Monthly Archives: April 2009

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. Continue reading →

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.

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.

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.

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.