Monthly Archives: December 2009

2009 was an awesome year for games! And we played a lot of them! Here’s a recap of the great games we played this year. If you haven’t tried them yet, now’s your chance! They are all FREE and just waiting for you to enjoy them.

Our year started off with a great little platformer called Eversion that has a scary twist (a retail version is in the works). We then laughed a ton while living out the Olympic dreams of QWOP. There were a few fun games in the Boston Global Game Jam, and The Redistricting Game taught us about how messed up our current electoral system is.

The Legend of Princess gave us a glimpse of what could have been a sequel to Zelda 2 (on the NES), and Dino Run ate up a bunch of our time as we ran away from Armageddon with our dinosaur brethren. Speaking of dinosaurs, have you checked out Robot Dinosaurs that Shoot Beams When They Roar yet? It’s a pivotal work in gaming. Gemcraft is an addicting little tower defense game with a fun chromatic twist, and Facade is an older game (2004 or 5, I think) but still a lot of fun to play today.

Effing Hail is a neat little flash game where you destroy buildings, airplanes, and satellites with hail, or if you are in a more constructive mood you can try building with Grow Cube. Don’t Eat the Mushroom (and Knytt Stories) is a hilarious game about what happens when you do (or don’t) eat the mushroom, and is a must play for any serious gamer. Finally this year we enjoyed racing through the apocalypse in Canabalt, and subsequently relaxed with the music of Auditorium.

These were all terrific games, if you haven’t tried them yet be sure to go play them all now!

Ever wonder who we are, and what it’s like working at Fire Hose? NOW YOU KNOW.

Another lecture blog post? HELLS YES. We’ll stop putting these up when the awesome guys at GAMBIT stop making them. Thanks to Gene, Abe, Ken Zolot, and anyone else who was involved with making this that I’m not aware of.

In this talk Eran Egozy (co-founder and CTO of Harmonix, whom you know and love for Guitar Hero and Rock Band) talks about how Harmonix started out, how they got off the ground and shifted into (and ultimately defined the genre of) music games, and then fields a bunch of questions from some really smart MIT and Sloan students. Check it out!

This Thanksgiving some friends of mine from RPI in good old Troy NY invited me to their annual Saturday night Second Thanksgiving Dinner, for people who couldn’t get enough on Thursday night. At the end of the night they have a tradition of eating pie. Specifically, 10 pies. Between 14 people. I’ll chronicle some of the more interesting pies here, in the order we ate them.

Chemical Pie: All of my friends were cracking up as this pie was served. I took a bite, and I didn’t get it – the pie tasted like an ordinary apple pie! When I said I didn’t get what the fuss was about my friends cracked up even more… and informed me that there were absolutely no apples whatsoever in the pie, nor anything that tasted like apples. I guess this was the pie equivalent of a Long Island Ice Tea, where many weird ingredients mix together to make some sort strange new flavor. Or maybe the local chemistry student made it and just dumped in a bunch of hazardous compounds that I just thought tasted like apples. Who knows.

Mince Pie: We were pretty worried about this pie, since we thought that it was a mincemeat pie and would be full of random animals. When we found out it was purchased by the resident vegitarian we were a bit less worried, but still disgusted when we found that it was chock full of vegetables, fruit, and turnips. Despite looking revolting it actually wasn’t so bad, but I’m not sure I’d get it again.

Protein Pie: Oh man, this was a doozy. You know how you go to Jamba Juice (or any smoothie place) and they’ll put in some protein powder in your shake? Ok, now imagine a pie made out of chocolate pudding, peanut butter, around 14 cups of that nasty powder, and topped with freshly cut banana. Yum. The maker of the pie (the girl in the pictures below) informed us that each slice had 40 grams of protein and twice your daily recommended intake of cholesterol. Eating this was like pouring cement into your stomach.

Granola Pie: This one was a lot better than it sounds. A bunch of granola and other yummy stuff all shoved into a granola crust and served with a heaping scoop of whipped cream. It was really good, but each slice probably could have been its own meal.

Mystery Pie: I have no freaking idea what was in this pie, and the nut who made it wasn’t about to tell us. My guess? Cap’n crunch and artificial flavorings. PROVE ME WRONG, CHEF.

Strawberry Mango Pie: This one sounded great on paper, and was the most vile thing ever once we started eating it. The strawberries and mangoes were in some sort of horrendous sugary goo type syrup, and the whole thing just tasted miserable. I’m pretty sure I developed diabetes after eating a bite of this one.

The other pies: We also had a few standard pies thrown in, like a homemade berry pie, a Hershey’s chocolate pie, a Boston creme pie, and of course a pumpkin pie.

The result: I made it around halfway through the lineup but I didn’t last. After an attempt to rally I just gave up and started collecting pie on my plate, taking care to eat at least a bite of every slice I got. At the end I was so far behind I did the only honorable thing I could think of and face planted in what was left and ate what ended up in my mouth. Only four of us failed to get through the whole ordeal, so I’m going to have to train hard if I’m going to be ready for next year.

Thanks to Bob + Turnip for inviting me, to Vona and Josh for egging me on and getting me to eat more pie than I would have ever though possible, and to everyone else who joined in the madness.