Shape Type, the letter shaping game
Followup game from the gentleman behind the excellent Kern Type game. Be still, my heart.
Your mission is simple: achieve pleasant and readable text by distributing the space between letters. Typographers call this activity kerning. Your solution will be compared to typographer’s solution, and you will be given a score depending on how close you nailed it. Good luck!
My new favorite game, even though the score for my first attempt was lower than I’d hoped. (Update: I scored 85/100 on my second attempt—still disappointing.)
This hits close to home. I had both Age of Empires II: Age of Kings and the expansion The Conquerors and they were my favorite games of my early teen years. And by “had” I mean I owned the physical boxes and everything—this was back in a time when games had thick, in-depth manuals, giant fold-out maps, and other goodies packed in a sturdy box along with the game DVDs.
I was never very good at RTS games—I stuck mostly to playing the campaigns and single-player games against the computer AI and rarely played online, even when MSN Gaming Zone was still operational—but there was something about Age of Empires that attracted me. So when last month I read somewhere on Reddit that there was a YouTube account dedicated to commentating on Age of Empires multiplayer matches, I fell back in love. ZeroEmpires does a wonderful job commentating on a variety of match-ups and game styles. The tactics and strategies I learned from his commentary brought back fond memories of AoE and I immediately set about reinstalling this classic game. I’m still too noob to try my hand at online play so I’m sticking with campaign mode for now, but hopefully by the time Age of Empires Online comes out of beta, I will be ready.
Automated card-dealing machine
Stephen’s machine deals both Texas Hold ’Em and Blackjack.I ended up eating by myself; FML
- Me: I’m coming over for dinner. Make room.
- Stephen: I’ll engage the auto turrets then.
- Me: Big whoop. I have an overshield. What, wrong game?
- Stephen: Oh I have a permanent shield drain installed in my turrets. Anyway I’m done with dinner.
Text message from Hoyin.
A follow up text:
(You have my permission to reblog, tweet, or tumblr that.)
Starcraft 2
- Stephen: I gotta warn you—my SC2 arrives today.
- Me: August 5th: the day Stephen’s job hunt took a permanent hiatus.
- Stephen: Nah, August 5th: the day Stephen found his permanent job—professional SC2 player.
Celebrating the 30th birthday of PAC-MAN with a homepage logo is one thing, but having a fully playable game is just beyond amazing.
Update:
You can keep the party going at google.com/pacman. Game on!
Hunch: Twitter Predictor Game
Very interesting “game” that attempts to guess how you’d answer a series of questions just by analyzing your Twitter feed.
Several of the earlier questions seemed far too easy—the tech-related ones wouldn’t need a genius to “predict”—but it was truly surprising how accurate the predictions as a whole were. It predicted 34 of 35 questions correctly, only stumbling on whether I own a Polaroid camera (I don’t).
(via waxy)
