Gamertell

It was an ordinary day. I was checking a site to add as a link to another story on Gamertell, when an unusual icon at the Square Enix Members site caught my eye. “Game Zone is now open?” I wondered, though not aloud as I was still at work and didn’t want to attract interest. I clicked through to find four mini-games, all promoting Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo’s Dungeon.

There are four flash games available, and all are pretty similar to the mini-games found in Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales, which was released on the DS a while back. There’s Chocobo’s Snowboard Glide, Chocobo Flight, Chocobo’s Balancing Act and Chocobo’s Classmate. All games use the mouse, and have happy perky Chocobo themes playing in the background.

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When wealthy Texas businessman, Richard H. Collins, decided to campaign against Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid, he began creating anti-Hillary websites. With Thanksgiving coming up, he also included an interactive Whack-a-Turkey Flash game featuring Clinton as a pilgrim bopping presidential candidates on the head, a la Whack-a-Mole.

“While there is a place for negative advertising, we’ve heard so much of it that we’re almost immune to name-calling. But we’re always eager to hear a new joke. Humor can be an effective political tool,” Collins said.

Collins is so concerned about Clinton’s presidential bid that he has created StopHerNow, an anti-Hillary website that features news, humor and public views about Clinton. The free Flash-based game allows the player to controls Clinton, dressed in a pilgrim outfit, who bops a variety of pop-up presidential candidates with a virtual mallet to scores points. Former president Bill Clinton will earn the players double points when whacked. In fact, when Bill is whacked the animated Hillary shouts “Hit Bill Again!”

Collins, a community newspaper publisher and online education entrepreneur from Dallas, has raised millions of dollars over the past three decades for Republicans such as conservative icon Jesse Helms to establishment favorite Kay Bailey Hutchison. He claims that when Clinton complains about a conspiracy against her that she’s talking about him, stating, “The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy is alive and well and flourishing in Red State America and I’m glad to be a part of it.”

Collins said he hopes his humor will be strong enough of a potent weapon against Clinton to knock her out of the running since most of the younger viewers favor getting their political news from comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, that the game and his humor will be more effective than negative information or name-calling.

“No profanity,” he said. “Chelsea is off-limits. No gay-bashing. And Bill’s womanizing is OK, but we don’t name names unless they’re public knowledge. Hillary has used the woman-as-victim routine throughout her career. She claims she’s a woman. We say she’s the front-runner, no different than anyone else.”

While Collins acknowledges that some Republicans remain skeptical of his approach through comedy and games, the Democrats don’t mind because they feel this approach will only create more sympathy than antipathy for Clinton. Collins and his comrades feel humor is the best cure for the public who is tired of watching negative ads.

“It’s easy to be mean,” Bell said. “It’s hard to be funny. It’s even harder to be funny and clever.”

Clever, as well as fun, is what this game is about.

Read [The Houston Chronicle] Site [Stop Her Now] Play [Whack-A-Turkey game]

Mimobots are small, 2 3/8 in. tall USB 2.0 flash thumb drives with pretty plastic covers molded and painted to look like Halo soldiers. I recently received the 1 GB Master Chief version to play with.

Released October 2007, Halo Series 1 Mimobots come in 1 GB ($49.95), 2 GB ($69.95) and 4 GB ($109.95) versions with Master Chief, Red and Blue Spartan variations. Each comes in a clear tube so you know which one you are getting. Besides the drive you get a tiny, fuzzy zip-up coat to keep your l’il guy drive cozy. It covers most of the flash drive except for a small hole for the face to peep through (though in the case of Mater Chief, it’s really just a featureless facemask). Check out the placement of the lightning bolt. Classy.

The 1 GB Halo Mimobot is cute and functional. It is, after all, a working flash drive.

Each drive comes preloaded with Halo-related media, including wallpapers (one is pictured above), screensavers, sounds, avatars (see the image below for the avatars) unpublished pages from the Marvel Halo comics, sections from the Halo 3 strategy guide, excerpts from the upcoming Halo novel and an exclusive episode of in-game talk show This Spartan Life. All of the contents a compressed into a single ZIP file that is approx. 188 MB big and expands to 208 MB.

It has an optional Flash-based interface (below) to view the contents but, again, you have to unzip the contents to use it. It does give you access to the Halo novel, but in a pretty small chunks. All of the content is Win and Mac compatible.

