Cartoon Network actually has a Stark Tower Defense game. Seriously.
Unfortunately, the title works a lot better than the actual game, which is a shame.
Tag: Computer Games
Open Source Theme Hospital Clone
CorsixTH is an open source clone of Bullfrog’s 1997 game Theme Hospital. Playing the clone requires either a copy of the original game or a copy of the demo version of the game.
As the Google code page for the project notes,
As computers evolve, we risk losing some classic games. Bullfrog’s Theme Hospital, published in 1997, is a classic simulation game, but getting it to run natively on modern operating systems is getting progressively harder.
This project aims to reimplement the game engine of Theme Hospital, and be able to load the original game data files. This means that you will need a purchased copy of Theme Hospital, or a copy of the demo, in order to use CorsixTH. After most of the original engine has been reimplemented in open source code, the project will serve as a base from which extensions to the original game can be made.
Good show. The Bullfrog game I would really like to see get this treatment, however, is Syndicate Wars. Not sure if that game is playable on modern hardware.
What Are Game Achievements For?
Whether you love them, can’t stand them, or could care less, achievement systems within games are clearly here to stay. Personally, I’m a big fan of achievements, both to track my progress in a game in general as well as in relation to other people as well as to give an excuse to do goofy things that I might not otherwise think to try out. And, of course, they’re yet another form of the constant reward/reinforcement system that most good video games have really nailed down (usually complete with visual effect and even music to further reinforce the reward).
But as one young woman profiled by Kotaku demonstrates, once you start adding achievements with assigned points to games, some people will start playing the achievements themselves as a sort of meta-game. The games themselves are simply something to grind through on the way to an achievement score. In the case of the Kotaku profile, Kristen has amassed an XBOX gamerscore of 165,000 and is grinding her way to 200,000, frequently playing games she could care less about except for the achievement points she can gain from them.
Quite a few people in the comments don’t see the point of playing the achievement system as a game, but that seems just as legitimate a way to approach video games as any other.
Post I.T. Shooter
Post I.T. Shooter is a basic shooter game done on a 32 x 24 grid of Post-It Notes in stop-motion like effect. The gameplay itself is very basic and nothing to write home about, but the presentation and graphical styling is awesome. This was put together by Kloonigames which puts out an experimental game each month and is done by the developer behind Crayon Physics Deluxe.
Zombie Driver
What does the world need now? MORE ZOMBIE GAMES!
Enter, Exor Studios’ Zombie Driver in which the player drives cars around, upgrading them or choosing new cars with different features, all the while mowing down zombies and rescuing survivors. Supposed to be released sometime in November 2009, but no pricing as of yet on the website.
How I Finally Quit Playing WoW
I realized the other day that I’d finally quite playing World of Warcraft (though I still haven’t canceled my subscription). Oddly, it wasn’t that I woke up one day and suddenly said “no more WoW” but rather that I just gradually stopped finding reasons to log in and just sort of stopped while I carried on with other things in my life.
Part of the reason is the Xbox. On the one hand, I have never found playing games on a console nearly as captivating or engaging as games on the PC. With PC games, you feel like you’re playing the game; on the Xbox it often feels like the games are playing you, since they tend to be far more linear and have fewer options.
But that’s not a bad thing in that it is a lot easier to hop on the Xbox and play for an hour or two, and then actually stop and go back to what I was doing. I could rarely do that with a good PC game.
The second thing that’s nice about the Xbox is precisely that it isn’t my PC. So laptop=writing/web browsing/productivity. Xbox=blowing off steam for an hour. And ne’er the twain shall meet.
Still, I can’t bring myself to actually cancel my WoW account — feels a bit like permanently putting my toon out to pasture. Maybe in a few more months I can reach some sort of closure there.