I’m a game junkie and I love SIM games. There is a sense of power you get from controlling the fate of virtual people because it’s typically frowned upon to do it with real people. There is a measure of fun involved in playing god. There isn’t much in the game world that deals with construction. Sure – we have SimCity, but how realistic is that? We also have ThrillVille where we get to build roller coasters and amusement parks. Then again, it’s not all that realistic.
BridgeBuilder Game bridges the gap (forgive the pun) between the real and unreal by offering many levels of play where you have to build a bridge - under budget AND safe for travel. It looks simple, but since it’s incorporated with scientific principles, it makes it pretty difficult to pull off a build that won’t kill unwitting people.
The game doesn’t offer much by way of advanced graphics or heavy metal soundtracks. It offers a real approach to the very real science of building bridges. The graphics are gray with a lot of white segmenting lines. The bridge construction uses these same white lines. Once you are finished with your bridge, you click on “TEST”. The result would be your bridge rendered in 3D. It’s now time to see if your grand design holds up under the weight of a moving train. If it doesn’t, the train crashes thru your bridge.
However, the playability of the BridgeBuilder Game is quite complex and oddly fun. It can even teach you a thing or two about physics.
The game allows you to pretty much do anything you want. You can build economical bridges or expensive ones that look really cool and plausible. You can also build out-of-this-world bridges.
Your creativity is never stunted with this game. You can save your bridges and post them to the designers’ website in order to show off your work.
I don’t have too many complaints about the game as not all games are about sound and graphics but playability. Still, my biggest complaint is the background. It’s boring and gray. It could have been rendered with scenery to make the scenario look cooler. The other issue I have is there is no scrolling save for the mouse toward the screen edges so if you lose point it will take you time to get centered again.
Level 1 is easy enough (or so it seems). If it is your first time playing, then the layout can be a bit confusing. When I first began to fiddle around with it, I was building away from myself – this proved to be poor thinking on my part as you have to build across.
After the first try, I thought Level 1 would be easy – it wasn’t. Several tries later: SUCCESS! I’m looking forward to the more difficult levels.
If you like games that basically make your PC explode with its power, then this game may not be for you. But if you like problem and puzzle solving, then I highly recommend BridgeBuilder Game – it’s TETRIS with bridges.
If you grew up in the 80’s, you probably spent all your free time at the arcade or at home playing low tech video games.Well now that you are older, there is no better time to enjoy your childhood favorites once again.Plug and Play TV Games make it incredibly easy to enjoy video games at home.First off, there is no large game console to buy; most plug and play TV games consist of a joystick which already includes all the gaming hardware and software inside- how times have changed.Secondly, set up is a breeze, plug and play TV games, simply plug into your TV set.And perhaps the best feature of plug and play TV games is the price- usually around $20.If you are looking to once again master the art of low tech video games, here are three classic video game consoles now available as plug and play TV games.
JAKKS Pacific Atari 10- in-1 TV Games
Most of us first started playing video games on the Atari 2600 video game console.While low tech, many games offered hours upon hours of enjoyment.JAKKS Pacific has created a plug and play TV game that looks exactly like the old Atari joystick, except for the fact that it includes 10 great games and connects directly to your TV set for instant play.The 10 games stored on the device are all classics and include:
Breakout, Gravitar, Real Sports Volleyball, Pong, Yar’s Revenge, Circus Atari, Missile Command, Asteroids and Adventure.
Namco Super Pac-Man Plug and Play TV Game
The all time king of video games is of course, Pac-Man.Not only was the original Pac-Man popular, but the franchise grew to include Ms. Pac-Man, Pac-Land, Baby Pac-Man, Super Pac-Man, etc.Today, you can play amazing Pac-Games on the Namco Super Pac-Man Plug and Play TV Game.
This TV game uses an attractive yellow pac-esque joystick to not only control all the fun, but also store all five Pac-Man games in this small unit.This device easily hooks up to your TV set allowing anyone to start chomping the dots quickly and easily.
Commodore 64 30-in-1 Joystick Plug and Play TV Game
While the Commodore 64 was an extremely powerful and versatile computer for the 80’s and perhaps the best selling computer of all time, many of its end users did not use it to program computer code or do homework, instead it was used by millions as a glorified game system.Today, the Commodore is back.You can now play many of the wonderful games that made Commodore 64 the must have computer of its time.
The Commodore 64 30-in-1 is simply a joystick that includes all the hardware and software to play 30 classic games.Set up is a breeze and this lightweight device makes it extremely portable, able to connect to practically any TV set.
The 30 games included within the joystick are:
Impossible Mission, Impossible Mission 2, Jumpman Junior, Cyberdyne Warrior, Cybernoid, Cybernoid II Paradroid, Pitstop, Pitstop 2, Gateway to Asphai, Tower Topler, Uridium, Eliminator, Surfing, Exolon, Firelord, Flying Disk, Summer Games, Super Cycle, Silicon Warrior, Ranarama, Winter Games, Speedball, Zynaps, World Karate Championship A, World Karate Championship B, Bull Riding, Sumo Wrestling, Championship Wrestling and Sword of Fargoal.
For those of you who don’t know what Machinima is I STRONGLY recommend you read this Wikipedia article. But for short Machinima refers to short movies made using real-time image rendering by a 3D Game engine. Some of the most popular game engines used for this are Hallo, Sims 2, Rome total War, World of Warcraft and even Half-Life.
What the artist actually does is control the characters, camera and sets in order to create short movies, most of them quite funny. The reason many artists choose this form of making movies is because it’s quite cheap and it provides a wide array of possibilities with limited resources.
There are many machinima groups out there but one of the most known is ILL clan with famous productions like Hardly Workin’ and Apartment Huntin’ . For more quality machinima visit www.machinima.com.
Here you have a compilation from the machinima serise Red vs. Blue
I’ve been reading about this for a while now and opinions still seem to be parted. Here is what happened: A Belgian user of Second Life was forced ( by using a so called “voodoo doll” that is a piece of code that takes the form of a regular object as a cup or pen or whatever but in fact gives control of your avatar) to perform sexually explicit behavior. In theory a user must give his consent in order for other player to take control of his avatar, but using one of the above mentioned voodoo dolls and some persuasion you can make a user (especially a new one) to give access to his avatar.
Things like these happened before as stated in this article about a similar event that took place in an older text based mmorpg. It was discussed at the time but no real action was taken. Well this time police was involved as you can find on the second citizen forum and in all the others articles covering the story.
The debate seems to revolve around the nature of this act. Is it really a ‘rape’ or only harassment? Well it’s surely a violation of the Terms of Service for Second Life and not only, as one can see it’s still discussed if it’s a legal offense or not.
