Last year I blogged about a cool “game” that was a giant image where you had to solve cryptic clues of movie titles. Now there’s been a new chapter in the Tron viral game that does something similar but for video games.

If you haven’t been following what’s been happening with the Tron viral game, head on over to Firstshowing.com who have done some great coverage of it so far. The latest discovery of the game is the site Arcade Aid which features an image of a huge pixel city with 56 hidden video game references. Once you solve all 56 references, you can get a ”Special Access” Encom ID, which will most probably lead to another step of the viral game some time in the future.

I’ve only got 10 so far (and then I decided I should blog about it first before continuing with it), but I already love some of the cryptic clues. How many were you able to solve?

Regular MissGeeky readers will know how addicted I am to the Final Fantasy games. I haven’t played that many games the past two years, but FF is something that will always get me hooked. The latest edition to this epic series will be coming out on March 9th, after a 4 year gap of no FF games. Like I said in previous posts this game is what will finally convince me to get a PS3 or an Xbox360.

So I was excited to see that there’s a special UK launch event happening on the 9th at the HMV on Oxford Street! Both Yoshinori Kitase, the producer of the game, and Isamu Kamikokuryo, the game’s art director, will be there to sign games and answer any questions. Also the first 50 people to show up dressed in Final Fantasy costumes will be treated to the soundtrack cd of FFXIII. Plus anyone who attends will have the chance to win special goodies.

Date: 9th March 2010
Time: 5.30pm – 7:30pm
Address: HMV, 150 Oxford Street, London, W1D1DJ

Awesome! I wish I could make it, but I’m flying in that day from the Netherlands, so regrettably won’t be able to join.

Funny little flash game where you have to turn gears. It’s only 20 levels, but gets pretty tricky:

I can’t wait till this game comes out in March! Regular readers here will know how much I love the Final Fantasy series, and this latest installment looks gorgeous. I haven’t heard that many good reviews about the storyline though, but even that won’t stop me from getting this game. Enjoy:

The past couple of years I haven’t been gaming that much; besides the occasional small game on the Nintendo DS, I think the last real proper games I played were Kingdom Hearts 2 and Final Fantasy XII on the PS2. A couple of months ago I borrowed a Wii, but I haven’t actually “played” anything on that besides EA Personal Trainer. There are however a lot of games out there that I want to try, but just never got around to getting.

Also so far it hasn’t seemed like a good idea to invest in a PS3 or an Xbox 360; I know what type of games I like, and nothing that has come out so far seems worth getting a new console for. Especially with the amount of PS2 and Wii games I have yet to try out. But looking at the titles to be released in the next couple of months, I think that’s going to change. For starters Final Fantasy XIII is coming out in March and that for me is finally a game worth getting a PS3 for.

So here is a list of the games I’m interested in getting. Some are pretty old, some aren’t even out yet, but they all look like fun.

Final Fantasy XIII (PS3 & Xbox 360)

As I said above, Final Fantasy XIII is a must-have on my wish list. I’ve been addicted to this series ever since VIII came out, and I still can’t get enough from them. I’ve actually only finished 2 of the games I’ve played properly (from the 8 I own), but with “properly” I mean unlocking all items, all secrets, etc. I think I’ve put in at least 50 hours per game (with some of the extreme ones topping at least 150 hours). It’s one of the few games I know I will play exhaustively and the price-to-hours-of-gameplay ratio has kind of spoiled me for most other games. Release Date: March 2010

Dante’s Inferno (PS3 & Xbox 360)

I got to play this last week at a demo day from EA and I really like the look of it. I’ll try to post a full review of what I saw later this week. It’s based on, well, Dante’s Inferno, the first part of Dante’s poem Divine Comedy. The levels in the game actually correspond with the 9 circles of Hell mentioned in the poem and it’s interesting to see how they’ve interpreted the different aspects of the poem. Release Date: February 2010

God of War I, II & III (PS2 & PS3)

I’ve never played any of the God of War games, but they look awesome! You know how much of a sucker I am for Greek mythology, so God of War shouldn’t disappoint. Release Date: March 2010 for III, I and II are out now.

Sacred 2: Fallen Angel (PS3, Xbox 360, PC)

I was addicted to Sacred when it came out 5 years ago, but the game was so buggy I got stuck and never finished it. I’ve been eyeing it’s sequel since it came out, but was never sure if it was worth getting or not.

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days (Nintendo DS)

I’ve played all the previous Kingdom Hearts games and it’s another series I just love. It combines Final Fantasy with Disney! How could you not love that!

Scribblenauts

I’ve heard so much about this game, but have yet to play it. You basically have to solve puzzles by summoning objects by writing their names. You can write down anything you can think of which might help you, like ‘ladder’ but also stuff like celebrities, animals and internet memes.

What are the games you are hoping to get for Christmas? Any suggestions of games I might like?

