Games

Not all of the below are new releases, and not all defy common sense. A few may have belonged better in a list from 2012 or even 2011, but here’s hoping you won’t notice the difference. Star Citizen’s inexorable, ceiling-smashing Kickstarter campaign What is it up to now, $35 million? I believe it because Eurogamer is telling me, and because the space-sim shall rise again. First, the adventure game re-birthed itself, and now it’s the turn of Chris Roberts, the Wing Commander mastermind-turned-crap movie producer. The project still seems a little duct tape and bubble gum, and it’ll be mighty…

  Wing Commander 1, flying the Rapier. Wing Commander 1 got too many things right. You could talk to the enemies. The friendly NPCs fighting alongside you had personalities that weren’t cartoonish or repellent. Your actions mattered, first in the debriefings delivered by your commanding officer guy and then in the branching campaign that even affected what ships you got to fly. If your wingman died during a mission, the commander guy would look crestfallen yet so tough. We have to defeat those Kilrathi bastards, because a future ruled by ruthless lion men is unacceptable. This game released in 1990…

Rather fortunately, today, Halloween, has turned into one of the better days of the year for video game sales. Rather unfortunately, and rather predictably, I’ve played most of the more interesting software on discount. Lucky for you, that means I’m eminently qualified to suggest which to spring (out of a cobwebby closet) for. /// Steam Halloween Sale 2013 The mother-lode. ··· Penumbra Collector Pack $2.49 ··· These are fantastically atmospheric and scarier, in my humble opinion, than Frictional’s followup Amnesia games. The developer originally intended the first Penumbra as a tech demo, but it took on a life of its own. If you can’t take any…

  Not all of the narrator’s suggestions are subtle. The Stanley Parable is the best game since the last game I played but – and this is a caveat the size of a small island nation – the last game I played was finally getting around to installing Terraria and, oh no, where did the weekend go. All I have to show for it is a glinting tree-house fortress built out of glass I smelted myself, from sand I dug out of a desert crawling with nasty buzzards and flying earwigs called “eaters of soul.” Stanley Parable, on the other hand, is the kind…

Would be great if the last image was: 😛 UPDATE: And it’s … a new controller. As what is probably the world’s most revered video game company counts down to what could be its biggest announcement in over a decade – a lot of speculation here, I know – we’re left with only cryptic shapes for clues. The first announcement, at the beginning of this week, was the Linux-based SteamOS operating system (the first circle seen above). The second, which landed mid-week, was the “Steam Machines” lineup, a range of living room systems running SteamOS that could prove stiff competition for the Xbox One…

A rare sighting of the GM. Sometimes there are games you expect to like but don’t, and other times there are ones you’re not sure why you’re playing; but you end up loving them, and they expand your understanding of what makes video games fun. ChatChat is one of those games. It’s a stripped down multiplayer game in which one plays a cat roaming about a neighborhood filled with back alleys and a few mice. Goals are few and simple. You can catch the mice and bring them back to the house at the center of the map, to leave…

  Even Outlast’s trailer will give you nightmares. There’s almost too much to be scared of in games these days, and instead of survival horror burning out as a genre – as it appeared ready to, a year or two ago – it’s only gathering steam. Outlast broke new ground by making the player character’s body mechanics central to the action, and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs isn’t the retread of the Lovecraftian soil that it could have been. The first Amnesia: The Dark Descent (and that it was) was heart-stoppingly terrifying at points but pretty light fare as adventure games go, a bad sign…

Anyone who works, shops, dines or occasionally drives through the Third Ward has probably seen this mural that appeared without fanfare — or even a simple press release — earlier this summer. Has its exhortation influenced anyone’s thinking? Has it even prompted some passersby to rather shockingly select a negative thought? We’ll probably never know. Hanson Dodge Creative and fitness store Lululemon designed the mural and say it’ll remain in place at 220 E. Buffalo St. indefinitely, which is probably for the best. Between the Milwaukee Public Market, Starbucks and the Marshall Building, there are scads of artistic types in the vicinity, and we…

Carnival rides aren’t for everyone. They’re fast, they’re violent, they induce sickness, they’re avoided by some fair-goers in the northern hemisphere like an anaconda in heat. Something about them seems … inadvisable. A little too fast for their own good. Maybe even accident prone. And yet, for all the drawbacks, some people can’t get enough of the rush, the candy-colored light bulbs, the triumph over trepidation. For you, you carnie ride lovers of Southeastern Wisconsin, may we suggest 13 of the 2013 State Fair’s best trips. Zipper Scream Factor: High. Not the biggest or fastest ride on this list, but it’s wildly unpredictable. Originality: Moderate. A fair staple…

The recently dethroned Titan supercomputer A Chinese supercomputer has outperformed the “Titan” supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energy, which until an announcement today was widely considered to be the world’s fastest computer. Developed by the Cray supercomputer company, which has roots in Chippewa Falls, Wis., Titan seized the top slot on the Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful computers when it went online earlier this year. But not so fast, government eggheads. The Tianhe-2 engineered in China is roughly twice as powerful as Titan, with the capacity to perform 33,860 trillion calculations each second (33.86 petaflops). This is…