3 trailers for the forthcoming Strongbad Wii game: Strongbad’s Cool Game for Attractive People.

My mild infatuation with Guess Who? has been noted on several occasions, and now it seems that someone has finally discovered the trick to winning the game in just one guess:

In reality this technique no longer works.  For fairly obvious reasons, the boards were updated to avoid this… unpleasantness.

Via Doobybrain.

I only vaguely remember the short-lived Zelda cartoon, but in retrospect it appears to have been the most annoying show in the history of television:

Why didn’t they use more actual Zelda music?

Via topherchris.

Sarah Michelle Gellar is still working on turning American McGee’s Alice into a movie. I’ve been waiting for that damned movie for eight years. Can somebody please call somebody and make it happen? Can I blame this one the writers’ strike? The game’s trailer still makes me smile:

Via BoingBoing.

Pong was first released by Atari on November 29th, 1972 making today the 35th anniversary of the video game era. Happy anniversary to Pong, Atari, Nolan Bushnell, Al Alcorn and everyone else involved in the design/development of the game. The game was initially installed at Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California and featured exciting, futuristic gameplay:

The test run in Andy Capp’s Tavern proved to be a smash success. Such a success that they started making commercials:

Based on the commercial, it’s hard to imagine who they thought audience for video games was going to be. But whatever potential missteps they may have made, everything seemed to work:

Atari churned out Pong at a breakneck clip, shipping 6,000 in 1973 alone. Desperate for new products, engineers tweaked new permutations: QuadraPong, Pong Doubles, SuperPong, Puppy Pong. But the breakthrough product was a version of Pong that could be played on the family TV set. Sears ordered 150,000 “Home Pong” units in 1975, and it became the bestselling item in its catalog.

To celebrate the anniversary, let’s play a game of pong:

Pong’s future today is bright. Well, moderately bright. Decades after its release, people are still creating version after version of the arcade standard (though none compares to the fun that must have been “Puppy Pong”). What will Pong look like in another 35 years? Only time will tell.

Have any more questions about Pong’s illustrious history? Answers can be found at Wikipedia or this surprisingly meticulous FAQ.

Place world cities on a world map. It starts easy and gets harder. I got to level 9 with a score of 323,801 and a “Traveler IQ” of 107. Damn you Africa!

Via Neatorama and Militant Platypus.

I just downloaded the original, Japanese version of Super Mario Brothers II (the Lost Levels) for the Wii. I’ve heard that it was hard, but I was somewhat dismayed when I got to this point in the game:

And this one wasn’t much better (I just came out of the pipe and cannot go back down):

In reality both of the above situations provided a means of escape.  The really dismaying point to get to was this one:

This warp zone provides a really mean-spirited choice: you can either warp backwards from 3-1 to 1-1 (who would do that?) or you can off yourself in the provided bottomless pit (but remain at level 3-1). This choice becomes even easier when you consider that this version of Super Mario Brothers provides the ability to continue at the “-1″ board of your current level if you run out of lives. There’s no situation in which you would chose to go back to world 1-1, you’ll always choose the pit.

It’s one thing for a game to construct a level in which you’ll most likely die, it’s another to contrive a situation in which suicide is the only viable choice.

Another weird thing about this Warp Zone — there’s multiple ways to get to it. Every time you find a new path through the board (going through a pipe, climbing a vine, vaulting over the flagpole) you’re initially excited about the possibility of a new ending, only to realize that you’re back at the same suicide point.

Miyamoto’s got a sadistic streak.

As I’ve previously indicated, I have a running interest in the board game Guess Who?  It turns out that I’m not the only one. Check out this high school computer science student’s efforts to develop a Guess Who? AI engine to compete against humans. He worked on it for at least 19 weeks and was never able to produce a playable version, but it’s a start.

I’m desperately awaiting the playable web Guess Who? game. Can my readers who know how to build robots please get cracking on this?

BoardGameGeek has a collaborative list of board games that, while poorly ranked by the masses, are somebody’s private joy. A quick glance through the list shows a series of games with low production values, obtuse rules and uneven gameplay… and they all sound like they’d be perfect for Obscure Games Night.^*

I’m going to start tracking games on here that seem like possible targets for future Obscure Games Nights and begin slowly acquiring them. I might have to switch my buying regiment from thrift stores to ebay, but I guess technology was going to do that to me eventually anyway.

Some early notable favorites: Elk Fest (mainly for the ridiculous Elk woodcuttings), Kingmaker (sounds like a cross between Scotland Yard and Risk), Escape from Colditz, (again, sounds like a Scotland Yard variant with one player controlling prison guards while all the rest attempt to flee) and, of course, The Plot to Assassinate Hitler (do what you can to assassinate Hitler and grab control of the German parliament!).

^* For those who don’t know I used to host an Obscure Games Night in which attendees played games that none had ever heard of. I purchased them on the cheap from local thrifts stores and the winner of the first play through got to keep the game. plan to resume the tradition when I return to L.A. next year.

I wish the url that Hasbro assigned to its Scrabble website didn’t refer to it as an “adult game”:

http://www.hasbro.com/games/adult-games/scrabble/home.cfm?page=home

It just seems, I don’t know, icky.

Magic Eye Tetris via Game|Life.

It’s a sailboat.

This game is chaos.

Via Neatorama.

Click on the video below to start it:

I knew almost all the older ones, and then suddenly, I didn’t. It’s sad. At a certain point I clearly got too old to know all about every video game.

Via The Last Boss.

The Internet offers no advice to those seeking the optimal Guess Who? strategy. Or, really, any stategy at all. This is a great disappointment for me.

UPDATE: Troeltsch correctly points out that the Wikipedia page for Guess Who? has a brief strategy write-up:

Although generally treated as a simple children’s guessing game, playing can involve relatively complicated statistical scenarios. For example, the situation is often encountered wherein Player A (whose turn it is) has four possibilities left and Player B has only two possibilities left. Thus Player B will definitely guess correctly on the next turn. Player A is therefore confronted with the possibility of choosing a question which will eliminate either two choices for sure or a question which will possibly eliminate three choices (and thus allow for a certain guess) or only one choice (thus forcing a guess the next turn with only a 1 in 3 chance of hitting it for a rebuttal). In this situation many players will choose the seemingly safe choice of eliminating two choices for sure, thus assuring a 50-50 chance of guessing correctly for a rebuttal on the next turn. However, statistically attempting to eliminate three choices is better. If the player tries to eliminate three choices, there is a 25% chance of winning outright, 25% chance of tying that turn (with Player B correctly guessing for a rebuttal), 16.67% chance of tying the next turn (with a correct rebuttal guess from Player A) and 33.33% chance of losing. This is clearly better than the other option of a 50% chance of tying and 50% chance of losing.

… but I still await the arrival of an optimal gameplay strategy.