How’s this for awesome picture of the week? I did a double-take when I first saw this picture but this is a real machine alright. It’s the Bagger 288 excavator and you can see more pictures of it on this blog. Particularly awesome are the photos of the machine chewing up a Caterpillar bulldozer, the poor little thing.
I picked up on this because this machine was apparently an inspiration for the developers of the upcoming Borderlands game by Gearbox Software. As you can see from this promotional picture, there’s definitely a distinctive resemblance there.
I spotted this picture over at the Quartertothree forums and you can see a larger version of the photo here. The picture speaks for itself and it is seriously freaking me out. I thought at first this must be a digitally manipulated photo or something but people are saying that it is completely plausible. Someone please tell me that this is not actually possible!
Monsters’ Den is a newish, free to play, flash-based game that replicates an old-fashioned party-based dungeon-crawler. You control a party of four characters out of a total of five different classes and take them through multiple levels of a dungeon, killing monsters and getting loot. Each character has detailed statistics and different skills, which you get to upgrade every time you descend to a lower level of the dungeon.
The thing about Monster’s Den is that despite its simplicity, it has a surprising amount of depth. Do you customize your warrior to be a sword-and-shield tank or give him a huge two-handed warhammer to go to town with? Do you play your mage in the traditional way of staying in the back and flinging spells or have him front and center with protective spells and a magic-enhanced sword? With a loot-colouration scheme that seems lifted straight from World of Warcraft (green, blue and purple items with a decent variety of different bonuses), savable games and plenty of abilities to experiment with and enemies to fight, it can be pretty addictive. My only complaints are that the default difficulty is perhaps a little too easy and there aren’t enough different classes to play around with.
Between this and the flash version of Portal, it’s amazing to see how far flash games have come. They make a good argument that 2D games aren’t dead and that good gameplay can overcome skimpy graphics.
The publishers of the Merriam-Webster dictionary has just named the word of the year, and it’s “w00t”, spelled with two zeros instead of the letter ‘O’. While it’s fascinating to note how a word from the gamer lexicon has entered the mainstream, I personally find the usage of such terms annoying. One reason why I find the QuartertoThree forums so appealing is that almost everyone there uses complete sentences, proper grammar and punctuation and correct spelling. I find many garish forums such as SomethingAwful and even lowyat.net to be nearly unreadable and the Malaysianisms of the latter forum doesn’t help at all.
I’d like to note though that the article’s stated reason for the spelling of “w00t” using zeroes is incorrect. Early online gamers that could only type messages to communicate with one another used numbers to replace text only because they thought it would be cool and as a way to subtly code their communications. Nowadays, thanks to predictive text technology and better keyboards on mobile phones, I think that there’s no real excuse to actually spell “w00t” with zeroes other than continuing the tradition from online gamers.
What you’re seeing there is a project by the Tampere University of Technology in Finland to create the world’s biggest game display by using the windows of an apartment building as pixels. Here they’re implementing a version of Tetris specifically written for the project, though I must admit that the player playing it isn’t much good.
Pretty amazing project though and it would totally rock to see it implemented on a larger scale on skyscrapers.
This new service for WOW players seems ridiculously cool: select a character on any server, select what items you own that you want displayed on the character and the service makes a customized figure of that character. It won’t be available until December 11 and at US$120.00 including freight charges it isn’t exactly cheap, but this is exactly the kind of business idea that makes stupid sense retrospectively. Considering the amount of time that MMO players spend on their characters and how important it is to most players that their characters look cool, it’s pretty obvious that this is exactly the kind of product that would appeal to a big segment of the market.
I’m still playing WOW on and off but mainly because it’s the only game I can play together with my wife. We’re still at level 64 after a few months of Burning Crusade, so that’s some super-casual playing for you.
[The above image is taken from Sager’s official website.]
I noticed this ludicrously powerful notebook computer in the news today. It has a quad-core CPU, dual 8700M-GT video cards in SLI mode and triple 200GB hard drives. It’s so powerful in fact, that instead of having a battery, it claims to have a built-in UPS instead. And since it weighs 11.5 pounds without including its power brick, can you really call this thing a laptop?
I’m an tech enthusiast myself, but this item serves as a perfect illustration of my puzzlement at how some people go completely crazy in an overboard way over the latest and greatest gadgets. I play a lot of computer games so naturally I need a gaming computer, but from my observations there are people who will happily pay ridiculous amounts of money just to be able to own powerful computers that they don’t really take full advantage of. Similarly, I can appreciate the utility of devices like mobile phones, PDAs and even ebook readers but I’m certainly not the kind of person who buys them just for the sake of buying them.
