What if YOU were the Tetris block? What if, when you hit the “rotate” key, it was as if, from your perspective, the whole world rotated around you?
Well, I’ll tell you what — it sure makes the game a heck of a lot harder.
Play it at firstpersontetris.com.
I once read about a version of Risk/Monopoly where, every time you pass Go, you not only get $200 but also the chance to play a turn on the adjacent Risk board.
Now, someone has done something similar with Super Mario Bros. and Tetris. Two iconic games, with very different styles of play, yet they’ve been merged.
It’s ridiculous, but it’s fun.
(I don’t know what the copyright status would be, so enjoy it while you can!)
All you do is aim and fire. Watch for ships on both sides! So far, I haven’t been able to destroy any ships — hitting them with a torpedo just spins them around and they head back in the opposite direction (like a really old fair shooting gallery).
But that hasn’t stopped me from playing repeatedly. There’s a zen quality to the game. Click on the image below or here to go to the site. Then, click ‘CTAPT’ to start. If anyone manages any other translations, please let me know in the comments!
Okay, the question is more like this:
Which uses all more electricity: all the video game consoles in the United States (Xbox, PS3, Wii, etc), or the entire city of San Diego?
The answer is, they’re tied. I’ll throw some numbers at you, for context:
My eyes just about popped out of my head when I realized just how much power is being used by people leaving their video games on for days at a time, just because it’s easier than hitting the save button.
I learned about this from a New York Times story, but you can download the original report here, where you will also find out that using you game console as a Blu-Ray player uses several times more energy than a standalone player would.
Oh, and by the way: that’s 16 billion kWh of energy that San Diego and video games each use every year. The report’s authors estimate that 11 billion kWh of that could be trimmed with simple energy-saving ideas like an auto-save hibernation feature, like the one on your laptop.
A recent study hints that soldiers witnessing a horrific, traumatic event may be able to prevent flashbacks due to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) simply by playing a little Tetris.
Playing Tetris appeared to interfere with the brain’s ability to form a significant visuo-spatial memory of the traumatic event. Such memories are an important component to flashbacks. No such memories means a reduced likelihood of future flashbacks.
Granted, the study was conducted on undergraduate students as opposed to soldiers and the “traumatic” incident was a film not a true PTSD-inducing incident. Despite these limitations, this study is interesting in its implications.
First of all, do these findings suggest that in the future soldiers in the field will have a military-grade GameBoy tucked in their belt for emergency innoculations? (“Omigod! They shot Kenny! Break out the GameBoys, men!”) Will this have an effect on the efficacy of the military? (“How could you have missed that sniper on your perimeter check, Private?” “I was giving myself a PTSD shot, sir.”) Will the major video game companies be vying for military contracts?
On the other side of the coin, consider what this has done to those of us who have played way too much Tetris in our time. Is this visuo-spatial interference the reason I don’t remember my high school graduation? How I totalled my car the first time? The name of that girl I dated for three years?
If you want to conduct further studies on your own, you can play a free online version of Tetris here. Say good-bye to both your fears of PTSD and your productivity.
I’m pretty sure this was on BoingBoing a couple of days ago, but it wasn’t until my friend Kris said that it was cool and that I should watch it that I actually did. Boy, am I glad.
Although, I know this was a love paean to old NES-style video game action — complete with chiptune-style soundtrack — but all I could think of was, “Damn, I wish I had that much Lego!”
When I was a certain age, my brother and I were basically addicted to a game called Civilization (image above from here). We would play it for hours. Because we had borrowed and copied the floppies from a friend, every now and then we had to answer a challenge question. The question — always asking us what two technologies were required to make a further technological advance in the game — would have been easy to answer with the game’s manual, but we were too cheap to shell out for photocopying.
Luckily, we played it so much that it didn’t take long before we had the whole game’s technology tree memorized. So, this copy protection, while annoying, didn’t make us go out and buy the game.
I did, however, buy Civ3 when I was older and richer, because I knew that the manuals and posters included in the box were wicked cool. They weren’t actually as wicked cool as I had hoped, mind you, but you still got some stuff.
Now, of course, you’re lucky to get a printed “Quick Start Guide” when you buy anything computer-related.
Obviously, I know that it’s cheaper to ship a pdf on a CD than it is to print and bind a real manual, but game designers should realize that all that extraneous stuff had value to the end user.
Personally, I value LPs with included posters and psychedelic cover art far more highly than I value mp3s, which are just the music. Games are kind of the same way. I like being able to zone out with a game in front of my computer, but it was always nice to have something extra, something tangible, something that made the game feel like it was mine, and not my computer’s.
Chris Kohler at Wired feels the same way. He recalls buying an Indiana Jones game — just for the included “Grail Diary”:
The downside to this form of copy protection was that if you ever lost the manual … you’d render your game unplayable. …
I just find it interesting, in this day and age of protests against DRM, to look back on a time when game publishers occasionally found solutions that gave the consumer some notable benefits to make up for the fact that they were being inconvenienced by the copy protection schemes. I read the diary cover to cover before even installing the game.
I hope that the transition of everything to digital doesn’t mean we’re going to completely leave physical artifacts behind. In fact, I’d argue that the fact we’re wired into virtual stuff so much actually leaves us hungrier for “authentic” things. Companies would be wise to exploit that.
This was the original, if you’ll recall:
Like a grandparent’s worst horrifying nightmare of how kids these days will get their news, MSNBC now offers an online game called NewsBreaker. Ripped from any context, disembodied headlines float down from the top of your screen, but it’s difficult to read them since your goal is to run your paddle back and forth along the bottom, bouncing a ball up and down to break the brick wall at the top.
The headlines? Oh, you can collect 25 of them for a bonus life, but there’s no incentive to actually read the stories.
I’m not much of a video gamer. I know I have a Sega Genesis in the front room and rumour has it that there’s a GameCube in the house, too. But that’s it. We don’t have any Playstations or XBoxes or Wiis or whatever the big platform of the day is. That doesn’t mean I’m not fascinated by the technology.
Recently at E3, Microsoft released a demonstration video of the next level of gaming. It’s something else. In addition to voice and face recognition to identify players, absolutely no controller is needed. A motion-capture device is used to translate movement in the real world into the game. It is the stuff of science fiction.
Beyond the physical interactivity, which is undeniably a step above and beyond what currently exists, the jaw-dropping innovations come from the next piece — the one-on-one interactions an individual can have with a video game character. Some aspects of it are, though exceedingly cool, somewhat unsettling (notice the use of the ideas of “life” and “living” in the next video). It is truly the stuff of science fiction and is not that far from our living rooms.