A few months ago, I had this idea to prank Giant Bomb by interrupting their PAX panel with a series of bands. I reached out to my friends at Harmonix, and over the last four months, we booked a bagpiper, a three-piece mariachi band, and a full dixieland jazz band to come in and interrupt the panel… we even hired a producer to sneak them into the building and give them their cues.
In the history of this Giant Bomb panel though, our prank will be merely a footnote; halfway through, someone from the audience strolled up the stage and put a jar labeled, “ANONYMOUS BREAST MILK - CERTIFIED” in front of Ryan.
Anyway, please enjoy the funniest and weirdest panel I have ever seen at any con, ever.
EDIT: Thanks also to patbaer from UCB for helping us get everything set up!
Hey friends, I’m making a version of my favorite game, Werewolf. You can back it on Kickstarter for $10 or download the whole game for free.
Check it out at Maxistentialism.com/werewolf.
At a PAX East panel today, Cards Against Humanity designer Max Temkin launched and funded a Kickstarter campaign for his version of a card game called Werewolf.
During the presentation, which included Kickstarter employees, Temkin took the audience on a trip through what it’s like to launch a Kickstarter project. He walked through the crowdfunding platform’s back end, which includes setting categories, uploading product images and videos, creating descriptions and more.
Temkin submitted the project onstage, and Kickstarter’s project specialist Luke Crane and head of community Cindy Au talked it over as if he weren’t there. Approval usually takes 24-48 hours, but they approved the project onstage.
Within minutes, it exceeded its $230 goal.
After the project launched, they took questions form the floor, which was filled with former, current and potential Kickstarter project runners.
“Everyone’s gotten help from people who’ve been there before,” Temkin said.
He encouraged people who want to use Kickstarter to reach out to those who’ve been there before.
This is what gamers look like if you put female characters into your games.
Cards Against Humanity is now made in the United States of America.
Ridiculous Fishing is out!
For the last few months, my friends Greg, Zach, and Rami have been working on this game called Ridiculous Fishing. Here’s how it works:
- You throw your hook into the water
- You guide the hook down, avoiding fish for as long as possible
- When you finally hit a fish, you guide your hook back up and snag as many fish as you can
- You throw the fish into the air
- You shoot the fish with an Uzi and they explode into a pink mist
It’s out on the App Store today for $2.99 on iPhone and iPad, and it’s already one of the best-reviewed video games of all time with a 94 on Metacritic.
Joystiq said:
Ridiculous Fishing’s art, by Greg Wohlwend, is unlike anything I’ve seen on any platform, an intricate arrangement of creatures, backdrops made entirely of 45-degree angles. Any screenshot you take of this game would make an amazing wallpaper – quite an achievement for a game about a guy sitting alone in a boat.
MacLife said:
Ridiculous Fishing is one of the most purely entertaining iOS games to date … absurdly fun and seriously memorable.
IGN said:
Ridiculous Fishing puts a smile on my face … a polished arcade time-killer.
TUAW said:
Ridiculous Fishing is a great game that is among the best we’ve seen on the iPhone, ever.
Right now Ridiculous Fishing is the 6th-ranked paid app on the App Store and Apple has picked it as a featured app, which is especially amazing once you hear the story of how this game was cloned before it was even finished and almost died.
There’s a ton of surprises and a great story in the game as well (for example, I’m in there as the egg pictured above - look for Max Shrimpkin on Byrdr). I’ve had Ridiculous Fishing for about a month, and played it all the way through twice, and I just keep having more fun.
Ridiculous Fishing has amazing unlockables, buttery smooth controls, and gorgeous art direction. If you’ve got an iPhone or an iPad, do yourself a favor by downloading one of the best mobile games ever made.
My three year old daughter and I play a lot of old games together. Her favorite is Donkey Kong. Two days ago, she asked me if she could play as the girl and save Mario. She’s played as Princess Toadstool in Super Mario Bros. 2 and naturally just assumed she could do the same in Donkey Kong. I told her we couldn’t in that particular Mario game, she seemed really bummed out by that. So what else am I supposed to do? Now I’m up at midnight hacking the ROM, replacing Mario with Pauline. I’m using the 2010 NES Donkey Kong ROM. I’ve redrawn Mario’s frames and I swapped the palettes in the ROM. I replaced the M at the top with a P for Pauline.
Some screenshots of Ridiculous Fishing by Vlambeer, Zach Gage, and Greg Wohlwend, out for iOS on the 14th.
As the development of StarCraft dragged on it seemed like it would never be done: the game was always two months from launch but never seemed to get any closer to the mythical ship date. “Fortunately” — and I use that term advisedly — Blizzard had previous experience shipping games late.
Some bugs were related to the development process itself. The Protoss Carrier regularly lagged behind other units because it had its own way of doing … everything. At some point in time the code for the Carrier was branched from the main game code and had diverged beyond any hope of re-integration. Consequently any time a feature was added for other units, it had to be re-implemented for the Carrier. And any time a bug was fixed for other units, a similar bug would later be found in the Carrier code too, only more devious and difficult to fix.
But the biggest thing holding back StarCraft was unit path-finding.
[…]
My idea was simple: whenever harvesters are on their way to get minerals, or when they’re on the way back carrying those minerals, they ignore collisions with other harvesters in the same state other units. By eliminating the inter-unit collision code for the harvesters there is never a rush-hour commute to get jammed up, and harvesters operate efficiently.
It’s possible to notice this behavior by selecting a large group of harvesters who are working a plot of crystals and telling them to halt. They immediately spread out to find tiles that aren’t occupied by other harvesters.
The behavior is obvious if you look, but hidden in plain sight — it doesn’t rise to the level of conscious awareness, though professional-level players and map-makers/modders do notice.
In short, it just works, which is the best kind of hack.
I always noticed this when I played StarCraft as a kid, it’s pretty cool to hear that the story behind it involves the same kind of hack that I’ve had to use a thousand times in my work.
There’s a new episode of TableTop! My friends Paul and Storm are on it! They play Chez Geek! It’s amazing!
“Incredibly disjointed. Why is that city flooded? Where are we going? And why?”
-
Jeff Gerstmann’s notes on Black Ops II
The guys at Giant Bomb asked me to write about my favorite video games of the year and I still wound up quoting David Foster Wallace.
A lot of my friends have been making huge gaming news this week:
- Rich Gallup and Summer Camp Studios released their first title, Fart Cat, which is a puzzle game wherein you feed food to a cat and it farts. Fart Cat is delightfully stupid, I love it.
- Asher is on the front page of Giant Bomb talking about the new version of his game Puzzlejuice, which I think is my personal favorite iPhone game.
- Terry Cavanagh’s impossibly difficult new game Super Hexagon is out and Jenn Frank recorded the voices. I am terrible at this game but I keep playing it over and over.
- Zach Gage’s board game Guts of Glory, a post-apocalyptic competitive eating contest, is Kickstarter’s project of the day. This was my favorite thing that I saw at PAX, I have an advance copy, and my Playtest review is in the works.
- EDIT: OH. And no big deal, but Young Horses’ “Octodad: Dadliest Catch” just got a stellar review on the PA Report.
If there is a board game with better box design than Lords of Waterdeep I have not yet encountered it.
@h_e_e_l_s I met the guys at WotC who made it and specifically pointed out how well designed that was.
Max:
@stepto @h_e_e_l_s The box looks good but it spills the pieces all over as soon as you move it.
@maxtemkin @h_e_e_l_s I put the board on top. As long as you’re not juggling the thing the pieces mostly stay put…
@stepto @maxtemkin I too use the board on top strategy, it locks everything in.
Boy, that escalated quickly.
