Sites Unseen 38

I’ve played San Andreas. I loved it. And I tried to review it. And I failed. The game is so great that it simply wasn’t possible for me to describe it. It’s that good a game.

The game’s different. It’s so different that at first it doesn’t feel like a GTA game at all. It’s a surreal and unusual experience. The game has so much depth in it! But then, it’s not a game at all. It’s an experience to be had.

If you’re not in San Andreas with CJ, you definitely should be. I don’t care what anyone says, this is going to be the best game around… until the next game in the series comes out.

The usual cool links:

First Person Gamer’s Magazine
[gamersquarter.com]
The Gamer's Quarter magazine is a quarterly publication produced by a group of passionate gamers with the desire to create a new type of videogame magazine.

MTV News sat down with the editor of The Gamer’s Quarter to talk to him about the impetus for creating a free online magazine dedicated to New Games Journalism. It’s MTV-short, but worth the read with a nice run down of the first issue and tease to the second, which just hit the website. Check out the article [doiop.com/MTVgame] and The Gamer’s Quarter, both deserves your time. The Issue two is available, [doiop.com/Gamers2] 9.4 MB. The first issue is also golden: [doiop.com/Gamers1].

LAN Gamers as art
[doiop.com/LANgamers1]
Here’s some nice black and white art shots of gamers playing in some sort of LAN tournament. Is it just me or are there an awful lot of shots of women with their mouths open? More at [doiop.com/LANgamers2] and [doiop.com/LANgamers3]

Babycal Throw
[doiop.com/throw]
A Flash game where the goal is to get one kid with a soda can in his backpack to toss it up so it will nail one of the other kids walking by. If you time it right you can get a twofer when the victim kid’s soda launches out of his pack after being hit. Catchy gameplay, and with surprisingly smooth bass centered ambient-ish background music.

Transl8it
[transl8it.com]
Web site Transl8it will convert plain English into text message shorthand or SMS-speak into English, so it’s EZ 4 U 2 figur out wot d heck dat dumb kid w n brains txtD U bout.

Tough Customers...
[doiop.com/customers]
I love secret shoppers, it empowers us all. 1Up/EGM had a woman go in to several game and electronic stores and play up the old “I’m a girl and don’t know jack about games” stereotype. The results run from heartening to horrifying. To summerize, though you really should go read the entire item it’s a gem, GameStop rocks, EB Games are elitists, Best Buy is moronic and Toys ‘R’ Us should have their games taken away from them.

42
[doiop.com/42]
There cool little Wario Ware take-off with a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy theme that’s fun and test both your dexterity and novel knowledge. I suck at it, but not as much as the most others.

It's a shame they don't tell you what you're supposed to be doing before each game, after a couple of goes I found I was failing for reasons I couldn't understand, and as you only get one life that's pretty frustrating. It takes the form of Warioware but misses the exemplary attention to balancing and gameplay that makes those games so enjoyable.

Contents under extreme Escher
[doiop.com/Escher]
The Worth 1000 image twisters give surrealist MC Escher’s iconic flat images a new life through a little interpretation. And the work is absolutely brilliant!

Google Will Eat Itself
[gwei.org/gwei]
"We generate money by serving Google text advertisements on our website GWEI.org. With this money we automatically buy Google shares via our Swiss e-banking account. We buy Google via their own advertisement! Google eats itself - but in the end we will own it!

By establishing this model we deconstruct the new global advertisment mechanisms by rendering them into a surreal click-based economic model. We inject a social virus ("let's share their shares") into their commercial body hidden under a polite and friendly graphic surface. GWEI.org is a show-case and to unveil a total monopoly of information [Google search-engine & added services], a weakness of the new global advertisement system and the renaissance of the "new economic bubble" - "reality" is, Google is currently valued more than all Swiss Banks together (sic). Let's open their goldmine to the people."