Since you enjoying playing the 3D version of Portal so much (and if you didn’t play it, stop reading this entry right now and go play it), I wanted to make sure you knew that there was a 2D flash version as well, compliments of an article at Evil Avatar.

I haven’t played more than the first level, so I can’t attest to the overall experience, but sometimes you gotta trust in fanboys (the designers, not me).

What’s even more exciting though, is that the developers of the Flash game have released a mappack with  40 levels for the original Portal game, based on the flash games’ levels. How’s that for circular design? This gives almost 3 and and half hours of new Portal content.

I’ve gotta delve into playing the custom Portal maps that are all available now.

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You’re a fan of LOLCats are you? Well, they’ve got nothing on LOLGrues.

I’m sorry… say what you want… I’d rather have a Grue than a kitten anyday.

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I was going to leave an entry discussing an upcoming labyrinth training event that I’m running in Deptford, NJ, but rather than write my own, I thought I’d quote a good amount from Jane McGonigal who is also going to an event, and did a wonderful Q&A for that one:

You should note that the flash animation training link that she posted was done by me. /me does a little jig.

I’ve been talking it up and hoping to get some of you involved. Now might be a great opportunity.

You don’t have to know anything.
You don’t have to bring anything.
Just show up, alone or with everyone you know.

And prepare to have an amazing adventure as you learn how to play The Lost Sport of Olympia.

Playing the lost sport is pretty much the most fun I’ve ever had. That’s all you need to know. But if want to know more, some FAQ are below.

FAQ

Q: What’s the Lost Sport of Olympia?
A: According to legend, this blindfolded sport was played and then banned by the ancient Greeks, who attempted to destroy all evidence that the game ever existed. It was completely forgotten by history — until 2008. That’s when a small online community began investigating the lost sport. The community got bigger and bigger, and recently they actually pieced together the rules of the game — simply by analyzing clues found in ancient artifacts. They’re still working out some of the kinks of the game, but so far, lost sport training events have have happened all over the world, from Canada to Brazil to Spain to New Zealand!

Q: Is the lost sport hard to play?
A: Like any great game, it’s incredibly easy to learn and extremely challenging to master. But, you don’t need to be traditionally athletic to excel at this sport. Instead, you’ll need trust, courage, memory, and teamwork.

Q: Is it fun to play?
A: I’ve only played it once before, but it was unforgettably awesome. You will almost certainly laugh until it hurts. Watch this recent training video from some aspiring Lost Sport champions in Kitchener, Ontario — my favorite part is the referee yelling repeatedly (to no avail), “No laughing! No laughing!”

Q: So can I just show up, or do I have to learn how to play it first?

A: Just show up! You don’t need to know anything about it, just show up. Your friends don’t need to know anything about it either, so bring them. Plenty of people there will be able to explain it, but most of the people who show up will also be playing the lost sport for the very first time.

Q: How’s it work, exactly?
A: It’s a blindfolded team sport, with 1 runner and 10 - 100 teammates who form a human labyrinth around the runner. Just like the Minotaur, the runner must escape from the center of the labyrinth as fast as possible!
Runners can’t see, and they can’t use their hands to feel their way. So they must draw on courage, their spatial memory of the labyrinth pattern, and the sound of the walls humming to guide them.
Meanwhile, the walls run ahead of the runner to keep him or her safely penned in at all times. It’s total collaboration. (The walls and the runner are on the same team.)

You can catch on faster by watching this flash animation of the gameplay.

Q: What’s the legend, exactly?
A: If you’ve never heard of the Lost Sport, you can learn about it in this podcast about ancient mysteries and forgotten secrets of the Ancient Games.

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So I’ve mentioned several times about my anticipation and roleout of the new ARG, Find the Lost Ring. Well it’s in full swing now. The main meta site has released two trailers (You Tube mirrors 1, 2) as well as some well placed banner ads on You Tube and Live Journal. Those kinds of things are going to constantly bring new people into the game.

The thing is, I don’t think I’ve explained to alot of you what an ARG even is. A great resource for an explanation and quickstart can be found here at Giant Mice. After reading that, you can read our wiki’s Beginner’s Guide.

Here’s what’s been going on so far, and hopefully it’ll pique your interest even further.

