61 Frames Per Second

Browse by Tags

• Play Bejeweled Inside World of Warcraft

  The world's most addicting game just got addictinger. So you're waiting for your fellow clansmen to meet up at a waypoint before a raid and you've minimized the window to play a little Bejeweled. But when you pull up the WoW window, you find that some h4x0r pwned your n00b ass while you were goofing around. Well, this unfortunate situation will never happen again because now you can play Bejeweled, the game most likely to have been downloaded by your mom, inside WoW.  From Yahoo: An amateur game maker and World of Warcraft junkie, the San Jose State undergrad decided to break more than a few laws by creating an unauthorized clone of the great puzzle game Bejeweled (called, laughingly, Besharded) that could be played in the middle of a Warcraft session. While such insolence normally leads to a barrage of cease and desist letters, Bejeweled publisher PopCap Games opted for a much different strategy. They decided to go ahead and allow players to play Bejeweled inside Wow, kind of like how you can now play officially branded Scrabble instead of Scrabulous inside Facebook. The game can be easily pulled up and closed. Of course, all this does is give me more ammo for hating on MMORPG's. If the game isn't interesting enough to hold your attention, why not just go play Bejeweled to begin with?  Related Links:  Kotaku Endorses Products Unaware Terrorists Using WoW to Plan Attacks? Shawn "Napster" Fanning: Wow Nerd Success Story Posted Sep 29 2008, 04:40 PM by Cole Stryker with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: world of warcraft, cole stryker, bejeweled

• Men Are From Hyrule, Women Are From Simville: If Gender Defines the Games We Play, Why Does Everyone Play By the Same Rules?

  The problem with working on the internet is that you inevitably find yourself plummeting down some horrible information vortex while trying to be productive. It could be some hyperlinked sentence in a Newsweek article or that godforsaken new email icon popping up on your screen, but no matter the form it comes in, your cognitive process is sent down the road of endless consumption, natural curiosity leading you by the nose, sniffing out even more useless information. Today, Pete Smith sent me a nugget of knowledge from the Wikipedia entry on game addiction and, so, I fell down the information rabbit hole. Somehow I missed this back at the end of May, but Professor Allan Reiss of Stanford University published a study on the effects of videogames on male and female brains. The experiment entailed monitoring a number of men and women’s brain functions while playing a simple strategy game; players gained control of territory from other players by clicking on dots on a screen. MRI scans of the players’ brains, both male and female, showed activation of the mesocorticolimbic centre, that lovely chunk of grey matter associated with addiction and reward. The scans, however, showed more activity in the mesocorticolimbic centre in men than in women. Reiss’ conclusion was that this explained men having greater interest in the common videogame, one in which territory is at stake, than women. I find the Professor’s findings damned peculiar in light of the most successful PC game in all of history. Read More... Posted Sep 12 2008, 01:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, gamasutra, resident evil, the sims, nintendogs, bejeweled