Rock, Paper, Shotgun

What you need to find on this site as you get into work in the morning is something that will distract you from working for the rest of the day, if not month. It’s the Wikipedia Game. You may have played it yourself in the past – especially if you’re a listener of the Collings & Herrin podcast, which set similar challenges a couple of years back. The idea is to get from one random subject to another in the fewest number of clicks. You can use any hyperlink on the page to get there (without editing your own in). And now it’s been automated at WikipediaGame.org. You can play anonymously, or create an account for score bragging, and then compete in 150 second challenges to get between the two subjects in the fewest clicks. The scores appear in a the box on the left of the screen. Right, good luck getting anything done.

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News breaks that Telltale have signed up the licences for Jurassic Park (mildly excited) and Back To the Future (VERY EXCITED INDEED). Not much to say yet, except they’ll be out in Winter and Ste Curran spent most of the early 00s hanging around in Bath Night Clubs saying “I Like It When Biff Gets His Head Stuck In the Manure… he tries to get McFly, but McFly is too quick for him!”. I have no idea if this was a reference or not, but I still find it funny. Let’s hope that the games are better than the first Back to the Future on the Spectrum…
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Blue spotted that there’s a new trailer out for City Interactive’s long-distance-death themed shooter (with occasional knives) Sniper: Ghost Warrior, and it’s really pretty neat. (And really below the click). The trailer shows that the different difficulty settings will mean, how sniper finds his way around the level, hapless soldiermen under crosshairs, and how the stealth mode works. I’m not expecting this one to be a classic, but it might just be an okayic.
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Portal 2 delayed? The E3 surprise definitely not Half-Life 3? It seems there is more news from Aperture Science, and it’s arriving via strange transmissions from the Valve mothership. I’ve posted the full release below.
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It’s the last ever Mod News! And by “ever” I mean “for a fortnight”. Why? I’m going to keep you in suspense and tell you right at the end of this post. In the meantime, here’s some tasty treats from the modding world to clasp your big mouth around. Onwards!
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When analysing the claims made by those from various fields with regards to the negative effects of gaming it’s tempting to come to the same conclusion each time. These claims, inevitably presented without evidence (and unable to offer evidence when it is asked for), tend to rely on uncited anecdotal stories of individual cases. Whether it is suggestions that games cause addiction, violence, sexual crimes or murder, we are told about one child, or one individual, whose behaviour appears to be adversely effected while playing games. And the conclusion that’s so tempting to reach for each time is: perhaps this individual has unique circumstances that reach beyond a pathology created by the games they play? But there’s a problem. While this conclusion may appear extremely reasonable given the evidence, it’s still an unproven assumption. It’s just as bad to declare as the unproven assumptions being contested. Which makes a new study (as reported by GI.biz), that finds violent behaviour in response to games to be directly linked to individual predispositions, something of enormous interest.

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Lack26 spotted this in the Telegraph, and it’s interesting. Basically, the Russian Ministry of Communication has requested 500 million roubles (or 10.8 million quid) to develop six patriotic games, mainly about the patriotic war, because they think the games industry is overwhelmingly slanted towards presenting Russians as dodgy. As Youth Policy Committee member Pavel Zyryanov puts it to the Telegraph…

What we need is more programmers who have a patriotic education, who are on the right ideological level… Computer games today are part of a vital ideological platform that effects the consciousness of our young people. They learn history, they adopt values, and it’s important that this process is given a pro-Russian background.

More below, including quotes about Bears on Unicycles…
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It seems that after the success of Dungeons & Dragons Online going free to play, Lord Of The Rings Online is to adopt a similar model. We found out a bit more about what that means by talking to Adam Mersky, Director of Communications at Turbine, and Kate Paiz, Executive Producer for the project. They explained how they see this new model as the logical, mature direction for MMOs, and how removing the subscription could be the best approach for the future of online entertainment.
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Michael Castle (who sounds like an action here, if ever there was one) alerts us that indie platformer Eversion has cropped up on Steam. Which is, of course, good news for its creator Guilherme S Tows, aka Zaratustra Productions, but may mean almost nothing to you. Thing is, you can rectify that very easily.

About a year and a half ago, Zaratusta submitted Eversion to a TIGsource compo, but in a rather more lo-fi state than it is now. This means that, essentially, the entire game is its own demo – once you’ve established that you like it, you pay to make it slicker and prettier. I can almost imagine some publisher deliberately employing that kind of strategy to try and defeat the trade-in market…

You’re going to think Eversion is Mario. Eversion is not Mario.
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I thought about doing an “Is this Left 4 Dead 3?” gag-headline to follow-up Kieron’s GIMPery, but then I realised the entire internet would probably come and burn my house down.

This’ll still be a little contentious, probably – the release of fan campaign (fanpaign?) I Hate Mountains is being heralded as “the first day anyone has played L4D1 in over half a year.” That’s what a guy on Moddb says anyway, the big joker.
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Just spotted this over at That Videogame Blog, and it’s worth taking a look at. A video-editing ninja has taken the most recent GTTV interview and respliced it to contain just the in-game footage from Crysis 2, which gives us four minutes and nineteen seconds of purified game action (with dev rambling in the background). Looks like a first-person shooter to me, but then I am very old, and I have many troubles. Also: the humanoid aliens make me nod in agreement.
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