In a cooperative effort between Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, researchers have produced a new way to help the blind get around better: videogames. You may be scratching your head, as the two main components of playing most games requires the use of the hands and eyes, but head scientist Dr. Lotfi Merabet found a way.
Forced to rely on tactile and auditory cues, individuals without eyesight face more difficulty traversing unfamiliar environments. The Audio-Based Environment Simulator or AbES mimics real-world navigation by creating a virtual setting based off of computer-generated layouts of public buildings. Armed with headphones and a keyboard, participants were charged with finding specific items, namely jewels, and successfully exiting the building without getting caught by roaming guards.
I haven't played Hotline Miami yet. I haven't played many games yet. I'm so buried in backlog that I wonder if it's even worth buying anything new when I barely even touch the stuff I do buy. But that's a discussion for another day.
Mega64's latest skit involves neon filters, white (pink?) suits, animal masks, and a baseball bat. That bat looks real to me, meaning the boys allowed themselves to get beaten like speed bags. According to this post on the Mega64 site, someone was actually heavily injured during filming. Damn, guys!
Mega64: HOTLINE MIAMI [YouTube]
We've seen Capybara's Super Time Force at the last three PAXs in a row, and every time there have been some major updates that improved the overall quality of the experience. This past PAX East saw the biggest change as players now have full control over how they control time.
Under the old system, once you died the game would automatically rewind back to the very beginning, forcing players to sit and wait until they can start again. Now, players at any point -- alive or dead -- can press a button and rewind to any point they so desire.
It was far easier for the team at Capy to make sense of the time-traveling elements prior to this change. Now "it makes the game infinitely more complicated to make," Nathan Vella, co-founder and president of Capybara told me. "We're f*cking ourselves over in a way, but it's fun, it's crazy.
"It breaks our brains! We end up in these crazy Back to the Future moments where we're like 'Holy crap, our mom is trying to kiss us!' It's creepy, and you know, butterfly effect, somebody dies, etc. That shit happens when we're talking about, like, 'Why don't we just have the door open?' and we're like 'Ah, the door can't be open because if it opens for the first character what if you get there first and then it closes after you and then the other characters technically shouldn't be able to walk through it!' Sometimes we try and it makes us hurt, in the brain."
Do you hate spending weekends in the office? Talk to Michael Birken. He spent nearly a year's worth of weekends and holidays at his, filming this ridiculous post-it note stop-motion homage to arcade classics Ms. Pac-Man and Donkey Kong.
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I did a lot of crying at GDC this year.
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