Rose Ball

Anybody here ever play it?

From what I've read:

this is Street Fighter IV, in practice mode. Both players are handicapped so they have a pixel of health, and both have selected Rose as their character. They are playing best of 9. At the beginning of each round, one of them “serves” by performing Rose’s “Soul Spark” move - a half-circle towards on the joystick, and a punch button. Then, they take it in turns to perform her “Soul Reflect”, which can reverse projectiles; this is a quarter-cirlce away on the stick, with a punch button. Whoever fails to time the parry correctly will get hit by the “ball”, and the other player will win the round.

So: they’re playing Pong, inside Street Fighter IV.

Awesome Game Wallpapers

Here are some awesome looking game wallpapers from deviantArt.

Via Kotaku.

Eat the Head!

Have your birthdays been, well, a bit dull lately? Try being this guy.

Head tracking without a Wii.

Head tracking with a chicken. (+ superz-kyut follow up)

Yao's favorite food.

(first three videos via Waxy)

Midnight Movie News

That's "movie news at midnight", not "news about midnight movies"!

The Good: Jeffrey Tambor hints that the Arrested Development movie might finally be happening!

The Bad: Sir Ridley Scott — director of Alien, Blade Runner, and Gladiator — will indeed direct the feature-film adaptation of Monopoly. Yes, that Monopoly.

The Ugly: Much to alliesglove's chagrin, Jaden Smith (son of Will) is officially the new (wannabe) Ralph Macchio, in a remake of The Karate Kid ... set in China!?

In this case curiosity kills the dog

... as well as a bunch of time from your life. Find the game here and the post on kotaku here.

Ask The Hydra: Mega Man 9

O, blessed heads of The Hydra, I ask thee: what are your thoughts on the newly-released Mega Man 9? (trailer)

Spy Hunter car come to life

Ad for the Pontiac G8 GT channeling Spy Hunter.



Update: Looks like previous video link died. Added youtube video.

Lair - A Game Review

Bottom line: Don't buy or even rent this crap game. I don't know why I rented this game even though everyone said that the game was crap. The controls are too clunky; it uses the Sixaxis control scheme, which can be very annoying since your arms can get tired. The gameplay is weird, almost as if it is trying to be a free roaming version of Panzer Dragoon. Can't really comment on the story since the gameplay is sucktastic. Production values are high for the cutscenes, but sadly, this doesn't translate into anything worthwhile for the game.

Things I Didn't Know, December '07 Edition

Here are some of the things I've learned over the last couple of months:

— Phil Knight, founder of Nike, has been taking writing classes at Stanford, and is a good classmate.

— Nintendo has some excuses for its (mind-boggling, IMO) inability to meet the demand for Wii systems, as elaborated in Wired and in the WSJ.

— Bill Bellamy is Shaq's cousin (link to FHM, so maybe NSFW).

— There's a documentary about CalTech basketball called Quantum Hoops.

— PCs with some Award/Unicore BIOSes will, seemingly at random, play classical music to signal problems with CPU fans and power supply voltages!

— Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, was created as an advertising gimmick for Montgomery Ward. His creator's brother-in-law wrote the now iconic song about Rudolph, sung by Gene Auntry, for a Max Fleischer cartoon.

— Speaking of Christmas music, there are tons of cover versions of "Last Christmas", Wham's gift to the world.

— The Ten Mafia Commandments.

— An expert Scrabble player would not have set the highest Scrabble score ever, given the same circumstances in which it was achieved.

— The first three-way tie in Jeopardy history (where everyone came back) was a true act of generosity, and the guy who made it happen planned it that way.

Infoporn: Steam Stats

Valve has a Steam & Game Stats site with fantastic infographics that may be more interesting than the games themselves — to people like me, at least.

For example, there's a hardware survey that shows Intel, nVidia, and Realtek leading in their respective hardware categories, among the users sampled. I also learned that a majority of the users of the service have monitor refresh rates of 60 Hz, about a fifth of users have HyperThreading enabled, and 6.43% have over 250 GB of free hard disk space.

The coolest, though, are the Half-Life 2: Episode 2 Death Maps that show where players died most often in each map.

[via Kottke]

Spot the Video Game References ...

... in this halftime performance by the Cal band:


Cal Band Great!!

Turtle Shel Silverstein

Slate talks about Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels. Probably old news to the Nintendo junkies and Wii owners out there, but it got me thinking about what must've been going through Shigeru Miyamoto's head when faced with the task of creating a sequel to his industry's Citizen Kane.

After lulling you into complacency with the game's superficial similarity to Super Mario Bros., Miyamoto (depressed or not) signals that he intends to torment you. The first row of question-marked boxes you encounter includes that familiar mushroom, Mario's iconic power-up. Except this mushroom is different. It's deadly. As Mario was tossed from the screen, I experienced a combination of shock and puzzlement. That would become a familiar sensation over the next three hours. Again and again, the game uses your familiarity with Super Mario Bros. to subvert the playing experience.

Mental Floss Magazine profiles Shel Silverstein's career, from Playboy cartoonist to children's books author to musician.

Silverstein made it pretty impossible to get pigeon-holed into a poetry-and-cartooning rut by simply tossing in a few other careers on top—songwriter, musician, novelist, you name it. In 1959, just a few years before he started to write children’s books, Silverstein began a respectable career in music. How respectable? Well, he was inducted into the Nashville Songwriter’s Hall of Fame, won two Grammy awards, recorded more than a dozen albums, and wrote hundreds of songs that were recorded by artists including Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, and Jerry Lee Lewis.

RPS or RSP? You Decide!

Take a moment to vote in the poll on the right. The future of your country is at stake! (The future of what your country calls Bato Bato Pick, at least ...)

See also: Pop vs. Soda