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Sidestep Right Two Paces!
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2–3 minutes·
2 comments on Sidestep Right Two Paces!One of the most memorable children’s TV shows of my generation was Knightmare. Ah, Knightmare – a show that was about role-playing games, but oddly cool to be a fan of. In Knightmare, a team of four kids would try to get through a dungeon populated by all sorts of traps, baddies and dangers. Of…
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A Game by any other Name…
The term ‘Alternate Reality Game’ has been used to describe a vast variety of different games. These include traditional ARGs such as The Beast, to single-player games such as Jamie Kane, to immersive theatre productions such as Faust by Punchdrunk, to collaborative games without central narratives such as World Without Oil. I’ve also seen urban…
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Portal: The Way Forward
I’m not a fan of puzzles, and I don’t like first-person shooters like Halo or Doom, either. Despite this, I found myself irresistibly drawn to Valve’s new first-person puzzle game, Portal. The premise behind Portal is simple; you have a Portal gun that can create man-sized wormholes in walls, floors and ceilings that connect to…
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Rock Band Exclusive: All Sorts of Merchandise
Improbably enough, I was on stage this afternoon with Alex Rigopulos of Harmonix (creators of Guitar Hero 1 and 2, and Rock Band) talking about how ARGs and music games were similar. During the course of the conversation, Alex revealed a few details about Rock Band which I am fairly confident haven’t been announced elsewhere.…
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Free the Man Bookers!
I’m currently in Zurich at the GameHotel conference, so I don’t have much time to cover this, but The Times is reporting is talk of making all six shortlisted Man Booker prize novels available online for free. I say ‘talk’ because it’s not entirely clear what’s being discussed between the publishers, the Man Booker Prize…
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Barclays OnePulse: A Tale of Woe
The bottom line: Barclays hates its customers, and doesn’t even know how to run its business. A few months ago, I decided that I was finally going to move my current account away from Barclays to someone more sensible, like First Direct or Egg. Barclays is a big bank with a lot of branches, but…
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Let’s Change the Game
Achievement One of the most startling things about alternate reality games is what their players can achieve. When you have tens of thousands of highly motivated and tightly-knit players who urgently want to get to the next scene, even the most obscure puzzle can be solved, no matter what language it’s written in, or what…
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Bits and Pieces: The Future
This is almost exactly a year late, but Vernor Vinge, one of my favourite SF authors and perhaps the most insightful prognosticator I know of, gave the keynote lecture at the Austin Games Conference in 2006. He covers so much ground in the lecture that I suspect he lost a few people not familiar with…
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The BBC Civil War
It’s a shame to see what’s happening at the BBC now. With the TV license fee not increasing anywhere near as much as the BBC had hoped, something’s got to give, and people are all trying to point the finger at anyone but themselves. Jon Humphrys from the Radio 4 Today Programme suggested killing off…
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The Next Sony Reader
The first image of the new Sony Reader PRS-505 leaked out today on an electronics store website, no doubt ready for sales in the next month or two: At 128MB, the PRS-505 has double the memory of the previous model, meaning that it’ll be able to store about 160 books quite easily – enough to…
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