By Adam Smith on September 11th, 2012 at 7:00 pm.
“Very important, historical Khan game”, thecatamites writes, introducing his latest jolly hockysticks adventure, The Pleasuredromes of Kubla Khan. It’s experimental learning, an explorable history lesson with a life of its own that has a rant at Edward Said and then almost literally vanishes up its own backside. There are probably all kinds of gloriously detailed and accurate details to discover but it’s possible to rush through the lesson in five minutes or so if you’re that way inclined. Go and learn!
Use the comments to make a list of all the clever things you learned. I’ll start by admitting that I didn’t realise until now that ancient Mongolia looked like it was coated in pizza topping. This may well be the most ambitious first-person study guide that you play with today.
Since you clicked for more despite there being no promise of a trailer or anything of the sort, I feel compelled to provide something worth all that time and effort. For exerting yourself in such a grand fashion, enjoy this link to Crime Zone, which is possibly the most brilliantly absurdist game I’ve ever played.
11/09/2012 at 19:16 MOKKA says:
I just learned that I have yet to install a program to extract files on this PC.
11/09/2012 at 19:31 Bhazor says:
I just learned that Unity still doesn’t lock your mouse cursor to the window. And that this is the dumbest design decision.
11/09/2012 at 20:03 eks says:
What do you mean?
If you mean to the game/window area then yeah, that sucks and you would be pretty surprised by how many commercial games are like this. I never even noticed (or cared) until I got a second monitor. For the majority of game types this small decision to not capture the mouse completely can be game breaking.
In an FPS it means your mouse can end up on the other monitor and gets out of “sync”. In an RTS it means you can’t use the mouse to scroll at the edge of the screen etc…
Anyway, that’s my rant for the day over. Opinion Away!
11/09/2012 at 21:08 Bhazor says:
The best example was when I was playing an fps and ended up launching Batman Arkham Asylum by double clicking the icon.
Things turned out better than expected.
11/09/2012 at 21:10 allen says:
Unity does have this option, but some developers don’t use it (or perhaps don’t know how to). seems like they use Screen.showCursor = false (which just hides it) instead of Screen.lockCursor = true (which hides it and locks it)
if any Unity devs are reading this, please make your games use Screen.lockCursor = true; !!
12/09/2012 at 12:28 ColOfNature says:
You might find this useful.
11/09/2012 at 19:20 Xerophyte says:
I learned that the opium dreams of 19th century poets have remarkably low polygon counts. I assume it’s a hardware limitation.
11/09/2012 at 23:55 ZIGS says:
They only had single-core pipes back then
11/09/2012 at 19:22 Bhazor says:
On the topic of Genghis Khan and his wacky family antics Dan Carlin is doing a pretty exhaustive biography on the man.
http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hharchive/Show-43—Wrath-of-the-Khans-I/Mongols-Genghis-Chingis
11/09/2012 at 23:25 Arglebargle says:
Thanks for this! The waves of nomad invasions off the steppes is actually a focus of mine, nice to see this sort of thing.
11/09/2012 at 19:26 N says:
Crime Zone is cool, this is crap.
11/09/2012 at 19:47 JohnArr says:
I have learned a profound appreciation of Tacticus.
Also that History teachers don’t wear pants.
11/09/2012 at 19:48 N says:
…tacticus
12/09/2012 at 12:31 ColOfNature says:
You’ve never heard of Tacticus?
11/09/2012 at 20:06 HexagonalBolts says:
Man I love Edward Said
12/09/2012 at 15:20 lionheart says:
He’s my favourite post-colonialist bullshit-artist charlatan western civilization hating extraordinaire too!
(I really hope you were being sarcastic and/or are a 14 year old middle class Maoist)
25/09/2012 at 18:20 moyogo says:
I also like Edward Said. Please take your heart medication.
11/09/2012 at 20:08 jorygriffis says:
I played this the other day on freeindiegam.es (I expect it’ll be included in this weekend’s Live Free, Play Hard, too?) and just loved it. I had to play it twice–part because it was short and wonderful and part because it ends so abruptly I thought it may have been a bug or something. The second time through I was able to appreciate the abruptness.
11/09/2012 at 21:06 Bhazor says:
Don’t forget the secret ending. Want to know how to get it? Lemmin give you a clue.
11/09/2012 at 20:13 toastmodernist says:
Remember Space Funeral?
That was a game.
11/09/2012 at 20:17 Oak says:
Incorrect; it was a poached egg.
12/09/2012 at 02:34 PleasingFungus says:
thecatamites for god-dictator of reality
12/09/2012 at 03:59 xaphoo says:
I read this with a sense of foreboding, and know I have to play this, because I am a graduate student studying, in part, medieval Eurasian steppe societies… this could get ugly…
12/09/2012 at 04:10 xaphoo says:
Ok, actually I enjoyed it. It’s a good simulation of what it’s like to do history research: start out with enthusiasm, thinking you can accurately represent the past, and end up instead with masses of writhing bodies you don’t understand.
12/09/2012 at 10:15 Arglebargle says:
I got ahold of a bunch of class notes from one of the doyens of Inner Asian history, and they were pretty funny: ‘We don’t know much, and what we thought we knew was mostly wrong’. Hopefully it has gotten somewhat better in more recent times.
12/09/2012 at 06:49 Metonymy says:
It’s possible to RUSH through, eh?
I can’t think of a Coleridge joke.