Weird things happened to me in GTAIV last night.

First, the suicidal taxi. I was finishing up a job at Brucies, and for some reason didn’t feel like stealing a car (that road can get sparse sometimes anyway and cops love it too). So, I called Roman for a taxi. I waited and waited, but the blue dot never got to me. I looked at the big map, and saw that the blue dot was at the end of the docks, about a block away. I walked to the end of the dock and saw the taxi waiting for me, parked behind a container next to the warehouse. I got in, and the drive went into his hating-on-me spiel, as the AI tried comically to back out from the spot to get onto the street. Unfortunately, it poorly navigated the end of the dock, at a point where there’s a short car-length waterway between two piers. The taxi backed up, straddling the edge, then when its rear tire caught on the next pier, the taxi tried to pull forward. By that time it was too late, the front tire caught, and the car slowly tilted off the dock. I bailed from the car, but both me and the car ended up in the drink. The driver was still inside, and still whinging at me, until, I presume, he drowned. I got myself back onto land and walked.

At the end of Russian Revolution, where you have to escape past the cops, I managed to basically just steal a cop car, just as a cop was getting out of it. I’m surprised it wasn’t an auto-arrest at that point. I guess I caught the mechanics at a point where my entering the car and his exiting the car didn’t interact. So, weird, but a good weird.

Getting away from the warehouse, the road curves, which makes it really hard to get out of the wanted circle. So, I drove the police car up the side of the grass hill. Well, I didn’t quite make it, and it slid back in such a way that it ended up tightly wedged between a tree and a container or something. So I had to bail (with Jacob in tow through all this of course) and we hopped on a passing bike. (I didn’t even know you could ride a bike with an NPC; it was a crap shoot, but it works. Nice touch, though Jacob got thrown once.)

After dropping off Jacob, I was going to finish up for the night and head home, so I drove the bike back. As I was coming up a hill, a mack truck came out of nowhere and SMACKed directly into me, throwing me literally like 60 feet. I landed on some grass with barely a thread of health left.

Well crap, I don’t want to get back on that bike if I can help it, and I need to grab some food asap. I went up to a passing taxi and jacked it. Taxis are nice and sturdy and fast, so I figured it was the best option. But then I hear gunshots. I’m like, who is shooting? Wtf? And I hear “I teach you to steal my cab” or something like that. I realize that the damn cab driver I just jacked is packing, and shooting at me! I try bail up a side street but he nails me. That’s the first gun-toting cabbie I’ve encountered in the game.

[From Digg] Dr. Gene Cooperman, director of the Institute for Complex Scientific Software at Northeastern University in Boston, has received a $200,000 grant for 20TB of storage to store and analyze as many as possible of the 43 quintillion possible positions of a Rubik’s Cube. The toys are to be used as a model for operations research, a science dedicated to using computers to solve and optimize complex combinatorical logistics problems. Rubiks also have been used as mathematical models for diverse fields including particle physics.

Prof. Cooperman is one of two people at NU who claim to know the best algorithm for solving the 2×2x2 Pocket Cube, proving that any arrangement can be solved in 11 moves or less.

[Link]

If you like online (and maybe not-so-online) treasure hunts revolving around trivia and logic puzzles, give GPS The Game a try.

Though the name suggests a very Geocaching-oriented game, the game seems to currently be a primarily online project. However, players are invited to hide “stashes” (the original term for geocache, a term which has some contention over its ownership) in the real world.

The game website is affiliated with a C-grade independent movie named, appropriately, GPS The Movie (or just GPS). Many of the game’s puzzles will involve the movie or its participants, which, if you’re at all curious about it, you will be sufficiently familiar with through the course of playing the game.

New puzzles seem to be added to the website every day.

It seems that about 99% of home video games out there fall into a handful of what are now fairly uninnovative categories:

1. FPS
2. Sports
3. Racing
4. Platform scroller (this never seems to really go away)
5. RPG (even more so)

Lumping games into these few fairly vertical categories means that there isn’t really a lot of innovation in gaming. The only trends in gaming seem to be across the board: graphics get better, levels get larger, controls get more complicated and nuanced. But these aren’t so much gameplay innovations as they are a form of game developer dick-waving. Game studios are more inclined to release a new game in one of the above categories and announce it with “OMG look at the graphics! We push the GV2199 chip to its absolute limit! You can see the hairs in Tetsuko’s nose wave when he breathes!” Yawn. Game connoiseurs know that graphics don’t enhance gameplay, and frankly rarely do more complicated controls — they just make it more physically demanding to play, rather than mentally demanding, which is what games are supposed to do.

