#Games

Kinda freaking awesome, a choose-your-own-adventure YouTube zombie serial. Makes me wanna script, shoot, and chop my own kung fu, zombie, sorcerer, samurai, ninja masterpiece myself (with dinosaurs, of course).

And if you make it to the end alive and live and if you live in kiwiland (like you could miss those accents… ;-) ), you can enter to win a year’s supply of Hell’s Pizza once you know the magic email. Seriously though, did this not look like it was all sorts of fun to make?

Wow. Pretty incredible trailer for the video game Star Wars: The Old Republic. Don’t know anything about the game itself but have to say this is the best teaser for a video game I have ever seen. Seeths drama, menace, and intrigue.

I so want someone to come up with a Wii game I can duel with my WiiRemote like a lightsaber to… ;-)

Kind of surprised this one I missed entirely on launch. Augmented reality (ie. virtual layers over views of the real world) application where what a virtual bear gets bumped around your surrounding environment for WWF China’s Biodiversity Protection Programme (dead link). A bit gimmicky, but a very interesting experiment (much like augmented reality games and near-future social network games scenarios).

Developed by Bartle Bogle Hegarty China and Qdero.

When I was a kid, before i got into power gaming and being a master geek, I used to read the “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories which were the forerunners of so many computer games and text adventures that were to follow. Ah yes, the path to being a high school social outcast…

And just in time for Halloween, someone has put together The Outbreak , a little video interactive adventure that is a hell of a nod of the head and petite homage to Romero’s ‘78 classic Dawn of the Dead .

Back in the day, before graphics replaced playability (though let’s face it, the Wii has brought it back), some of the best games there were… in fact, the only ones, were text based interactive adventures.

Not to over-romaticize them but some of them were epic and such a critical part of hacker lore that they’ve entered the cultural lexicon.

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Good experience has a great list of fun online games to play if your brain needs a break from XMas stress and your current boss’s tyranny.

Good Experience Games - good games, fun games

One of my favourites, an online version of Snowcraft (dead link sadly) is on here as well.

I was kind of sad to read the review of the latest Carmen Sandiago game this morning.

First off, I remember the original game, Where in the World is Carman Sandiego ? from Brøderbund which I thought was a fantastic platform for teaching kids geography.

It was great fun and educational. It was not just a “memorize the capitals” flashcard type thing, but taught you some details about the country and culture there and allowed you to use deductive reasoning to figure things out. It also taught you the value of researching, going and looking up something, and in a lot of ways, was an inspired title educationally. You’d use the clues, research and storyline to determine where Carmen had escaped to in the world and then track her down there and recover the artifacts. OK, it was never that big a challenge to me (I am scarily good at world geography) but after having an adult last month ask me where exactly the Netherlands were, I definitely think that some people could use it even now. The things I loved about it were that it was engaging, played well and was chock full of educational content (I can still remember that is where I learned whose currency the zloty was).