News Travels Fast v1

Maybe one day I will come up with a better title, but for now News Travels Fast will be my occasional post picking a few bits of news and geekery from the internet that I feel like sharing. Why News Travels Fast? Because I have no delusions that I'm going to be posting these with any particular speed in relation to when the stories broke. I only post 'em as I see 'em.

Talks of a Sequel for X-Men: First Class  
(Source: Screen Rant)

No surprise here, really. The movie was successful, financially speaking, and many critics liked it. As I've said here, I saw problems with it (big ones) but it wasn't a complete load of garbage. Here's hoping they give a little more thought to their thematic structure the next time around.

Or they can just throw a bunch of random mutants in there and call it a day.

LA Noire tech will change the future of Adventure Games 
(Source: Edge)

The old lady in the bowling alley is played by my fiance's godmother. Yeah. That was a weird surprise.

Again, kind of a 'duh' statement, but it's cool to hear Kojima agree with my view of the facial capture used in LA Noire. I really look forward to this kind of tech being implemented in other games. (The idea of Bioware using this in a game similar in style to their current RPGs makes me giddy.)

Are games becoming too easy in order to pander to self confidence?
(Source: The Escapist)

 I love The Escapist for many of their articles like this one. Nathaniel Edwards does an interesting job analyzing how and why difficulty levels in games has been going down. He also compares them to the lack of enthusiasm and willingness to work that his father's middle school students show. I'll give him credit for not saying that video games are the cause of this behavior (after all, these are middle schoolers we're talking about here.) He does make an interesting point about the parallel between game design (aiming to reach the largest audience with an achievable difficulty while giving special challenges and rewards to players who go the extra mile) to American education (not being able to fail a student, so as not to hurt their confidence, and therefore implementing special rewards for those who go above and beyond their peers). While I think it's generally a smart idea for gaming companies to make their games accessible to players of multiple skill levels, I do see it as a large problem to apply the same ideals to how we handle education.

I would point out, though, that a low difficulty does not mean that a game cannot be a rewarding experience and doesn't necessarily sway educational performance to a lower standard. For my own nerdy example: as a child, I loved playing Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego on my old PC. Did I find it challenging? Not in the least.Trust me, there were many games that I outright sucked at. A combination of not a lot of access to a wide variety of games, access to some poorly designed ones, and limited time playing left me believing for years that I was just a shitty gamer. There were many games that I walked away from, frustrated out of my gourd because I couldn't get to the next level no matter how hard I tried or even if I knew the solution. Wishbone, I'm looking at you, you son of a bitch (literally). But Carmen Sandiego gave me a zest for historical knowledge that greatly improved my educational experience in school. My parents were not so lucky when they got me the Math educational tie-in for Sandiego. Yeah. That shit wasn't gonna fly.

In any case, it's an interesting read. Go check it out.

TARDIS arcade, anyone?
(Source: asciimation)

Holy crap. Oh, holy crap. Not only do I love this person, but I also kind of want to rob them.
Someone built a replica TARDIS with a MAME console inside:

Cue the angels' choir, because it is THAT awesome.

Seriously, I want that in my house.

Wouldn't it be cool to have a door hidden behind a TARDIS replica in your house? Like, you'd walk through what looks like a prop piece of furniture into an entirely new room? Just blew my own mind there. I have a thing for hidden passageways.

I scored a 131 point turn in Scrabble on the Xbox the other night.

Now that I've seen it, I need to make one of these for myself.

Okay, so that's not really news. But I certainly felt accomplished. I jumped over the 200 mark while my fiance was still down in the 80s or so. Suffice it to say, he didn't really feel like finishing that round.