Lemony Snicket, author of the fantastic books, A Series of Unfortunate Events, (now a Major Motion Picture™), a.k.a Daniel Handler had this to say, among other things, about the Occupy Wall Street demonstration that is happening in response to the global financial crisis:
Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending.
Yeah! I guess he’s talking about the people laughing and drinking champagne from the balcony high above wall street protests.
So you know Portal, the little game that in everybody’s eyes single handedly created the genre “first person physics puzzler”. The much anticipated Portal 2 was released in 2011 and ever since, the portal gun meme has infected many games and popular culture.
We’ve blogged about the Super Mario Portal Mashup previously. And because portal guns are the bacon of video games – making everything better – why not start with the portal concept and mash it up with time dilation and discontinuity effects such as those that form the game mechanics in “Snapshot”?
Why not indeed?
Here’s Super Fun Dungeon Run:
You take photos which can be placed and then become portals that you can walk through, teleporting you like portals, to the position they were taken but with the crucial addition that they also hold time still until you enter them. Or until things exit from them! Ready to freak out?
And here’s 2d platformer Snapshot:
Which uses the snapshot mechanic in a way that brings to mind the incredible time-direction-reversing, lush, painterly Braid :
Is there no end to Portal Mashups? Not yet. There’s even a Minecraft Portal Mashup:
Long time readers will know we’ve covered the steel drum version, now hear a very capable and quite nicely played steel string acoustic version of electronic wunderkind Aphex Twin’s beautiful melodic array that is Alberto Balsalm
.
Look at how her eyes stay fixed. She cuts her hair, she gets ready for parties, her mood changes but she always takes the photo. Every day for 4.5 years.
Minecraft redstone creation videos are always trying to one-up each other. The nerdcore amongst us compete to take the crown for fastest or most compact implementation of some kind of machine – or to build something everyone before had assumed was impossible.
With this in mind, I introduce you to toasttify’s Piston Powered Monorail. Give it up for toasttify!! woo!
So obviously there are much smaller ways to do this… but this looks FREAKIN AWESOME
It’s a way to lend small amounts of money to people in poor countries who are trying to earn a crust. Small time entrepreneurs, you know, fishmongers and the like.
This video shows the flow of money loans across the globe over the past five years. It’s interesting to see how Kiva has grown in popularity and reach.
Hans Lemurson has managed to do that seemingly impossible self-reflexive stunt that all computer science students joked about once the first freaks began building a working computer within Minecraft by using redstone circuitry. “Ho ho, wouldn’t it be cool if you could build a computer out of redstone circuits in Minecraft that was able to run Minecraft! chortle chortle, hee hee.
Well since someone had already built a version of the game of Pong, Hans figured that some kind of Minecraft might not be impossible to create…
… and then he disappeared for some time.
When he re-emerged from his troll cave, Hans had constructed a 2D 8×8 pixel version of single-play Minecraft with mutable world pixels, player pixel and even turn-based gravity! He’s even managed to include a means to build Jump Towers!
It was supposed to be a simple demonstration of how to make a fireplace in your house. It became much more than that. In fact after several million youtube views, it’s pretty much become “how NOT to make a fireplace in your house”.
OMG this is so sick. What would happen if you took Super Mario Bros, the 16 bit classic video game par excellance and mashed it up with the greatest first person puzzler EVAH?
This:
And from the YouTube comments:
Portal guns are the bacon of gaming… they can only make it better!
Wooo! Getting excited. Minecraft 1.8 will be out within a couple of weeks according to mighty creator, Notch. In this preview from PAX, he demos many of the new features.
He also goes on to explain how the feature list for 1.8 became too large and Mojang has decided to split it into two releases, one that will become 1.9. This is good news because it means that 1.9 is already begun and 1.8 is soon upon us.
Some of the features demoed:
Creative mode
NPC Villages, little towns with little automatic people getting busy in them
New effects for explosions, lighting (including brightness control) and fighting.
New larger and more pronounced biomes
New terrain such as Rivers, Ravines and Plains
New Monster! Creepier than a creeper: The Enderman. Harmless until you look at them. They teleport towards you and can pick up blocks!
Experience points – though they have no effect yet
Hunger – you need to eat regularly even if you’re not damaged
Sprinting – short bursts of speed
This all amounts to a lot of excited little minecrafters who can’t wait and are counting down the sleeps until 1.8 is released. GO NOTCH!
See this is the music that computers are always humming to themselves. You can hear it when your headphone wire crosses too close to the hard drive or the wifi transceiver or when your mobile phone sits on the speaker. It’s not made for us but we can find this music and curate it, like picking wildflowers for the vase in the hall.
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