I've decided to seek out for my collection those games which feature zombie chickens. So far I've only found one. If anyone finds such a game, email it to me jimmy@cybercrimesdivision.gov
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Intelligent Gamer is actively seeking writers!
Tuesday 24 March 2009 - 13:47:02
Think you've got something intelligent to say? Then consider writing for Intelligent Gamer!
We are currently looking for writers to do both editorial opinion articles as well as reviews for both tabletop games and video games. We may also consider other topics or types of articles if we feel that they fit with the theme of this site.
If you are interested, please create an account and send a PM to sleepy. Be sure to include what topics you are interested in and a writing sample.
Note that these are volunteer positions. Of course, if you are looking for a career in writing about games, having published material is always good to put on your job application. Additionally, depending on site growth, these may morph into paid positions in the long term.
Apparently following in the footsteps of Napster (you remember them, right? They were that file sharing site that people used before they went legit), it looks like The Pirate Bay is going to become a legal repository for digital content in the near future. The owners have sold the site to a Swedish gaming firm for the equivalent of about 8 million USD. The new owners have said they intend to make it a service where copyright holders get paid when their material gets downloaded.
So yet another company is going to try and see if they can capitalize on the motivations behind piracy instead of fighting the endless losing battle against it. It will be interesting to see what they do and how they intend to keep the existing user base happy.
Still, I can't help but wonder how a site named "The Pirate Bay" can possibly be associated with anything legal.
Arimaa - The game designed such that computers can't win
Thursday 11 June 2009 - 08:53:42
A few years ago, after Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in chess, a computer science researcher named Omar Syed hypothesized that he could build a game with about the same rules complexity as chess, that could be played with a standard chess board and pieces, but that would elude all AI attempts to master it for years to come.
The game he designed is called Arimaa, and he believed that his design was so inaccessible to current AI techniques that he offered a $10,000 prize to anyone that could design an AI that could beat the best human Arimaa players. His goal was to show that humans can still outplay computers using a chess set and also to provide the next challenge to the AI community. For 5 years so far, the prize remains unclaimed. Thus far, human players have consistently trounced AI players, sometimes even while offering the AI a handicap.
From the official site:
Why is Arimaa hard for computers?
On average there are over 17,000 possible moves compared to about 30 for chess; this significantly limits how deep computers can think, but does not seem to affect humans.
Opening books are useless since the starting position is not fixed.
End game databases are not helpful since a game can end with all pieces still on the board.
Research papers on Arimaa suggest it is more of a strategic and positional game with less emphasis on tactics.
In preparation for the upcoming Ghostbusters next-gen video game, Loot studios has released a slew of Ghostbusters-related gear for users of Playstation Home to add to their collections.
The pack contains 5 ornament items: a Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man figure, a Slimer figure, a model of the ECTO-1, a model of a ghost trap, and a model of the P.K.E. meter. It also contains six t-shirts (three male, three female) featuring Stay-Puft, Slimer, and the ECTO-1 as designs.
The pack itself costs $1.99 to buy, or the ornaments can be purchased separately for $0.49 each. [Submitted by Areala]
As a pre-order bonus, several US retail outlets gave away codes for multiplayer Resistance 2 skin downloads back when the game was originally released. It's been several months now since Resistance 2 came out, and due to the demand from the fanbase, Sony has officially released both of the preorder skins (a Grim and Dr. Malikov) as free downloads for all regions of the Playstation Store as of May 28th, 2009!
Log on, grab your freebies, and then go frag someone. :) [Submitted by Areala]
Back at the end of 2008 when Eidos and Crystal Dynamics released the newest game in the Tomb Raider series, they narrowly avoided the deadline imposed by Sony for having all games released with Trophy support. Now, though, six months later, Eidos has announced that the PS3 trophies will be released for the North American version of the game on the 28th of May.
Why it's taken this long is anybody's guess, as Japan received a trophy patch for their version of the game months ago, and of course the 360 version shipped with its Achievements right on the disc.
In any case, it's good news for gamers like me who have been holding off on digging in too deeply to the new game for fear of suffering another "Uncharted" incident: beating the crap out of the game only to discover that trophies aren't retroactive and having to do it all over again. :) [Submitted by Areala]
Yes, it's the middle of May (sorry, I've been busy with the birth of my first child so I wasn't able to post this article in April), but in this article Areala digs up the dirt on some games that left her scratching her head in the month of April.
New service allows you to play high-end games on low-end hardware
Tuesday 24 March 2009 - 08:12:44
There's some fancy stuff going on over at the 2009 Game Developers Conference. One of them is a new service called OnLive.
The basic idea behind the service is that they are moving all of the heavy computing and rendering tasks involved with playing games from your home PC/console out to a top of the line server on the internet. So, you're essentially playing a game remotely on another PC through the internet.
What happens is that as you're playing the game, your input (keys pressed, buttons pushed, gamepad movements, etc.) get sent through the internet to the OnLive server. The server then "runs" the game using your input to determine what happens in the next frame of the game. Then it sends the image of the next frame back to your home PC. So, for example, you might be playing the latest FPS and you press the fire button. Their software simply tells the server that you pressed Fire and the server sends an image back to you of the gun firing.
The beauty of all this is that all you need is a fast internet connection to play the fanciest games on the market. It would no longer matter how powerful your PC is, what kind of graphics card you have, how much memory you have, etc. because none of that processing happens on your computer anymore. It doesn't even matter what platform the game runs on because the server handles that. They could have a PS3 server sending you back a PS3 gameplay experience without you ever owning one.
Then they went one step further and made it so that you don't even need a PC to do this. They created what they call a "micro-console" that's about the size of a remote control. You hook a gamepad, a TV, and your internet service into that thing and you're set.
I must say I'm excited at the potential of this and will definitely be keeping an eye on it. They've already got the support of several major publishers apparently and, as can be expected, the service will probably live or die based on the quality of their game offerings. Let's see what they give us.
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