Category Archives: Video Games

XBOX 360 Sandbox

My gamer avatarI’ve added a new page to the Curiosities section of this site: XBOX 360 Sandbox. It’s a place for me to play around with the online capabilities of XBOX Live, such as displaying my gamer avatar (created on my XBOX and instantly updated online) on my own web pages; or my “gamercard” which shows how awesome (or not) I am calculated to be within the XBOX Live community (hint: I am not) along with icons of the games I’ve most recently played.

It fits with the exhibitionist nature of things like scrobbling, Twitter and all of the other online tools that have emerged lately to allow you to spew irrelevant nuggets of your personal life onto teh interwebz for others to not care about.

Yes, I get it that no one really cares that I was playing Castle Crashers last night. But I still think it’s cool that these kinds of things are actually possible, and it helps me to leave a legacy of the fundamental irrelevance of much of my existence. Consider it a cautionary tale, told in widgets, icons and 140-characters-or-less.

Marble Madness… uh… madness

This one’s making the rounds… Daring Fireball and Cabel Sasser at the very least, but it bears sharing.

I’ve had this game on both the PC and the NES, and I’ve tried it in MAME. It’s way cool… way ahead of its time… and way crazy-hard. But I loved it, even though I was never any good at it.

I’ve never actually had the opportunity to play it the way it was meant to be played — with a trackball in an arcade cabinet. But I have a feeling that even if I did it would require years of practice for me to play it this well:

Hilarious Portal Video (NSFWOK: Not Safe For Work Or Kids)

I had to put that “or kids” in there because my kids like watching me play the “shooting holes” game, a.k.a. Portal. It is awesome. I’ve talked about it before, but it is worth mentioning again since I just found this video, and I had been playing it again earlier tonight.

I kind of suck at it though. I haven’t even gotten to the turrets that star in the video. But I since already know about the “Rosebud”-esque ending, this video doesn’t spoil it. Beware, it’s drenched in profanity and 1337-speak so it’s not for everyone. And it probably makes little sense if you’re not familiar with Portal. But I found it absolutely hilarious.

Web browser usage stats. RPG-themed graphic. Geeks rejoice.

We web designers and developers need to keep track of more browsers than anyone should ever have to think about. (Isn’t one enough? And, even though I usually use Safari, can’t we all just agree on Firefox now and kill the rest?)

I’m just another in the chain of sites posting this graphic (which will probably proliferate exponentially now that it’s been on BuzzFeed): 1 – 2 – 3… and directly from here although this leaves me wondering who really is the originator. And of course, there’s the data source, cited in the image itself.

Well whoever came up with it, it’s pretty cool. And informative. I had forgotten the misfortune of Netscape 5, dying off two full years before Netscape 3 in the wake of the Mozilla split.

Enjoy…

Browser Wars

Now I don’t feel like such a dork for my “You have died of dysentery” t-shirt

oregontrailshirtYes, it’s true. My nostalgic love of Oregon Trail extends to, occasionally, wearing a shirt featuring the green, pixilated image of an ox team and covered wagon, bearing the message “You have died of dysentery.” If you don’t get the reference, you might as well die of dysentery, because I have no use for you. (Of course, you don’t need to get the reference if you’re reading this, because I just told you.)

OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But one thing is clear: as much as I love Oregon Trail, I’m nowhere near as passionate about it as Michael Nelson Price. Sure, it’s a joke, but you have to know the game inside and out to write an article like the one he did for McSweeney’s.