Again I’m way behind in blogging about the events I’ve been going to. A couple of weeks ago I got to attend this year’s Playful, a one day conference with a great collection of speakers from different fields, all talking about game design. There were 16 talks in total, each 20-30 minutes long. I don’t have time (or the memory, to be honest) to tell you about all of them, but I’ll try to remember the highlights for me:

Roo Reynolds

Because of transport fail, I sadly missed the beginning of this talk, but Roo talked about the relationship between movies and video games. He gave examples of games of movies and movies of games (like Max Payne and Super Mario Bros), and that they rarely work that well. He also showed how games themselves are difficult to illustrate properly in movies. For example, there’s a part in the Trainspotting book about how the main character thinks he’s in a video game and is a great piece when you’re reading it. But the scene in the movie? Not that much. Another example (although not a video game) is the poker playing in Casino Royale. While for the rest it’s a great movie, that poker playing is ridiculous. Roo ended the talk with giving the one example of a movie/game which is the exception to the rule, where the movie and game go both ways and work perfectly on both levels: Tron.

Daniel Soltis

I should have been paying more attention to this talk, but I was busy replying to an important email (I know, lame excuse, but this was the type of email I couldn’t leave until later). Anyway, I missed most of what he said (anybody have a complete description somewhere?), but he ended with talking about a GPS puzzle box. The idea was basically geocaching in reverse: a box with a small lcd screen on it, that showed you how far you are from the goal location and you can only open the box on that specific goal location. The person who made it gave it as a wedding gift; the newlywed couple had to find the secret special location where they finally could open the box.

James Bridle

This talk was the highlight of the day for me, which is also why the description is a bit longer than the others. James talked about the idea of the miraculous, which pretty much leads to the idea of awesomeness. For him, when he thinks about things that are awesome (and miraculous) it all kept going back to scale and complexity. Quotes from Douglas Adams and Thomas Pynchon are great in showing how metaphors are used to illustrate the ideas of scale and complexity. He also showed how you have complexity in complexity, scale within scale: Zak Smith created a book of illustrations based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow. For every page in the 760 page book, he made an illustration, creating a complete new work based on the former. Another example was Tom Phillip’s books The Humument, where he painted over the pages of an old Victorian novel, creating a new narrative with new characters.

The same can be done with technology: with scale and complexity you can make strange mechanical objects and machines. For example, Heath Robinson’s contraptions of weird complex machines aimed in doing simple things. Another example was the predecessor of the Collusus (the machine that broke the Enigma code) which initially didn’t work, but they ‘changed the frequency’ and it did. Or Babbage’s difference engine machine, which surprisingly works even though it only was finished decades after the design was initially made on paper.

The best part of the talk though was a machine called MENACE: the Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine. It’s a ‘machine’ that plays noughts and crosses, built from 304 matchboxes. Each matchbox represents one of the 304 board layouts the opening player might face (excluding rotations etc) and contains glass beads representing the possible moves. During a turn, you pick the matchbox representing the state you’re in and randomly select a glass bead which shows you which move to make. The cool thing is though that MENACE can learn: every time you win a game you a glass bead to each of the matchboxes you used, corresponding to the moves you made (and vice versa when you lose). The more often you played the better MENACE became in knowing which moves to make. James found many simulation programmes for MENACE, but no reports of an actual machine: so he built one himself.

But how about scaling it up? Like for Go? So James started thinking about MAGE: the MAtchbox Go Engine. He did some calculations… and MAGE would need 3.4 x 10^15 matchboxes, each needing to hold 3610 beads. If each bead is 5mm, a match box would have to be 18m^3, which results in a final volume of 6.1 x 10^16. That’s larger than the Crab Nebula. Awesome.

James’s talk is completely online on his website Short Term Memory Loss.

Russell Davies

Russell first talked about the concept of bubble-building vs world-building. In world-building you’re trying to recreate reality, trying to build an actual replica of a world. It’s hard to do, cause there’s always something that can shatter the illusion. In bubble-building, you’re trying to build a bubble of illusion alongside our own world, drawing heavily on the power of pretending.

It’s these type of games, the ones that rely a lot on pretending, that Russell is most interested in. “These aren’t games, like the industry thinks of games, these are something a little less, these are Barely Games.” He gave all sorts of examples on how pretending is an everyday thing. His entire presentation is online, so if you’re interested in hearing more, just head on over there.