The wallpapers are not really Halo game images but are instead Halo Mimobot images. Still cute and kinda cool, but not the Master Chief most people are expecting, I’m sure.

Oddly, after I installed the three screensavers, I got an error message that said the screen savers had expired and none of them would work except in the small demo format. From the demos, I could see that the gun version was the halo gun with shells floating around the screen, the second gad ever expanding icons into more halo icons and the third, and maybe the coolest of the lot, was line drawings of Halo art, a la the Marvel comic book.

In terms of a flash/thumb/USB drive, this works well enough though its content-free and less colorful cousins. For the price, it is obviously meant to appeal to the many, many Halomaniacs out there who don’t mind spending some extra scratch on a potentially collectible item.

Read [Gamertell] Product Page [Halo Mimibots] Also Read [UberGizmo]

For those of you who dig retro games - and those who have retro gaming gear like the X-Gaming Tankstick - you might want to download these three Tron homebrews.

Each of the games has a slightly different take on the infamous light cycle segment of the movie. FLTron2.0 Onlineis Flash based game you can play online and GLTron is available as a download for Mac, Win32 and Linux. Armagetron Advanced may be the best all, a 3D version also available for Mac, Windows and Linux with a multiplayer local network mode.

You basically speed around a grid, laying a temporary solid trail that you hope you opponent will hit and avoiding their trail. It’s kewl, it’s futer-y and it’s fun. Give them each a try and let us know what you think.

Read [The Think Blog] Via [X-Gaming]

Whenever I get nostalgic for those bygone days of videogames known as the early 1980s, I question my sanity when I come across things like this bit of videogame inspired lovliness.

In an old box of comic books I unearthed for an upcoming garage sales, I found issue 304 of Flash published by DC Comics, Inc., in December 1981. On the cover it features the dark profile of one of the weirdest comic book villains - Colonel Computron. Oh yeah, you read that right. Col. Computron - reducing Flash to a poorly pixelated videogame. The cover reads:

“When Colonel Computron plays the game, Flash… the name of the game is DEATH!”

Now that is some ‘80s greatness right there.

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Spoof Flash games may be a dime a dozen but this one came out pretty dern fast.

The Game Show Network (GSN) has released a The Prison Life: Paris, a Flash based game where you stamp license plates. It’s stupid-simple, but still kinda fun in a dumb sorta way. Check it out… Is it me or is does that look like Rosie O’Donnell as the prison guard to the right?

Site [Game Show Network] Via [Gaming Today] Also Read [ActressArchive]

More industries are realizing the importance of gaming not just as a relaxing pastime but as educational tools.

RiskDom-Geriatrics, a 3D virtual reality game meant to help medical students make effective house calls. It offers patient homes with various hazards that the students will have to find and help correct.

You can even give the game a try if you’d like (forgive the cheesy music and cartoony cat). It’s built on Flash and has a pseudo Sim style interface. You get an overview of the patient and then visit their home, clicking on various hazards. Visit the medicine cabinet and you’ll get a precise description of the medication the patient is taking.

I wouldn’t quite call it s “3D virtual reality game,” a la The Sims, but it’s a cute start.

Read [Medical News Today] Game [MMIWeb]

Back in the day, video games were primarily homebrew creations, programmed by a single person who just wanted to share a bit of fun. Now it can literally take years to create a video game from scratch an involve a staff that reads like feature film credits.

In a throwback to those early days of gaming, students at Ohio University were challenged to develop their own amateur video game in less than 24 hours. Yep, one whole sleepless day to create a video game - not compete in a video game - based on the theme “nature and technology.” The challenge, dubbed the Ohio Game Jam, took place on March 31, 2007, had 17 competitors that made up six teams from three schools.

All the teams completed a game before the deadline, with a little time to spare for testing. The winning game, I Can’t Breathe, was completed in two hours. Three games tied for second place: Brows of the Martian Landscape, Zomborgs and Hydroponic Hyperbole. The games were created using either GameMaker, C++ or Flash.

The best part: You can download all the completed computer games as PC (Windows and Mac) executable files at the Ohio Game Jam web site.

Here’re a few interesting stats listed on the site about the competition on the site:

• Total number of participants: 19
• Number of development groups: 6
• Number of working games created: 7
• Number of groups that failed to produce a game: 0
• Pizzas consumed: 12
• Caffeine consumed: Too much to measure!

Read [The Post] Download [Ohio Game Jam]