Add to this the number of the above game categories that are often “improved” by adding violence and criminal activity — ranging from vandalism in Tony Hawk, to speeding and road rage in Full Auto, to out-and-out mass murder in the GTA series (which started out a bit innovative, but eventually settled into the FPS camp). To be fair, these trends had their early predecessors — Rampage, Road Blasters, etc; but those predecessors were unique in their time, not part of trends as these themes are today.

With this in mind, I’m here to suggest some games for the home systems that are outside these trends, many of which have become staples in the K-rad household.

1. Dance Dance Revolution series and clones
This has to come first, because it is perhaps the most physically demanding game format you’ll play in the home, and among the most physically demanding you’ll find in the arcades. This one gets a lot of chuckles from the established 25-35 gaming crowd, and the general public, because the music is a little weird, and the games are always populated by giggly teenagers with no rhythm, or else skinny pretty boys who show off by doing three-pad hand tricks every other measure. Let’s not forget every cheap shot in the book, a la “if I wanted to dance to workout music, I’d get a gym membership.” The irony of this crack is that DDR has been adopted among segments of the otherwise frumpy gamer-geek universe (and even some civil fitness bureaus) as a bona fide workout routine.

So maybe secretly, you’d see the benefit of all this, but aren’t really keen on jumping around like an angry whirling rabbit in front of all those bratty kids who are better than you at it (the same reason perhaps you don’t go to a gym, either). Whatever the reason, the good news is that many different iterations of DDR are available for the home, for PS2 and XBOX, soon coming to the XBOX 360, and even available for the PSone, a Mario themed one for the Gamecube, and for the true collector, even a Disney themed Japanese one for the N64. So now, you have no excuse.

2. Katamari Damacy

A lot of you may have heard buzz about this but never actually seen it. And even if you’ve heard how the game is played, you still weren’t impressed. Still… Katamari is widely considered one of the most innovative game ideas to have come along in a very long time, breaking the above categorical dead end, but unfortunately not breaking it enough for the notion to be considered profitable. Still, Katamari 1 did well enough for them to make a Katamari 2.

Long story short, you are the son of a space supergod who has scattered crap throughout the universe. Your job is to roll a big sticky ball throughout the universe to collect all this junk. The more junk you collect (measured in diameter), the better you do. Fun, right? Who wants to be an intergalactic garbage man, Douglas Adams fans notwithstanding? This dismissal misses the point. You start at a very small scale, on the table and floor of a house, picking up coins, toothpicks, batteries, toothbrushes, flowerpots, etc., avoiding dangers like the household cat, and racing against a clock. As you progress through the game, your scale gets larger, until such time as you are rolling over a city, picking up cars and houses and maybe even people and livestock. (No one seems to get hurt, just stuck.)

Bottom line is, as long as you aren’t terribly motion-sick, this is a fun game. There are seemingly infinite number of identified 3-d objects in this game. The game is littered not only with esoteric junk, but also with of a sort of lightly aloof-absurdism that not only is universal, but should be well received by any member of the domestic gaming culture that is, like so many are, a fan of British comedy (though the game is decidedly not British). Throw in the one-on-one games where you can roll against (and even up) your opponent, and you’ll never have so much fun cleaning anything up.