Current Nutshell

Six individuals woke up in late February - all in various Olympic attire, in a labyrinth, with amnesia (and a name given by whoever found them), blindfolded, and with a tattoo on their arms saying Trovu la ringon perditan, or “Find the lost ring” in Esperanto. Then we found Eli Hunt, who studies ancient Olympic mysteries. He’s studied the “lost ring”, and has decided to share his secret - a mysterious system not run by him. The six amnesiacs have been the keys to discovering omphaloi, which appear to be pointing towards hidden artifacts. Ariadne found the first in Cardiff, UK. A package containing two pages of a document believed to called the Codex of the Lost Ring. There are 27 chapters to find. Help us find them

Each of the primary 6 characters has an in-game blog, in their own language, as well as in-game forums to help coordinate the community that speaks that same language. One of the (in the beginning) protagonists has released 4 video podcasts of excellent quality detailing the lost history of the Olympics and providing alot of true facts about the games, while interweaving some plot devices for the game.

The game is still in its infancy, and I encourage you to check it out. It’s fun to be part of a community and to solve puzzles and do research. Plus, you’ll learn lots of things along the way. Right now I’m learning about Rhumb Lines and Great Circles as well as how to calculate the distance in km between two known coordinates at a constant bearing.

Sounds a bit geeky doesn’t it? It doesn’t *have* to be. That’s the cool part about joining up with a ARG, is that you can lurk, or get actively involved. When you get involved you speculate, learn, or even provide answers to the stuff you really do know. For example, we spent about 2 days trying to figure out why our coordinates were off when looking for the second location, until a GIS specialist explaining in great detail why the calculations were wrong, and provided the right ones for us — as well as online tools to use in the future. The next location was nailed within hours.

That led us to another part of the game, which is real-world retrieval. We’re trying to reassemble the chapters of the The Codex of the Lost Ring. So far, we’ve found chapter 1 in Cardiff, Wales, and chapter 2 in Austin, Texas!

As a community, we’re coordinating discoveries and discussion on Unfiction Forums, and Ariadne’s ingame community (English), as well as using IRC Chat, Twitter, Flickr, and plenty of other tools.

I’d love to have you join up with us. Who knows what obscure knowledge you can bring to the community! If this isn’t the right ARG for you, then there will always be others.

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I was listening to PCGamer’s podcast this morning, and they mentioned a new relase of a game called AudioSurf. They loved it. So I did some research. Apparently *alot* of people love it. Here’s just two.

The Escapist Review (Recommend: Buy It)

Gamer 2.0 (9/10, Editor’s Choice)

Watching some of the videos on YouTube (see the main site’s video/review section), I can see why.

My sample video gives a good show of the interaction between the main rhythm and the bass, with the changing road, but doesn’t really show the complexity of a faster song, nor any of the grey blocks.

Escapist’s review has a great summary, so I’m not going to try and rewrite it:

    Audiosurf is an Independent Games Festival 2008 finalist, and with good reason. Part racing game, part match-three game and part rhythm game, Audiosurf synthesizes these three genres into a wholly satisfying experience. The basic premise of the game is simplicity itself - you steer a ship down a three-lane highway, scooping up colored blocks into a grid and trying to get matches of three or more blocks. What makes Audiosurf such an enjoyable experience is how the highway, blocks and background is generated.

    Like many other racing games, Audiosurf can import music from your collection - including CD audio, MP3s, M4As, WMAs and OGGs. Unlike those other games, Audiosurf actually analyzes each track you upload and generates a course specific to that song, using the primary instruments to place colored blocks and tempo to alter the elevation of the highway. The result is a compelling and intuitive experience, and like most things musical, you just have to be there to truly appreciate it. As your song slows, you find yourself slowing, moving uphill, weaving between lanes and casually scooping up the blocks. As the tempo increases, you start heading downhill and pick up speed until the blocks are flashing past you so quickly it’s practically dizzying. Red and yellow blocks are worth more points, and you’ll find more of them in the up-tempo portions of your soundtrack. The blue and purple blocks are worth fewer points, but they are easier to come by. Gray blocks get in your way as you zoom around.

Here’s the thing. The game is only $9.95 on Steam! That’s a bargain for a game that has the replay value that it appears to have.

Sure, it’s not Rock Band since this first version doesn’t have any sort of multiplayer aspect, but given the amount of my friends who are music-rhythm game enthusiasts, I think this will be right up our alley.

