Our Prince of Lightness
In the latest issue of The Improper Bostonian (April 29-May 12), Eitan and Fire Hose are profiled in the article “Bright Young Things”. Our fearless leader is a bright young thing! The article covers 11 of the city’s “best young minds”, in the fields of engineering, the arts, humanities, you name it! It’s an interesting look at accomplishments across many disciplines, especially as everyone is “on the cusp of fame” and specifically reside in the Boston area.
Also check out the awesome Fire Hose t shirt Eitan is wearing in the shot.
The entire text of the article is after the jump. (more…)
April 30, 2009 | | Comments (2)
Category: News
Tags: audiodyssey, engineering, immuneattack, immunology, Improper Bostonian, MIT, prince of lightness, science, Wii
What We’re Playing: GemCraft
Tower Defense has somehow become its own genre lately, and what an addicting genre it is. The games center around preventing enemies, or creeps, from traveling from thier source/spawnpoint to your sink/base by building upgradable, stationary attack towers. They also tend to have a terrific sense of flow, as it’s all you can do to keep up with the never-ending waves of enemies while building up your defenses. Because of the hightened sense of flow it’s easy to waste hours upon hours playing them, so be careful with this one.
You see, GemCraft is a highly polished TD game with distinct stages, a “level up” mechanic for improving your stats, and a much needed save function as the game is easily several hours long even if you’re good. The most interesting thing though is the importance of color. All weapons (gems) in the game have a hue value, and gems are especially effective against enemies of opposite hue. So an orange gem works well on blue enemies, and a green gem works nicely on red creeps. The game gets really good when you start “mixing” gems to make them more powerful and combine colors, bonus stats, and of course change the hue value. It’s hard to explain, but great once you start playing.
Be warned, the game is highly addictive.
April 28, 2009 | | Comments Off
Category: Games, What We're Playing
Tags: addicting, Armor Games, defense, Game in a Bottle, gem, GemCraft, tower
Bit.Trip Beat: Pong meets Rock Band
Ralph Baer, one of the most awesome people in the world, made pong on the Brown Box almost 40 years ago. The killer game on it? Pong. Since it’s release many have wondered “How could I make Pong more awesome?” Turns out that setting the game to chiptunes music seems to do a damn good job.
Aksys Games just came out with Bit.Trip Beat, a new title for WiiWare that goes full-on retro in a most amazing way. You control the famous paddle, and are tasked with swatting back pixels as you would expect. The twist? Like in Rez, all the enemies come at carefully timed intervals so that when you kill them you build up a song as you go. The pixels themselves are merciless – the game is very hard, and we’ve yet to beat level 1. Despite this we’ll probably go back and play it on a regular basis, as there is decent 4 way co-op multiplayer and we’re gluttons for ridiculously hard retro games.
The game is $6 (600 points) on WiiWare. It’s worth it. We need more games like this out there.
April 22, 2009 | | Comments (1)
Category: Games, Rant
Tags: aksys, baer, beat, bit, bit.trip, pong, ralph, rez, trip, wiiware
2 Boston Talks: IGC East and MIT BiG
Fire Hose has some talks coming up! Back to back talks in fact, on May 7th and 8th. Both are in Boston, so if you are in town be sure to stop by and check them out!
What’s that? Can’t afford the conference tickets? Never fear, I’ll be posting a short synopsis of each talk right here on this website. Here’s a sneak peek:
Thursday, May 7th, 10:30 – 11:20 – Rapid and Iterative Prototyping, or How to Rip Off Dinosaur Comics
Ethan and I are going to talk about how to make video games quickly even if you don’t have all the pieces in place. We’ll keep things exciting with lots of jokes, and we’ll be showing off early builds of our current game to illustrate points. The talk is guaranteed to entertain, or we’ll go back in time and save you the 60 minutes by telling you to skip it. You can read more about the talk here or on the conference’s website.
Friday, May 8th, 11:45 – 12:30 – Digital Distribution Panel
I really have no idea what the panel is going to be about beyond the title, but I bet it’s going to be pretty interesting as all three of us panelists come from pretty different backgrounds. My friend Al Reed from Demiurge Studios will be there, and he knows a hell of a lot more than me, so I’m exicted to see what he’s got to say. You can read more about the speakers here but I don’t see a page for our panel. Scot Osterweil and Dave Edery are doing a panel on Serious Games which should be pretty cool too.