3. Karaoke Revolution

The name may be a bit of a rip off, but the game is not. The game has more to do with American Idol than with dancing, though the newer release, Karaoke Revolution Party, is dancepad compatible and can optionall throw in some footwork with your singing. In case you hadn’t guessed, KR is a game that plays backing music, and rolls the words across the screen, with which you may sing along. Far from being a passive party gimmick, KR goes one significant step beyond what the suitcase karaoke DJs offer at the local happy hour bar. KR not only gives you the words, but even more importantly, the notes of the song, and scores you on how well you match them. Like Randy and Paula, KR won’t let any “pitchiness” slide; if you don’t meet the note reasonably well, you don’t get points. It behooves you to actually sing well if you want to do well in the game. And the songs range from the jukebox-wailing classics (one release includes That’s Amore) to some particularly challenging feats of vocal versatility (such as Mariah or Bowie). Where the drunken nightclub crowd will sing along with your wailing, KR will actually let you know just how good (or bad) you are. And aside from the dance steps option (which adds a significant difficulty to the game, let me tell you), the Party version (for PS2) also throws in EyeToy candy for cute stage-show video effects. (It’s also worth noting, after the comment in the second sentence, that KR will be picked up as the engine behind the next American Idol home console game. The original AI game used button-pushing to rather laughably and unrealistically simulate vocal talent.)

4. FreQuency and Amplitude

FreQuency, and its sequel Amplitude, were made by the same studio as KR, Harmonix; a music-oriented studio that likes to specialize in alternative game interfaces and paradigms. Their Eye-toy game Antigrav is perhaps the most physically integrated game for the PS2, using the camera’s view of your position to control your character on a hoverboard. I mention this because it’s worth noting just how much this studio has contributed to innovative game play and interfaces, though not all their games are mentioned here. Their games routinely get raving critical reviews, though this does not seem to lead to raving commercial success. Their latest venture, Guitar Hero, with a guitar-shaped controller, is already turning heads.

Back to the game at hand, the FreQuency series does use button-pushing for its interface, but to simulate musical note triggering rather than vocal quirks. At any given time, you are controlling the triggering of notes (indicated as they scroll towards you, with timing and measure marks) using three buttons, the sequence of which attempts to follow the musical progression: stable, rising, dropping tone. Get the timing and sequence just right for two measures, and you clear the music for a while — for one intstrument. To keep the music (and score) going, you switch to another audio track to control and clear another instrument, from drums to guitars to vocals and even SFX tracks. The music is catchy, modern, and increasingly complex and difficult. If you’ve ever found yourself tapping along involuntarily to a rocking or frenetic hook, or even air guitar or drums, your fingers should find themselves invigorated by a few good rounds of either of these games.

5. Donkey Konga

Now, don’t laugh. The idea is laughable, but in practice, it’s hand-pounding fun. Though a few of the music selections may not seem like natural conga-accompanied tracks, you have to admit, whomping on a couple of real drums to play a video game sounds like fun. And once you get the hang of it for a little bit, it is. While I might secretly wish for Babalu to be among the included tracks, Oye Como Va is a half-decent replacement. And there’s nothing quite as intellectually amusing as Conga-ing (and clapping) along to Louie Louie or Hungarian Dance No. 5. Like the other games here, DK has done well enough to spawn a 2 and 3.

6. Mario Party

This series stands out a bit. Unlike some of the other games above, which have spawned a number of copy cats, no one but Nintendo seems to have dipped into the party dynamic-board game market. Probably, the Gamecube and N64 being the only systems in their generations to be built from the start with four controller slots available.

Now, granted, perhaps the average gamer doesn’t have three friends handy that all want to play a game together, and those that do tend to bring their laptops or desktops over and have a good old LAN party on an established, hardcore multiplayer (near-universally FPS) game.

For the other crowds, or those looking for more entertaining and good-natured fun, the Mario Party series provides. Now on #7 (1-3 were on N64, 4-7 on NGC), each game provides a selection of unstable game boards full of tricks, pitfalls, switches, gimmicks, and all sorts of ways to get ahead. But it doesn’t stop there; at the end of each full turn around the room, all players get together for a head-to-head challenge of one of many dozens of randomly-selected competitions, where the other half of the getting ahead is done. Win coins, buy stars, play tricks on your opponents, steal, jump ahead, or even find yourself standing aside your opponents facing an evil and unforgiving Bowser. It’s not entirely inherently Mario, any more than any other unlikely Mario-themed game (Mario Golf, Tennis, Kart, etc.) is, except that no one else has really done this style of game besides Nintendo. Like few other games, Mario Party can bring a handful of people together for a truly fun time.