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There has been plenty of coverage about the death of Gary Gygax in the last few days.. a good number of the geeks I know have either posted about it directly, or linked to someone else’s post about it.

Wherever you read it through, you’re likely to encounter a geek euphemism for his death.

For example, Penny Arcade mentions “Rolling in his Grave“, while my buddy Steve summed it up nicely with “Save vs. Death” *rolls* - Natural 1. Even funnier with our RPG group and a proclivity for critical failures.

But I also ran across this list of 25 Gaming Euphemisms for the Death of Gary Gygax, and there are several on there that I hadn’t read previously, so I figured I’d share them with you. Some of them aren’t quite as funny, but if you’re compiling your own list to be used in your future obituary, you might want to read this list too.

My favorite was “Is looking for a ninth-level cleric“.

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Well my hopes about having the new ARG be a big one came true. Later in the day, on Monday, the game started rolling. Unfortunately, in today’s legal-wrangled world, the 4th wall had to be broken slightly by a “Terms and Conditions” link on the bottom of a website which outlined all the legal issues, and in fact mentioned who the sponsor was. I actually found this information out myself, because I was hoping for something big, but here’s a better quote from ARGNet, which not only mentions the primary sponsor but in fact confirms the identity of the lead designer.. who prior to the announcement was also suspected but not yet confirmed:

The Lost Ring is a global alternate reality adventure created in partnership between McDonald’s, AKQA and Jane McGonigal. Designed in collaboration with the IOC, The Lost Ring invites players from across the globe to join forces online and in the real world, as they investigate forgotten mysteries and urban legends of the ancient games. The Lost Ring recognizes McDonald’s historic sponsorship of the Olympic Games, and brings the spirit of the Games to people around the world.

This really is big news. You’ve got a major sponsor, a fabulous designer and the backing of the IOC. In fact, one of the trails yesterday led us to information that was posted *on the Olympic website*.

One of the themes of the ARG so far has been the international collaboration. The primary characters we’ve found so far are each from different countries and they are communicating with us in their native languages. This means alot of cross translations and tracking down actual speakers of the language rather than relying on software based translations.

Jane goes on to say:

… that she is “so thrilled to be collaborating with these organizations to create what we hope will be the most global ARG, ever. This is really a dream project for me - we are bringing together the two kinds of games, ARGs and the Olympics, that have the power to engage and unite people all over the world.” So far, the game is succeeding admirably, with characters interacting with players in English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Esperanto.

I dragged my wife into the game last night and had her watch the opening videos and the storyline so far. I think maybe she’ll be along for the whole ride with me this time.

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Here’s hoping that the new ARG that I am following is going to pan out to be a really good one.

I’ve been disappointed in the last several I have joined/lurked on. For whatever reason, they’ve fallen apart or didn’t meet my expectations of puzzles/interaction. This is often the case when they are grassroots ones run by inexperienced puppet masters, or when they are limited in their involvement tool and are more marketing based.

There have been several bits of information regarding this one that indicate that it may have some serious ARG designers behind it. If that’s the case, then it’s less likely to fizzle and *hopefully* will have the involvement level I’m looking for. Not going to post them just yet in case they are incorrect, but it’s a start.

One of the most inspiring tidbits though is that the theme of the ARG is the Olympics. If it’s truly a professionally done product tying into such a well known product, it’s going to need the proper level of support. It appears to be tied to the 1920 Olympics. Speculation abounds regarding a stolen flag, a 6th colored ring, protests, the works….

If all goes well, today should be the day that more information is revealed. People received boxes last week to draw us into the rabbit hole, and the initial date appears to be 3/3. So I’m anxiously monitoring the website and the unfiction forum for more information. Another indicator that this is being done large scale is the individuals who received the packages have various ties to the ARG community, but more importantly there are also ties to major media outlets and things. Your common grassroots projects don’t send out information like that which gets you covered on big sites likes CNet.

If you think that you might want to follow this ARG, whether it’s your first time or you know about ilovebees and others, here’s some informative links:

Article on CNet with some beginning coverage

Initial Wiki by thebruce (contains rabbit hole coverage and information regarding the packages received)

[Trailhead] Find the Lost Ring (unfiction forum thread covering the initial rabbithole packages, who’s received them, what they include, and rampant specualation)

Find the Lost Ring (the website revealed in the rabbit hold packages.. as of this post, nothing is on it but an error message.. hopefully more will be revealed today)

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