Engaging arcade games

I use the term "arcade games" to cover the fairly broad category of simple, single-concept games that do not involve a significant adventure or roleplaying component. Some may be more strictly defined as action, or puzzle, or something else entirely, but for my purposes, they're arcade.

This will be but a brief departure from my adventure game focus...these are just the games that are too cool to ignore.

I am a big fan of Orisinal, a large collection of very well-done flash games by designer Ferry Halim. Simple games, with innovative concepts, stylish design, and adorably, though not cloyingly, cute graphics. Out of the many games, there are a few in particular I'd recommend: A Daily Cup of Tea, Floats, Cats, Panda Run, Roperunner, the Bottom of the Sea, and The Truth is Up There...almost all of them, really. There's hardly a dud in the bunch.





Roshambo Run is a quirky, entertaining game. The concept: "You're a miniature angry nun who loves coffee. Shut up, you just are." It's one of those grid-navigation types where you must thread a path around obstacles (muffins) and enemies (rocks, paper, and scissors) to reach a goal (coffee).




Flip Card is a very attractive little time-waster. By controlling the direction and force of your hand, you must flip playing cards into a top hat. A nice interface and charming graphics and sound effects make it all worthwhile.




Classic 80's Games is the place to go if you experience a fit of nostalgia and long to play Pacman, Space Invaders, Frogger, Donkey Kong, Pong, or one of several other old-school games. It's all right here.




For more flashback fun, try Lemmings.




Curveball is a nice ping-pong type game. Simple, but very sleek. Like a workout in the holodeck.




Dad n Me is a very violent but oddly satisfying fighting game in which you are a young monster wreaking havoc in a schoolyard and around town. The animation is smooth and detailed, and the fight system, though using only two keys, is very complex, with lots of combos and special moves. There are many dynamic objects in the game, too, which can be hit, picked up, thrown, and blown up. Yes, oddly satisfying.




Chaos Theory is a very simple game with an interesting concept. You click on a single spot to start a chain reaction explosion and try to blow up all of the balls on the screen. I don't know how much skill is involved, but it's fun to watch a few times.




Metaphysik is a really interesting and challenging game. You must manipulate a ball through the screen to the exit without letting it touch the walls. Many levels have switches and traps along the way. You control the ball with the arrow keys, using "up" to counteract gravity, while gently nudging it left and right to maneuver it. The ball moves in surprising ways, and is quite tricky to master.




Next time: Interactive Eye Candy, Part II.

Random of interest

I like things made out of Legos. I like Escher. So I was happy to discover architecture blog gravestmor's post about this incredibly nifty Lego recreation of Escher's famous staircases. Kind of mindbending.



It was created by Lego artist Andrew Lipson, who specializes in rendering Escher's illusions in solid 3d, and has also done Escher's "Ascending and Descending" and "Belvedere" (featured on Amazing Art). He has his own website, which I couldn't visit because he has exceeded his bandwidth, but I bet it's pretty interesting.




In November, Spacing Photoblog, a Toronto group blog featuring submitted photos on a certain theme, did a series on the abandoned Whitby Psychiatric Hospital. Here is the permalink to the first page, but in order to get the navigation links it seems you have to use this link, which counts backward from the most recent entry so might only be good for today. If you see the title page, good, just click the "previous" link to see the series; otherwise, you might have to use "next" until you see the title page, or just go to the archive to find the start of the series. Sorry I can't give a better link, but anyway, they're some pretty neat photos.




I recently came across the essay "Shakespeare in the Bush", about an anthropologist's experiences with a West African tribe and an evening of storytelling. When she decides to share the tale of Shakespeare's Hamlet around the fire, she discovers some pretty wide cultural gaps as the elders interrupt to make "corrections," reinterpreting and making sense of the narrative on their own terms. It's an interesting read, suggesting that some of literature's "universal" themes aren't quite as universal as we think.

The old man handed me some more beer to help me on with my storytelling. Men filled their long wooden pipes and knocked coals from the fire to place in the pipe bowls; then, puffing contentedly, they sat back to listen. I began in the proper style, "Not yesterday, not yesterday, but long ago, a thing occurred. One night three men were keeping watch outside the homestead of the great chief, when suddenly they saw the former chief approach them."

