimbo Slice vs. Caterpillar)

A few days ago I was impressed with Symantec’s sence of humour with regards the frankly brilliant ’Protect Your Chicken From Dokken’  ads. Now I’m a little concerned for their mental state. They used to have nice wholesome ad campaigns, where families sit around their computer and play safely on the internet – now they have a small invertebrate slicing the arm off a street fighter with laser heat vision. What next – protect your gerbil from the San Francisco Orchestra? Protect your goldfish from Gywneth Paltrow? Protect your endangered species from the destruction of their natural habitat by development, deforestation and climate change caused by man? Oh no wait… that one’s real (unless you’re a Republican whose family wealth comes from the fossil fuels industry…)

I must admit though, I did like the caterpillar’s nonchalance towards the impending threat: “The caterpillar, responding in typical caterpillar fashion, eats a leaf.”

Deny:

Allow:

Bizarre.

Symantec Win ‘Most Bizarre Analogy’ Award (Dokken vs. Chicken)

Symantec are quite a serious company. Their business is very serious indeed. They are the company who bundle a year’s free anti-virus protection in with new PCs, then at midnight on the 365th day your anti-virus icon turns red and proclaims “You are no longer protected! Norton was the only thing standing between your PC and the apocalypse! You’ve opened the floodgates and metaphorically speaking, viruses are going to sail onto your PC in longboats before proceeding to rape your cattle and steal your womenfolk!” before offering you the option to renew ’your protection’ at a ‘very reasonable price’ while waggling a baseball bat rather menacingly. Not to mention the theory that a large number of recorded viruses are propogated by anti-virus companies themselves. Hell, it’s what I’d do, but then I’m a bad, bad person.

Imagine my surprise then, to learn they not only have a sense of humour, but have produced a slice of advertising genius so random that it’s perfect!

This is what happens if you renew your subscription:

And this is what happens if you don’t:

A Boy and His Blob – The Most Adorable Game Ever?

Yes, I think it genuinely might be.

I remember the original A Boy and His Blob when it was released in Europe in 1991, and it was a sweet concept then (pardon the pun). A young boy is joined by gelatinous blob named Blobert (or Blob, to his friends) and together they quest across Earth and Blobolonia to save Blob’s homeworld from the evil emperor. So far, so average, then. Move from left to right, jump, fight, collect things – hadn’t a short fat plumber done this already? The difference in A Boy and His Blob was the puzzle element, that genuinely relied on teamwork with Blob (yes, I did say ‘teamwork’) in order to pass through the game.

Blob, you see, has a taste for jellybeans (the ’sweet’ pun becomes apparent) but by a strange twist, different flavours have some very different effects on him. Throw him a licorice flavoured bean, for example, and he’ll turn into a ladder, or a honey one, and he’ll turn into a hummingbird. All you have to do is give a little whistle, and he’ll transform back again. This makes for an extremely novel method of problem solving, really giving you a sense of connection and attachment to Blob, and you start to care for the little ball of fun more and more.

How happy was I, then, to see that A Boy and His Blob is coming to the Wii! And what’s more, they’ve made it even more adorable! Now on top of the original jellybean and whistle related shenanigans (of which there are so much more than the original – shields, rockets, even giant blobular mechanima robot combat suits aren’t beyond Blobert in the modern incarnation) you get the chance to give your pal a cuddle. This isn’t just a saccharine visual tag-on, though – Blobert’s mood changes depending on the situation you are in, and you need to treat him nicely in order to keep him in top transforming shape. The necessity of hugs aside though, this reimagining is a visual picture book feast, and you will find yourself giving Blob a cuddle when he’s already maxed out on happy, just because it looks so damn lovely, and we all need a cuddle from time to time.

Video courtesy of IGN.com, UK release: November 6th, 2009.

‘Geeks Rock Hardest’ – It’s Offical

Back in 2002, a momentous moment in both games and music (in the days before Guitar Hero and Rock Band, long before their paths were intrinsically linked) seemed to slip under the radar quite unnoticed. Nobuo Uematsu, primary composer of the Final Fantasy series of games, heard word that two lesser known Square-Enix musical producers (Kenichiro Fukui and Tsuyoshi Sekito) had formed a prog-rock band, and were playing live arrangements of some of Uematsu’s Final Fantasy soundtrack songs. He joined them for a one off performance on keyboards, caught the live performance bug instantly, and they became The Black Mages.

Having released three fantastic (if slightly esoteric) albums, The Black Mages have also played a number of spectacular live shows, including guest appearances in two of the live ‘Final Fantasy Musicals’ that toured the world a few years back. In response to my own post (self-centred, I know) with ArcAttack’s amazing electrical video game themes, you should definitely check out these incredible performances of Final Fantasy favourites:

Final Fantasy VII – ‘Those Who Fight Further’ (originally ‘Still More Fighting’ on the OST)

“Imperial March not evil enough” says mad scientist

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you plugged a MIDI controller into an 8 foot Tesla coil, then discharged the energy through a man imprisoned in a medieval suit of armour, in order to make incredibly sinister sounding music?

No, neither have I, but thankfully some insane physicists did, and it’s bloody brilliant!

They also do a natty line in video game theme tunes…

HMV Presents GameOn! London

HMV have been making very deliberate moves to strengthen their position in the games world recently, having already launched their Re/Play trade-in service to rival Game/Gamestation/CEX, they have now joined forced with UKeSA (the United Kingdom eSports Association) to bring GameOn! to the London Olympia this summer.