Fox is looking to buy IGN. I guess that means that IGN will continue to suck in perpetuity.

This Spartan Life is a machinima talk-show that takes place inside a multiplayer Halo 2 game, using Xbox Live like Red Versus Blue, but better. The music is provided by an in-game DJ who spins 8bit Collective tunes made with a Game Boy. They have the Solid Gold Elite Dancers and the interviews are actually pretty thoughtful and stimulating, especially the segment with Bob Stein. Also clever is that they leave the game open so random players on Xbox Live jump into the game not knowing that it’s an interview, and they start killing the guests and host.

In college I never thought this…

would become a movie. Are there any good movies that began as video games? I heard Resident Evil was OK (and looking at Michele Rodriguez isn’t hard).

Then you’ll like Lode Runner without the digging. Check out the N game. It’s awesome.

From Gamers With Jobs comes an article asking video game developers to design games using the female sexual response cycle. An excerpt:

I bought a Namco Museum plug-in handset a couple of months ago for sixteen bucks, and to date I’ve played it more than any game I currently own. This could be because I’m an old fart and newfangled video games piss me off. Or it could be because Pac-Man kicks ass. Looking now at the acceleration of difficulty in Pac-Man, I realize that it more closely models the female sexual response cycle, which, as a man, I’ve spent quite a bit of time adapting to. Perhaps that’s another reason why I like it so. No matter how difficult the game gets, no matter how long I play it, I will only ever be asked to perform the same, basic set of maneuvers that I learned to perform in the very first few minutes of play.

By the way, Gamers With Jobs cater to a more refined and mature audience. It eschews L33+-speak and script-kiddie pablum for usually well-informed content. One guy there had an interesting series of articles on an insider view of your local EB. (Thanks, punctual_shrimp, for the lookout on the site) .

This is really fun. Try stackopolis. It’s like a Lego puzzle game.

If you played a lot of Starcraft, and I know more than one if us has, then you’ll like this, else ignore. Here’s a gallery where you can clearly see the evolution of the development of the game. It starts out like an image-replaced version of Warcraft 2 (they didn’t even replace the fonts), and shows the evolution into what became the published game. Like I said, limited appeal.

Not as much as bacon or boobs, but I love trebuchets. Not sure why. Maybe because it’s feat of engineering as a large-scale application of mechanical advantage. Maybe it’s because it’ll fuck you up from afar. It was always the first thing made whenever I got a new building toy set whether it was Legos, Erector, whatever. Many Weebles were lost to an overly-powerful Tinker-Toy siege engine.

Getting on with it…
Here’s a Flash game that lets you tweak a bunch of variables on your trebuchet as you’re tested for distance, accuracy, and power.