"Why was he no longer their chief?"

"He was dead," I explained. "That is why they were troubled and afraid when the saw him."

"Impossible," began one of the elders, handing his pipe on to his neighbor, who interrupted, "Of course it wasn't the dead chief. It was an omen sent by a witch. Go on."

For the longest time I've been meaning to link to this -- it's a coverpop featuring a few thousand covers from some seventy years of science fiction magazines, arranged in a huge spread by year and hue. The main site features a random coverpop from genres like horror, vintage, or art. Neat concept.




And now, some more Samorost stuff:

Adventure Gamers has a nice interview with Samorost creator Jakub Dvorsky in which he talks about his work, influences, the success of Samorost, other projects, and the meaning of the names amanita and samorost.

E-mental is the new media lab of Tomas Dvorak, creator of the Samorost 2 soundtrack, and there's a page where you can listen to some nice samples of the tracks.

Animal photography

Galen and Barbara Rowell's Mountain Light Photography has, in addition to some truly gorgeous landscapes, a wildlife gallery that's really worth seeing. The many colorful images of rare animals from around the world captured in their splendid natural settings are a real treat.





Nick Brandt does striking, black-and-white photographs of African wildlife, often combining animals and human elements. His pictures are beautifully composed, and present moving, intimate portraits of his graceful subjects.





Olga Samuels's animal photographs are arresting and amazing. Brilliantly iridescent, her close-ups show off every hair, feather, and scale in sparkling detail. Her often whimsical compositions feature everything from dogs and cats to farm animals to, best of all, exotic lizards, snakes, and birds.





Jim Zuckerman has galleries featuring all kinds of different photography genres, but today I want to point you to his animal galleries: North American Wildlife, Faces Only a Mother Could Love, Wild Cats, and Galapagos Islands. Lots of bright, bold shots of exotic animals in the wild.





This is a repost, but I had fewer animal photographers than I thought, so I'll point you again to Ashes and Snow, the serene, spiritual photography of Gregory Colbert. His elegantly posed scenes are an attempt to portray the perfect (comm)union of human and animal. If you've visited before, it's worth another look -- there's a slideshow version of his portfolio up with a lot of new material for an upcoming exhibition, including some interesting moving images.

Narnia, cont'd

Just a couple more views and reflections:

Easily Distracted has a great post about the hype, "Unbelief and Imagination", which clears some things up:

What makes Lewis relatively innocent, even of the (fairly indisputable) charge that his depiction of pseudo-Muslims practically oozes racism and condescension, is the simultaneous strangeness and typicality of his fantasy, that it contains so many familiar elements, the grammar of the genre and its folkloric roots mixed in with so many eccentrically composed or combined gestures of religious teaching. It takes a meanness of spirit to read Narnia as outrageous theological or cultural error, just as it would to read Wind in the Willows and complain that it was a polemic on behalf of English social hierarchy.

There is also a brief review of the film, with which I mostly concur, in the "Pop Culture Roundup".

(I am rather into Easily Distracted lately, not least of all because of the recent article "Should You Go to Graduate School?", which is striking a particularly large nerve.)

Finally, Fantastic Planet points out, tongue in cheek, that "Narnia is Satanic, too!"

Don’t worry, Narnia fans. Even though the Narnia chronicles are already being excoriated for being a thinly-veiled Christian parable, like in this article by the excruciatingly smug Polly Toynbee, many pastors would like to remind us that no, the Narnia books are not Christian. They are indeed, like the Harry Potter books, an open door to WITCHERY AND BADNESS!

Via A Sweet, Familiar Dissonance.

As I mentioned in the comments to my earlier Narnia post, the biggest problem with the new film isn't that it's Christian or satanic or racist or backward or patronizing or proselytizing or insensitive...it's that it's Disney and bland. That's it, really. I wish someone would do something about that.

Samorost 2 is out! Samorost 2 is out!

I discovered this by the sudden flood of traffic from Google searches for "Samorost 2 walkthrough" and "Samorost 2 solution". As always, feeling guilty that my visitors weren't getting what they wanted, I had to go play the game and provide the relevant information right away.





