G-Force simulators for the home

Do want! But screw those screens, this seems tailor made for an Oculus :)




Maybe for the arcades?

Epic VR setup

Amazing omnidirectional treadmill which allows you to walk and it uses paintball guns FFS! :)

UPDATE: The full video has been posted:

The hosts are kind of annoying but the setup is very impressive, though I see room for improvement. I'd try to make that gun more realistic by removing the onscreen gun because you're already carrying a gun, and also removing the small screen on the gun. Use the Kinect to see when you're looking through the scope and then change the view on the projected screen accordingly. Also I'd put the paintball gun stands outside the tent with small holes to shoot through. Maybe placing fans and heaters/coolers to simulate wind and temperature. Then you'd really feel the heat when you step outside into the sun.

How much would you pay if these systems became available in an arcade? I think I would pay around €10 per half hour, I doubt you can play much longer because you'd get tired.

Kerbal Space Program

Kerbal Space Program is a multi-genre game where the player can create his own space program. In KSP, you must build a space-worthy craft, capable of flying it's crew out into space, without killing them. At your disposal is a collection of parts, which must be assembled to create a functional ship. Each part has it's own function and will affect the way a ship flies (or doesn't). So strap yourself in, and get ready to try some Rocket Science!

Main Features:

• The Vehicle Assembly Building. Allows players to build spacecraft out of any imaginable combination of parts.
• Fully-fledged, Physics-based Flight Simulation ensures everything will fly (and crash) as it should.
• Procedural Terrain delivers detailed terrain at a vast scale. The Kerbal Planet is 600km in radius!
• Mod-enabled, allows players to create new content and modify the game.
• Ship systems. Keep an eye out for engine temperatures and fuel levels, and try not to explode.
• Build ships with multiple stages, and jettison parts away as they burn out.
• Full control over the staging sequence allows for complex ships and advanced functionality.

The game is still in development, but it's already a lot of fun, and it can be downloaded for free. Below there are some videos of people doing it wrong. There are also videos of people doing well, but it's more fun to find out yourself how to build a good rocket.

I've so far failed at going orbital. It is definitely possible to orbit, use transfer orbits, and deorbit, as this video shows. There are also tips on the forum. I did manage to reach a virtual escape velocity, going vertically at 2800m/s, it did slowly tick down so I guess it would land again after weeks if not more of waiting :)

I really like building the rockets and also experimenting with silly designs. I love how the different stages detach and how rockets can spin out of control. PRO-TIP: In the assembly building there is a circle button on the top left which you can click to the desired symmetry and then the parts you attach will instantly be spaced that way.

The future of this game also looks bright with all the planned features, such as much more rocket parts, and all kinds of missions such as satellite deployment, or landing on the moon and other planets.

Mortal Kombat returns to form

You all probably remember the awesome ultra-violence of Mortal Kombat. I hadn't yet seen some of the fatality footage of the newest Mortal Kombat. And wow, this shit is pretty gruesome.

Maybe too gruesome? :)

If you're feeling like more gore, you can see them all here.

Unreal Engine 3: Nerdgasm

Be sure to watch full screen HD.

The story of Minecraft

Bear with me, this is a long story for our blog, but it has been an development I've found quite interesting and have been playing myself.

This is what you are greeted with on the frontpage of Minecraft.net:

Minecraft is a game about placing blocks to build anything you can imagine. At night monsters come out, make sure to build a shelter before that happens. It also has music by C418! So far 4270804 people have registered and 1300092 people bought the game. More stats here.

You are dropped in the world and have to figure out what to do, there is NO in-game tutorial.

However the Minecraft community is large and productive and there are many tutorial videos (Funniest tutorial video around). There is also the Minecraft Wiki and many forums that that go into detail of the many things one can do in Minecraft.

As of now 1,300,124 people have bought the game for a price between €10 for the alpha version and €15 for the later beta version. Up to the beta the whole project was mostly created by one man, aka Notch, and the sounds were done by C418. So what transpired to make Minecraft such a huge success? The seed that planted Notch's vision of Minecraft was a game called Infiminer (free download).

MineWiki: Infiniminer is the game Minecraft was originally based upon. It was developed by Zachtronics Industries, and released in steps of incremental updates during April-May 2009. It quickly garnered a following on message boards around the internet, and eventually inspired Notch to start working on Minecraft. Like Minecraft, Infiniminer is a block-based digging/building game. It was originally intended to be played as a team-based competitive game, where the goal is to locate and excavate precious metals, and bring your findings to the surface to earn points for your team. However, as the game gained popularity, players decided it was much more fun to build things than to compete for points. Zachtronics discontinued development of the game less than a month after its first release. The source code was made public, spawning a handful of mods and spin-offs, but the game eventually faded into obscurity as the more polished Minecraft was announced.

From the words of Notch:

I found Infiniminer. My god, I realized that that was the game I wanted to do. I played it in multiplayer for a while and had a blast, but found it flawed. Building was fun, but there wasn’t enough variation, and the big red/blue blocks were pretty horrible. I thought a fantasy game in that style would work really really well, so I tried to implement a simple first person engine in that style, reusing some art and code (although not as much as you’d think) from RubyDung, and came up with this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9t3FREAZ-k

After a lot of coding, Notch produced Minecraft Classic on the 17th of May, 2009. This mode is still free to play so you can get a feel of the game, though feature and game wise it's far behind the paid version.

It is in the old (free) creative server hosted by Reddit that I first encountered the world of Minecraft. It was a Reddit only multiplayer server where people could just build stuff by plomping different blocks down. This is where I made my first big structure (The Dom Tower).

