-
Wireless Steering Wheel with Force Feedback – 360 review
Obviously videogames are completely ridiculous. This much is made most obvious by the ones that pretend they’re not. Those games which present themselves as very, very serious simulations of real life activities all too easily forget that they’re played in front of a television, usually using a silly piece of plastic with sticks and buttons ...
-
Zendoku – DS review
Pseudoku? That’s what you might be thinking when you first spot Eidos’ irreverent replacement of Sudoku’s traditional numbers for seemingly arbitrary eastern symbols. But rest assured, this is the same orthodox pen and pencil puzzle game that depressingly saved British newspaper sales in all but name and face. Of course, the recently ubiquitous Japanese puzzle ...
-
Wisdom re-applied #5
“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” Albert Einstein gives Todd Goldman some late advice as to how to keep the entire internet from scrutinising his work and uploading all traces of plagiarism.
-
Diner Dash – DS review
Undress any good videogame, be it Crackdown, Chuckie Egg, Civilisation or Counter-Strike, and often what you’re left with is basically Tetris. Videogames might have ten thousand different faces and costumes to distinguish themselves from one another, but scratch off the scenario and the good ones all employ the same principles, logic, framework and tricks. We’re ...
-
Saul Williams writes openly to Oprah
‘In Hip Hop, every emcee is automatically pitted against every other emcee, sort of like characters with super powers in comic books. No one wants to listen to a rapper unless they claim to be the best or the greatest. This sort of braggadocio leads to all sorts of tirades, showdowns, battles, and sometimes even ...
-
Armageddon and 6° of Separation
[A global temperature rise of] three degrees would see increasing areas of the planet being rendered essentially uninhabitable by drought and heat. In southern Africa, a huge expanse centred on Botswana could see a remobilisation of old sand dunes, much as is projected to happen earlier in the US west. This would wipe out agriculture ...
-
Best Thing I Saw Today #12: Live Ant Advertising
The task was to communicate that anything made with Sugar Free tastes the same as when made using sugar. To dramatise this, we decided to use the most credible ambassadors for sweetness – ants. We experimented with syrup made of Sugar Free and sweet lime, and found that even the ants couldn’t tell the difference. ...
-
Izuna: Legend of the Unemployed Ninja – Nintendo DS Review
Applicant ref. no: 9-26-21-14-1 Applicant review Name: Izuna Age: 16 Marital Status: Single, straight and under-age Nationality: Japanese Address: Currently residing in North America Blog: http://www.atlus.com/izuna/ Education: ASCII adventure games, Rogue, Chocobo’s Mysterious Dungeon, Diablo. Languages: A native Japanese speaker, Izuna seems to have worked hard and commendably (under the tutelage of Atlus’ expert translators) ...
-
The Copycat Effect
“To listen to CNN and MSNBC is to watch the news people stumble through this story. These cable news people certainly should be aware that there is a copycat effect going on here. They have been reporting on this for ten years now, and can’t see the legacy between wall-to-wall coverage and what happens when ...
-
Imaginations at war
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. It is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.” – Albert Einstein Lawrence Thornton’s 1987 novel Imagining Argentina, set in the war-ridden country of the 1970s, presents a protagonist who enjoys “a peculiarly miraculous gift”. Carlos Rueda has the capacity to create futures by acts of anticipatory ...
-
Wisdom re-applied #4
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward. Kurt Vonnegut advises humanity as to the most sensible response to his death last night, in vain.
-
300 – PSP review
It’s hard to imagine a greater tale of probability confounded than the story of the small band of Spartans who took a heroic stand against the advancing Persian Empire at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC. Certainly there’s never been an easier time to hear of about it, thanks to modern capitalism’s excellence at ...