The sequel, titled simply Samorost 2, is a lot like the old Samorost...but different. Aesthetically, it's a bit darker and grittier than its breezy predecessor, as you explore the bowels of a grimy planet-ship that is home to a crew of thieving blue aliens. The main character is much more active this time, taking matters into his own hands rather than sitting back and letting events resolve themselves.

There are other changes, too. There are now multiple levels with passkeys, though the game is still short enough to be played in one sitting. There are also two chapters, only the first of which is free -- the offline version, including chapter 1 and chapter 2, costs $9.90 to download. If I hadn't just been to Target yesterday and splurged on three wonderful games I'd been wanting for just $9.99 on the bargain rack (Rhem, The Longest Journey, and Syberia II, all there together -- unbelievable!), I'd probably have bought it today...but instead I think I'll wait until January for the CD version, which will also include the soundtrack.

I haven't yet found a walkthrough online for the game, so I went ahead and made my own. It's my first ever.

What I did discover was the site of the fledgling Samorost Fan Club, which includes a discussion forum and, especially exciting to me, the complete Samorost 1 soundtrack.

It's just a special day, I guess.

NOTE: I'm having trouble uploading the walkthrough, so until it's sorted out, I'm including the walkthrough in the comments to this post. If you read the comments before completing the game, be warned! Avoid the spoilers!

Flap about Narnia

I loved The Chronicles of Narnia when I was a kid. I have, in a box somewhere in storage, a nice set of all the books in the series, which I avidly read and thoroughly enjoyed. I didn't understand its Christian undertones then; all I knew was that I found the Stone Table scene deeply disturbing, and the Aslan-as-lamb image vaguely confusing -- it reminded me of something, but I wasn't sure what.

Now, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is being made into another epic fantasy movie along the lines of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, and the religiosity of the series is a big concern. It can't be just another high fantasy adventure like it was for me in my youthful ignorance -- there is no way to secularize Narnia. There are going to be Issues.

The movie is being actively marketed to and through religious groups, in the same way as The Passion of the Christ, if you can believe it. I am a bit aghast, but not much surprised. A Guardian article, "Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion: Children won't get the Christian subtext, but unbelievers should keep a sickbag handy during Disney's new epic", pulls apart the religious aura suffusing the books and, subsequently, the movie.

US born-agains are using the movie. The Mission America Coalition is "inviting church leaders around the country to consider the fantastic ministry opportunity presented by the release of this film". The president's brother, Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, is organising a scheme for every child in his state to read the book. Walden Media, co-producer of the movie, offers a "17-week Narnia Bible study for children". The owner of Walden Media is both a big Republican donor and a donor to the Florida governor's book promotion - a neat synergy of politics, religion and product placement. It has aroused protests from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which complains that "a governmental endorsement of the book's religious message is in violation of the First Amendment to the US Constitution".

Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy and fervent atheist, was outspoken in his hatred and criticism of Narnia. An article in The Chronicle Review, "For the Love of Narnia", attempts to defend the series by refuting some of Pullman's charges, including the complaint that in Lewis's world, "Death is better than life; boys are better than girls; light-colored people are better than dark-colored people; and so on."

Lewis's approach in The Chronicles was deeply rooted in his own experience. A crucial element in his conversion was a long conversation with J.R.R. Tolkien in which Lewis became persuaded that the many and, to him, deeply moving ancient myths in which a god dies and is reborn to save his people had "really happened" when Jesus was crucified and resurrected, placing Christianity squarely at the intersection of myth and history. Lewis had an enormous regard for pagan myths, both for their marvelous stories and for the truths about origins, aspirations, and purpose he found embedded in them. In writing The Chronicles, in which the divine lion Aslan is slain to save a treacherous child and then triumphantly resurrected, Lewis was trying to write a myth of his own that had all the excitement and truth of other myths, including the Christian one.

Many children seem to have read The Chronicles as Laura Winner, in Slate, remembers herself and her friends doing, as simply "a riveting tale." Some children — the books have sold more than 95 million copies, after all — presumably have experienced, in Lewis's phrase, the "pre-baptism of the child's imagination" that Lewis hoped and Pullman fears would someday open their ears to the Christian story. But where's the offense in that? For Pullman, it seems, Lewis's offense was merely to love what Pullman hates.

