Pixelsocks.com

Mario Marathon Earns $28.8K for Child’s Play

pixelsocks — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 05:33:57 +0000

The Penny Arcade Child’s Play charity generally gets the most press around the holidays, but actually runs year round. This was especially apparent this past week when Brian Brinegar ran the second annual Mario Marathon and raised $28,835.76 for the children’s hospital charity. For those unfamiliar, Brinegar and colleagues played through every major [...]

Review: Tales of Monkey Island: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal

pixelsocks — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 05:23:23 +0000

Like an infatuated zombie pirate, The Monkey Island series has returned from parts unknown to perform unspeakable acts on your brains. It's pushing eight years since the last installment, which was less well received than its three predecessors, so you may be wondering if this is a revival or betrayal of the brand.

Warcraft Shrinks by Half

pixelsocks — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 04:47:50 +0000

Shortly after Blizzard tried to transfer their China licensing to a new third party, the national World of Warcraft servers went silent. This fracas has been ongoing for a month now, and the blogosphere has been doing some speculative math about it. It turns out that about five million of Warcraft’s eleven million [...]

Valve Trying to Unite Left 4 Dead Multiplayer With Sequel

pixelsocks — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 05:45:51 +0000

In a move you’d expect from the Umbrella Corporation, Valve is trying to merge two zombie concepts into one multi-headed brain-devouring chimera. Marketing VP Doug Lombardi told totalvideogames.com that Valve was “trying to work out the details” to make it possible for fans of the first game to play alongside their sequel-adopting counterparts. This decision [...]

In Defense of Video Game Music

pixelsocks — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:43:03 +0000

I have to level with you; I listen to video game music. Even I get waylaid into visiting the grocery sometimes, and it's just not enough to spend my leisure time playing the things and writing for this blog. So I fill the gaps with accoutrements of the medium. This creates problems, however, because it really gets in the way of ice-breaking chitchat. It's easy to see where this goes wrong if you imagine that we're having that conversation. Once we've gotten past the what's-your-job phase, we wander into hobbies. It has become more palatable to bring up video games here as they've become more mainstream, so no trouble here. However, the conversation almost inevitably runs aground when we start talking musical tastes and I have to revisit the gaming trough and end up looking more one-dimensional than I really am (cough). It certainly doesn't help that famous musicians have recently been whining that video games are incapable of teaching you anything valuable about music. So whenever someone asks me what kind of music I like, I just mumble something about "eclectic obscure stuff," and try to divert the conversation down a different path. It's a shame too, because game soundtracks really have a lot to offer; it just seems like so much trouble to describe. If only I had some kind of soapbox so I could explain it once and for all.

Genre Primer (final entries)

pixelsocks — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 07:56:59 +0000

Puzzle

Portal

These are games where the player is provided with a set of unfamiliar tools and then asked to explore their uses. Sometimes these tools are falling blocks that you must organize into lines, and other times you're given a portal gun that lets you explore complex environments. So the role of player agency in puzzle games is to learn the nuances of the core tools so that you can use them in increasingly sophisticated ways or under greater pressure. These games tend to fall into two major categories, though neither is sufficiently distinct to merit a subgenre. The first and most typical type includes relatively short affairs that rarely last more than a few minutes. However, their short length is usually balanced by a random element to them that makes them more or less infinitely replayable. The latter type of puzzle game is longer and more elaborate, but the puzzles themselves are typically setpieces with one real solution. So once you've finished the game, there's not much point in coming back. Notable examples • Tetris • Portal • World of Goo

Genre Primer (continued)

pixelsocks — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 06:40:04 +0000

Adventure

Day of the Tentacle

It might appear that adventure games are a subgenre of action adventure (or vice versa) because both involve exploration and item collection. However, where action adventure games populate their worlds with enemies, adventure games use puzzles, and that proves to be a game-changer. In adventure games, the fobs you collect are used to solve the puzzles, so if you don't have the right stuff, you can't really play the game. So genre entries end up being more about scouring the environment for any interactive item, no matter how small, and then puzzling over the random debris in your pockets (in case it's not intuitively obvious to you that the best way to traverse a zip line is using a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle). Notable examples • The Curse of Monkey Island • Day of the Tentacle • Professor Layton and the Curious Village

Genre Primer

pixelsocks — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 05:33:23 +0000

The non-gamers who read this blog are here for many reasons. Some are family and obligated, some are friends who follow it as the sole sign that I'm not dead yet, and some just happened to stumble by while looking for something else. However, for all their differences, all these people share one complaint in common: they have no idea what I'm talking about. Gaming is an insular little hobby. We have our own jargon and incestuous little comparisons that make perfect sense if you've been following the hobby for a decade, but everyone else is out in the cold. So in the spirit of Nintendo's blue ocean strategy (see, I did it again right there), this week we'll be doing some outreach to the non-addicted community. This week we'll be looking at gaming genres: what they're good for, why we use them, and a primer for some of the more ubiquitous genres that'll be suitable for linking in future reviews.

Competing Entertainment Medium Complains. Film at 11.

pixelsocks — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 05:14:46 +0000

Nme.com has reported that, in a press conference to promote an upcoming documentary, Jack White and Jimmy Page have criticized the Guitar Hero franchise. The respective luminaries of The White Stripes and Led Zepplin, are upset that video games are introducing kids to music. Said White, “It’s depressing to have a label come and tell you [...]

Tingle Loves the Ladies

pixelsocks — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 04:51:38 +0000

That’s right! He’s single, Ladies! Following up on the Tingle teaser seen in Famitsu two weeks ago, Nintendo has announced that the fairy-obsessed mapmaker from Majora’s Mask is getting a second game. It seems that Nintendo is trying to emphasize that Tingle doesn’t solely follow around little boys, because his upcoming game is entitled Irozuki [...]