Notch continued to work furiously on the game and after a few intermediate updates (Survival Test, Indev,Infdev) he released Minecraft Alpha on the 28th of June 2010, only slightly more than a year after he started. Compared to classic, Alpha was filled with all manners of new content and possibilities. Most importantly a survival aspect was added to the game. Monsters come out at night and are found in caves, take shelter or take up arms against them. By using the different materials you mine you can craft all manner of objects like swords, arrows, armor, farming, food, boats, railcarts and tracks, also logic circuits which are almost exclusively used by the very tech geeky (NOFI) userbase of Minecraft.. Alpha also included different biomes like snowy, grassy, and desert (see the almost infinitely large landscapes here), also an Underworld called the Nether was created, accessible by portals.

It's is very rare for an Alpha version of a game to ask for money (€10), but this was also an investment, because anyone who bought it in Alpha is guaranteed to also get the beta version (€15), and the final release (€20) and any additions that might come later.

Many people who had played the classic version were quite willing to invest the money to get the Alpha version. Almost all of the sales of Minecraft have been driven by word of mouth advertisements, and Minecraft related posts ending up on many (game)blogs. Obsessed Minecrafters have been producing amazing structures (example 1, 2, 3, 4 ,5) which often get reposted on social media sites. Minecraft sales really started to explode when fanbases were created on sites such as Reddit/r/Minecraft/, forums, and popular gaming press sites.

At one point the influx of new users was so high that the account verification servers crashed. In a gesture of goodwill Notch then gave away free Minecraft to anyone for one weekend. This seemed to be a good idea because it resulted in even more people buying it after the weekend was over.

A lot of money came in, so much that Paypal froze $763,000 on Notch's account because they were suspicious of the sudden large influx of money. The issue was sorted quickly though. Notch then decided it was necessary to start a company, Mojang, to deal with the business and programming sides of such a successful game. The work that went into this distracted Notch a lot from his coding work, so progress was slow during this time, and entitled little shitfaces started whining on many forums about why he wasn't releasing weekly updates.

On December 20, 2010 Mojang felt confident enough to release Minecraft Beta, this upped the price to €15. The Beta fixed a few multiplayer issues and also included some elements the community had been asking for. The addition of note blocks allowed some obsessed people to create whole songs in Minecraft. The inclusion of dyes allowed people to shear sheep, color the wool and create all kinds of colorful buildings.

Of course you could also just use the dyes to make colored sheep.

No one knows when Minecraft Final will be released only that it will cost €20 at release. Everyone is curious about the things that might still be included before the final version. However the future of Minecraft isn't solely in the hands of Notch and Mojang.

Because of the relative ease at which the Java code Minecraft was built in could be altered, the modding community really took off. There are many mods now that truly increase the beauty and possibilities of Minecraft. There are tons of different texture packs that make the game look strikingly different and prettier in some cases. Modders have added tons of new creatures to the world, new items, new craftable equipment and even flying mounts. People have also been improving the graphics and lighting engine.

Besides the isolated single player survivor mode, you can also play multiplayer worlds. Whereas in Creative you just build (or troll other people), in Survival you can craft and battle each other and monsters. Creative multiplayer maps have yielded some extraordinarily grand designs as can be seen here on a Google Maps like viewer of the old Reddit server.

This has been a brief summary, it can go much deeper. After reading this, many people will still be confused about why Minecraft is fun and what the point of it is? There is no end boss to fight after all (until someone makes a mod for it). You could see it as a giant immersive LEGO playground where you mine the land and use your creativity to build nice things which also protect you from monsters that come out at night. The only way to find out if it appeals to you is to watch some of the videos on youtube, I recommend some of the Yogscast videos, these guys can be hilarious too. You could also play a bit on the free creative servers, or just take the jump and buy the beta version for €15.

Since I started on this post 750 people have bought this game.

I shouldn't have to deal with this shit

IBM super computer Watson beats Jeopardy players

This is quite a big step. Watson understand natural language questions and uses a range of algorithms to give sensible answers. Not to long from now Watson will be the world champion. More @ Engadget

Super PSTW Action RPG

The game is worth playing if only for the epic dramatic reading of a comment review here.

Carnegie Mellon about how games will influence the future

How games will influence the future. The start is boring old stuff. After 20 min he got some nice thoughts.

DS Games - E3 2011 - Wii Fit Plus

PIXELS

Fifa 1994 Development Team

FIFA 94 And id software (1992) from classics like Doom and Commander Keen:

Civilization song

I'm quite addicted to Civilization V at the moment :)

History of the Soviet Union arranged to the melody of tetris

Loved this song. I didn't realize anyone could ever use the tetris-song for anything good.

20 years of top PC games

I was looking through this image of PC games over the last 20 years and was quite shocked to see how many I've actually played :)

My Minecraft creation

Minecraft is not really a game but more a world where 'players' can come together and just build stuff. All creations you see are by different users on the Reddit server. I made the golden roads and the Dom Tower. Building stuff is easy, you just select your block, right click places a block, left destroys a block. Was a lot of work though, but it's really addicting :)

Vector Park

Vector park is the site of a great flash designer who has made some very creative, bizarre, trippy and fun flash things. Like Feed the Head, which you could call a game because you can finish it, but it's more like a toy. Also be sure to check out Windowsill, which sadly, you can only play halfway without paying.

Fun interactive 3D simulating cube

Cubee is an interactive cubic fish tank VR display system that enables viewing from around all the screens. Its perspective-corrected rendering and real-time physics simulation establish an interaction metaphor of having real objects inside a physical box that a user can manupulate.

Apple Shooter

The best part of this flash game is losing. Try it out, there are many different ways to lose :)

One Button Bob

A fun and original flash game that can be played using only the left mouse button. Click here to play it.