An IndyStar article, "5th Narnia book may not see big screen", discusses some of the problems of representing Lewis's eurocentric, orientalist visions in the culturally problematic The Horse and His Boy, should Disney attempt to make movies out of the whole Narnia series.

The book, first published in 1954, may never get to the screen, at least not in anything resembling its literary form. It's just too dreadful. While the book's storytelling virtues are enormous, you don't have to be a bluestocking of political correctness to find some of this fantasy anti-Arab, or anti-Eastern, or anti-Ottoman. With all its stereotypes, mostly played for belly laughs, there are moments you'd like to stuff this story back into its closet.

In its simplest form, the plot seems mild enough. A boy named Shasta, raised in the southern land of Calormen and sold into slavery by a simple fisherman who claims to be his father, runs off with a talking horse from the free northern kingdom of "Narnia."

But the land of Calormen is not simply a bad place to be from. Worse, the people are bad -- or most of them, anyway -- and they're bad in pretty predictable ways. Calormen is ruled by a despotic Tisroc and a band of swarthy lords with pointy beards, turbaned heads, long robes and nasty dispositions. Calormen is dirty, hot, dull, superstitious. In truth, it's pretty unsettling.

Finally, a word from the author himself: apparently, a 1959 letter to a BBC radio producer reveals that Lewis was uncomfortable with the idea of his works ever being rendered onscreen, according to a BBC News article.

"Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare," he wrote.

"Cartoons (if only Disney did not combine so much vulgarity with his genius!) would be another matter."

He added that he would find a "human, pantomime" version of Aslan the lion to be "blasphemy".

Online literary mag Nthposition has the entire letter.

Damn. Missed my hundredth post.

At least now I'm saved the trouble of trying to do something momentous.

Happy hundred and second post, Blue Tea!

Cities of the dead

Immortelle.net is a nicely done site that offers virtual tours of the grand, beautiful cemeteries of New Orleans. I can't imagine what state they must be in now, but they are preserved here forever. You can browse a series of images for each cemetery, or view one of the four virtual 3d panoramas. I've posted this link before, but it's worth repeating.




You can also take a virtual tour of Paris's famed Père Lachaise cemetery. There is a panoramic walkthrough, as well as a map with famous graves marked out, where you can view individual images. The one below is the grave of Chopin.




Then there's my real reason for posting. After Life: The Four Seasons of Streatham Cemetery, a lush multimedia composition by photographer Jonathan Clark. Over the course of a year, he photographed a number of already striking, brilliantly composed scenes of one cemetery. Then, he grouped them into four series by season, and added atmospheric background music, sound effects, and and one or two digital elements to create eerie light effects, motion, or ambient weather. Snow drifts softly down, birds fly by, grasses wave in the wind. The effect is stunning.

Some of that old-time atheism

A few interesting things I've come across lately.

Bibi recently posted about the Skeptic's Annotated Bible, which I'm amazed I haven't heard of before. It's a wonderfully rich and thorough resource, a complete Bible with copious annotations divided into numerous color-coded categories such as Injustice, Absurdity, Cruelty and Violence, Family Values, and Contradictions. There are also illustrations, a discussion board, and links to that other great version of the Bible, The Brick Testament (which I discussed here and here). They have a Koran and Book of Mormon, too.

Stumbling Tongue blogs about faith, and includes a link to a very interesting article about meta-atheism. As the author explains, meta-atheism is the view that "Despite appearances, not many people -- particularly, not many adults who've been exposed to standard Western science -- seriously believe in God; most of those who sincerely claim to do so are self-deceived." He then lists eight compelling reasons why this may be so.

A while back, I gave my cat Sidney to my friend LadySusan. Soon after, he got sick and eventually died. LadySusan blogs about his illness and how she talked to God about it, and shares a transcript of their intriguing conversation. The point of all this is to direct you to igod, an amusing chatbot with the tagline "repenting made easy".

While I'm at it, some other links of interest from my collection:

Positive Atheism
Agnosticism/Atheism at About.com
CelebAtheists

Livejournalers...

Did you know that Blue Tea, like all Blogspot blogs, has a Livejournal feed? I mention it just in case you didn't know you could be reading me from the comfort of your very own friends page...

(And killing my stats by not visiting any more, but that's okay.)

This has been a public self service announcement by bluewyvern.