Category: Video Games

  • Violent Pong

    Here’s a link I found from Scoble, which was too good not to post: violent pong. No, it’s not a game (how many of you even remember pong?), which is what I thought at first; it’s a Flash movie. Watch it. It’s crazy and philosophical!

  • Sony Bend Redux

    It’s funny how the world works. Hot on the heels of my blog article on Sony Bend Tuesday of last week, our local newspaper, the Bend Bulletin, publishes a story in Saturday’s business section about Sony Bend and the latest version of their Syphon Filter game in development.

    Sony filters out separatist group from Bend designer’s video game” is the article. I don’t really need to comment on the story as the opening sentence covers it: “Sony Computer Entertainment America has pulled a fictitious Quebec terrorist group from the latest in a series of hit video games created by John Garvin….”

    Basically, I just thought it was very interesting to see this article show up in the paper less than a week after I had initially blogged about the company.

  • Mike Berlyn

    This is the second part of the story about Sony Bend I previously posted. This follows up on Mike Berlyn, who was a founding member of the game company Eidetic (now Sony Bend), who left the company in 1997. Read on for the gory details. (more…)

  • Eidetic & Sony Bend

    Herewith the first part of an online detective story, with interesting results. If you’re interested in any of the following: Infocom, the Sony PlayStation, or video game companies in Bend, Oregon—then you’ll probably enjoy this story. Read on. (more…)

  • Alternatives

    I got so caught up in finishing Cryptonomicon this past week that I didn’t really go online to post stuff. Damn good book. Longer than hell, but it was worth it.

    What else? Oh yeah, bought a PlayStation (the original, not Two) from my brother, along with several games. It’s pretty sweet, even though I’ve only played a few times. I know, I’m way behind the curve, but I’m always behind the gaming curve; before the PlayStation, the most advanced console I have (aside from the computers) is a Sega Genesis. Then a Nintendo, the original one. At the rate I’m going, I should be up to a PS2 or XBox in 2007 or so.

  • Get Father’s Day

    What a neat Father’s Day it was. I got to lay around the house, drink some beer, played some Dukes of Hazzard: Racing for Home (you haven’t lived until you’ve jumped the General Lee over anything with the horn playing. The reviews at Amazon aren’t so hot for this game, though. Go figure). Also I picked up a couple of books for myself, Groovitude: A Get Fuzzy Treasury, by Darby Conley, and How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker, with a Barnes & Noble gift card from my in-laws.

    Get Fuzzy is one of the funniest strips to come along in awhile (for me, anyway). Reminds me a lot of Bloom County (one of my all time favorite strips) with liberal doses of Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side thrown in.

    So for the past 2 days I’ve been reading Groovitude and chuckling. Interestingly, the early versions of Rob is visually very, very similar to Steve Dallas from Bloom County.

    Ooo! The freshmaker!

  • Progress Quest!

    What is Progress Quest? Think of Nethack and Seti@Home rolled into one: It’s an online RPG that runs autonomously on your computer, in the background. You start it up, create a character, and go; everything is automatic and it even does away with the “annoying” aspects of fantasy roleplaying: dying, wandering around mazes, solving puzzles.

    Visit the homepage.

    I’ve been running it for just a day now and I just let it run in the background, yet it’s oddly addicting just to watch. The cool thing is, in Multiplayer/Online mode, it can actively compare your stats and progress in the game with all the other players in online mode, over the web. So, in a sense, it’s a MMORPG. And you don’t even have to pay any money!

  • Pong!

    Man, I can’t stop playing the Pong game at G4’s website (the new video game cable channel). It’s a single player Pong game, you versus the computer. I can’t beat it— the game goes to 21 points, and I haven’t been able to score more than 10 or 11 points before getting whupped. And yet, I keep going back.

    All for Pong.

    That’s just me, though— Old School, especially when it comes to games. I still think the Commodore 64 is one of the best personal computers and game-playing machines of all time— I own a collection of miscellaneous Commodore hardware and software— and many, many of the games produced for it are eminently more playable for me than today’s games. And I think NetHack is one of the best PC games of all time, and it doesn’t even require graphics or sound! So, yeah, Pong got me.