Chris O’Shea

Chris O’Shea’s talk was basically a showcase of all the cool projects he has worked on. Out of Bounds: an interactive museum installation that lets you “see” through walls as if you had x-ray vision (using an infrared torch and laser tracker). Air Guitar Championship: an interactive installation at Glastonbury, where festival go-ers could play air guitar. Flap To Freedom: a race between two people, each ‘controlling’ their own robot chicken by flapping your arms as fast as you can. Audience: an installation consisting of around 64 head-size mirror objects, with each object interacting with the visitors moving its head in a particular way to give it different characteristics of human behaviour. Some chat amongst themselves, some shy away and others confidently move to grab your attention. Beacon: similar to the Audience project, but with light beacons. The lights ‘interact’ with visitors, tracking their movements and reacting on them. Hand From Above: outdoor screens from the BBC, in which they added a giant hand of god into the real time video from people near the screens. People could see themselves on the screen being tickled, squashed, picked up and taken away by the giant hand.

There were loads more interesting talks, but these were the ones that really stood out to me (and that I still vividly remember after a couple of weeks). I’m guessing they’ll be doing it again next year, and if they do, I can highly recommend it!

I’m a major addict to the Final Fantasy games, and I’ve been waiting for the latest addition to the series for ages now. The main reason I still haven’t gotten a PS3 is because FF-XIII isn’t out yet, and I think that would be the game I’d primarily play on it (even though there are many more awesome titles out there, I just know I don’t have the time to get addicted to yet another series). So I’ve been waiting, and waiting until FF-XIII comes out to finally give me a reason to buy a PS3.

Anyhow, in Japan it was just announced that Sony is bringing out a limited edition PS3: the Final Fantasy Lightning Edition. Lightning is the main protagonist in the game, and she herself is printed in pink on the chassis of the PS3. Yep, pink…

I like how this looks like, even though I’m not much a fan of pink. I would have loved to see in this other colours, but despite the pink, I have to admit it looks pretty sleek.

It’s got a HDD space of 250 GB and ships with a version of FF-XIII. In Japan it’s priced at 41600 Yen (around the £280), but I wonder how much it’s going to be here (if it even is released here).

Via GirlyBubble

One of last year’s best conferences I went to was Playful 2008 (see my blog post about it); it was an interesting day with a fun collection of speakers from different fields, all talking about game design (without necessarily being game designers or working within games). It was great to hear that this year they would hold another event, and the lineup of speakers is again pretty amazing.

Here is Playful’s description of what their event is all about:

Playful is a one-day event all about games and play – in all their manifestations, throughout the contemporary media landscape. It’s a conference for architects, artists, designers, developers, geeks, gurus, gamers, tinkerers, thinkerers, bloggers, joggers, and philosophers. We look at what PLAY means both creatively and culturally, and put speakers on the stage who offer different perspectives on where we are currently, where we’ve been, and where we’re going. We want people walking away talking about the nature of games…what they mean to different people inside, on the periphery, outside or miles away from the industry.

Check out their programme to see the full list of speakers that will be there. I know all the talks will most probably be great, but in particular I myself am looking forward to a couple of the speakers: Robin Burkinshaw, who is behind the blog Alice and Kev (an experiment in The Sims 3 with two homeless sims), Simon Oliver, the founder of indie games studio HandCircus, creators of the Rolando series for the iPhone, and Roo Reynolds, because his talk from last year was awesome!

There are still a couple of tickets available on the Playful evenbrite page for only £40. That’s a bargain compared to most conferences! But be quick: tickets are limited, and I have no doubt that these will be snapped up before you know it.

So, see you all at Playful?

I’m loving this cute photo spread from French magazine Amusement, picturing the actual way video games are manufactured. Here’s what they have to say about Tetris:

When Alexei Pajitnov first ordered a load of bricks from Karpov Abramtsevo’s workshop, workers there were wondering who could be interested in all those right-angled blocks. No one in 1985 could have imagined those concrete Tetriminos would become world famous and constitute Russia’s deadliest weapon against Reagan’s America.

And Mario:

In 1995, the collaboration between Oita’s mushroom farms and Nissin Foods Co. in Sapporo revolutionised the conditioning techniques of the time, also bringing biochemistry out of labs and onto a global stage. Without Shigeru Miyamoto’s 750 billion colored (shiitake) mushrooms, the Japanese food processing industry wouldn’t have cruised through the 1990s with the same optimism.

Besides these two they’ve also got images of Arkanoid, Pong and Sonic.

I still want to blog about the fun I had at this year’s Hide & Seek Festival. As usual there was lot’s of running around (lots and lots), puzzle solving and random silliness. I hope to blog about it in more length some time this week, but for now here’s a short video about it:

This is part of this week’s Pocket TV episode, a new music based show hosted by Holy Moly’s Matt Edmondson. Every week, you’ll be able to watch a new episode in full or broken down into 5 segments so it’s a bit like jumping to a scene on a DVD. Simple and easy.

I like the idea of the show, but I’m not that much into current music myself. It’s not that I don’t listen to music (I do, a lot), but seriously 90% of my music library consists of movie soundtracks, TV show soundtracks and West End musicals; I’m not exactly up to date with the “hottest” music out there. However, if you are into music, Pocket TV seems pretty fun.

Check out the Pocket TV channel on YouTube.