April 19, 2009 | | Comments Off
Category: Events, News, Words of Wisdom
Tags: al, big, comics, dave, demiurge, digital distribution, dinosaur, edery, IGC, IGC East, MIT, osterweil, panel, prototyping, reed, scot
That’s a lot of Nerds
MIT had it’s grad gala on Saturday night this past weekend, and a lot of people went! 710, to be exact. Afterwards everyone hit the dance floor, and I got to thinking. Could it be that the dance floor was in fact the nerdiest dance floor ever? Possibly! A room full of MIT PhD students is quite the geek-out, and would certainly put us up there in the running. Perhaps the Nobel Prizes has some sort of break dancing event after the award ceremony? That could one up this, I suppose. Top 10 for sure though!
BONUS MATH SECTION: While we were sitting and eating dinner we heard two groups of people singing happy birthday to someone at their table. We started wondering – given that there were so many people in the room, how many tables would sing happy birthday? For simplification’s sake we decided to pretend that people would only sing happy birthday if it was someone’s birthday that day (and not just “close by”). Well, as you might guess 710/365 is about 2, so you would expect that 2 tables would sing. But that’s not good enough! What about the standard deviation – how many people could have birthdays within the realm of reason? A quick backhand calculation of standard deviation ( which is: square root([E[X^2]] – [E[X]]^2) ) yielded (sqrt(E[~50,000] – 2^2), which is about sqrt(135), which is about 11.5. So if my math isn’t wrong (and it might be), up to 13 people could have birthdays and it wouldn’t be weird.
Update: I’m an idiot, the standard dev is much lower at around 1.3 or so. In that case it’s extremely unlikely (read: around 1 in a hundred chance) that you would even have 6 or more people having a birthday today. That’s not particularly intersting, so can anyone do a better job of this? I’d love to take into account other factors, like when babies are born, likelihood of twins, and to get rid of the assumption that people only celebrated their birthday on that day.
April 13, 2009 | | Comments (2)
Category: Events, Random
Tags: birthday, dance, math, MIT, nerd, party
What We’re Playing: Robot Dinosaurs
That shoot beams when they roar
Some games don’t mess around. They’re a rare breed, the kind that looks at you square jawed with grit and determination and calmly states: “It’s go time“. Robot Dinosaurs (that shoot beams when they roar) is one of those games. From the moment the game starts atop makeout point, to the squeal of the guitars, to the over the top dialogue, to the hilarious shooting mechanic, this game is keenly aware of who it is for and what it is trying to be, and delivers. The whole game is very quick (there’s only one level) but there is a high degree of polish that you wouldn’t expect in such a short title. If you’re anything like me you’ll want to play it again at least once to try out the other character and see if there’s a difference.
I strongly recommend letting the game stay open for a little while after the credits, you’ll probably get a laugh out of it.
April 8, 2009 | | Comments (2)
Category: Games, What We're Playing
Tags: beam, dinosaur, flash, over the top, roar, robot
GDC 2009: Walking the Walk (Part 2 of 2)
Welcome back to part 2 of the series on GDC 2009. While the last post covered some of the more interesting sessions from the Game Developer’s Conference., today’s post will focus on some of the more interesting people I had the pleasure of meeting. While you may not recognize all of their names (at least not yet), these are the guys and girls and who are doing new and exciting things in games. Perhaps unsurprisingly they are all independent developers and academics who are truly trailblazing new areas in gaming.
Alex Austin, Cryptic Sea
There are a large number of us who try very hard to make serious games that teach users real life skills in a fun way. Then there’s Alex, who just does it on a regular basis. He’s the brilliant mind behind Bridge Building Game (which eventually turned into Bridge Construction Set), a fantastically fun game in which you have to build suspension, draw, and railroad bridges over rivers and pits using real world physics. Alex isn’t stopping there though, and is currently hard at work on a new game… set on the moon. The premise is pretty simple, you’re an astronaut in a lunar lander, and you’re trying to take off from the moon and rendevous with the lunar orbiter so you can return to Earth. The catch? Limited fuel, a moving target, and a nasty case of gravity. It’s not enough to simply aim at the orbiter and go, you need to estimate where it will be, shoot ahead of it, and hope that you can meet up. The game sounds like a lot of fun, and will be available on Steam (hopefully soon!). The best part is that the game is just going to be part of a six pack of small, bite sized offerings, though I personally hope they all involve space, rockets, or bridges.