News You Can Bruise for 2008 March 30

Jeremy Penner reminded me of more heavily intertextual games: ROM CHECK FAIL and Barkley, Shut Up And Jam: Gaiden. Neither works in WINE so I can't play them, but they're exactly the kind of game my hyper-ludic-literate self likes to see.

Another thing I forgot to mention is that this new kind of game is inevitably what they call an "indie game", because you can't sell a game that rips off Pac-Man's sprites or makes unauthorized use of sports star likenesses. All you can do is hope nobody sues you, and game designers aren't covered by the same social mores that protect artists. You can always file the serial numbers off afterwards (the way some authors turn their fanfic into "original" universe novels), but part of the fun is the thrill of the remix.

Oh, one more thing about GameCenter CX: It's Mystery Science Theater 3000. Right down to the jumpsuit.

Wow, I've still got the original "The Future: A Retrospective" in my browser's form field autocomplete mechanism. Anyway. Everyone knows that people surfing the web love lists, but a lesser-known fact is that they love short lists. Like, shorter than 275 entries, which is how long the completed TF:AR is. Maybe ten entries (the "David Letterman" standard), or five (the "Digg bait" standard). I await the inevitable reduction to a degenerate list of one entry, which will free us from the tyranny of lists altogether.

In the meantime, I made a best-of list for TF:AR. Evan was the only person who responded to my request for peoples' favorite entries, and both of his proposals (Vending Machine French Fries and Car Video Navigation System) were ones I was going to include anyway, so I just picked my favorites. It may be pushing your attention span, but I think there's enough good stuff in TF:AR to justify a best-of list of twenty entries. I know, twenty, it's like the freaking Metropolitan Museum of Art here.