Tag: games
Art as Games: Counterstrike map based on Van Gogh painting
We did gaming as art, here’s art as games. An enterprising young chap has recreated Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” painting (pictured) in the form of a Counterstrike map. It’s stunningly beautiful, and a reminder that gamers, even though we like killing things, appreciate beauty, too.
Check out a video tour of the map over the jump and marvel at amount of Van Gogh references crammed into this creation. Rock, Paper, Shotgun asks ‘What long-dead artistic visionary would you base a game on?’. I’d go for Edward Hopper. His use of light rivals anything that a modern 3D game engine could cook up.
Max out your Flash gaming habit with Flash Game Maximizer
Are you tired of squinting at a tiny screen for your lunchtime Desktop Tower Defence habit? Well, squint no longer with the Flash Game Maximizer Firefox add-on. Although some games have a built-in ‘fullscreen’ option, many don’t, and this add-on lets you pump any which don’t up to full 1920×1280, or whatever massive resolution you’re running in.
The add-on’s still ‘experimental’, so you’ll need to log in to Firefox’s add-ons site to download it. When installed, you get a little box in the bottom right hand corner. When it detects flash, it’ll turn yellow, and you can then click it to go fullscreen. Unfortunately it will reset any game currently in progress, so be careful of that. Still, it’s a nice way of avoiding those annoying ads all around the game, and increasing the sense of immersion.
Flash Game Maximizer (via Cnet)
Related posts: Adobe still confident of Flash on iPhone, must pass Apple’s tests | NASA celebrates its 50th Anniversary in style – with a Flash-based website.
National Geographic to start making games
In yet another sign that games are rapidly taking over from movies as the #1 entertainment medium, veteran nature documentary producer National Geographic has decided that it fancies a shot at making the next “Hunting Unlimited 2009”.
Curiously, though, the company has decided that it’s only going to develop for a very limited set of platforms – naming Mac and iPhone specifically. Is there an Apple-National Geographic deal that I don’t know about?
The first title, “Herod’s Lost Tomb”, is already available on Mac, iPhone and Windows. It’s about the biblical King Herod, who reportedly wasn’t too fond of baby boys. More titles are on the way, including “Sudoku Traveler: China”, “National Geographic: Africa”, and the intriguingly titled “From the Bottom Up”.
National Geographic Channel (via Macworld)
Related posts: Chinese scientists continue thumbing nose at nature | Video games to outsell music and movies this year
Stat-counters of the world reveal the best-selling video games of the last three months
What’s been the biggest-selling game around the world over the last three months? You’re probably thinking GTA IV or Mario Kart, or perhaps you’re being clever and thinking it’s something weird for girls and old people like Ubisoft’s mind-numbingly odd Imagine: Interior Designer?
If you are, you are WRONG – the best selling game around the entire world is Electronic Arts’ Madden 08, the latest annual update in the long-running US football sim. It shifted a ludicrous 2.994 million copies to inhabitants of Earth, beating Wii Fit (!) into second place, with the bizarre balancing exercise “game” amazingly managing to convince 2.089 million people that what they really need to start getting into is video game yoga…
Pensioners 'caught' pirating games
Poor Gill and Ken Murdoch. They’re aged 54 and 66 respectively, and they’ve never played a computer game in their lives. Imagine their shock when they opened a letter from law firm Davenport-Lyons that accused them of downloading an Atari game called Race 07, at 3am on November 26, 2007.
The letter demanded immediate compensation of £500 plus £25 costs, with the threat that that figure could rise into the thousands if legal action began against the couple. Over to Ken:
“A Swiss investigator had identified us as the downloader of this software at 2.59am on November 26, 2007. At 10am that day, I was at a government conference. The thought of me being up at 3am was ludicrous – and there are no kids in our house. The whole thing’s been a nightmare. We have never even played computer games.”
World of Warcraft hits 11 million active subscribers worldwide
Belgium? Bolivia? Israel? Ireland? You’ve got nothing on World of Warcraft. Blizzard’s ultra-popular massively-multiplayer online role-playing game, full of orcs, elves, dwarves and undead, has hit 11 million active subscribers. That’s a shade fewer than the population of Greece, and means that one person in every 625 on the planet holds an active subscription…
GameCity in Nottingham – a Midlands alternative to the London Games Festival
If, like Jamie, a commenter on our post about the London Games Festival, you’re not based in London, then you might be interested in GamesCity – a similar event in Nottingham. It’s due to take place between the 30th October and 1st November, mostly at Gatecrasher, but also at a few other venues around the city…
SHINY VIDEO REVIEW: Swinxs – 21st century party games
Occasionally we actually get to see some sunlight here at Tech Digest. The video above chronicles the results – we all get a bit giddy and descend to the intellectual level of 8-year-olds. Lucky Swinxs was around to save the day…
Gaming as Art: The Unfinished Swan
The Unfinished Swan is a forthcoming indie game / tech demo, made in XNA by a chap called Ian Dallas. It’s set in a completely white world, and you’re equipped with splats of black paint which you use to view the area around you. The goal is to find your way to the exit…
Nine out of ten kids want videogames for Christmas
If there was ever doubt that gaming had become well and truly mainstream, it must now be officially extinguished. Nine out of ten kids aged between eight and eleven want something game-related for Christmas – a game, console, or peripheral of some sort…
