May you be touched by his noodly appendage.

Hint: use the shadow to determine if you are over your converts.

My best was 681 930 982 feet.

Does playing this make me a bad person?

I was in Fry’s last weekend, and was just browsing the cheap video game aisle’s with my wife, when I noticed that the quirky Japanese title Katamari Damacy was only $19.99. I think it was Tom who first told me about this rather odd little game, and when I explained what it was to my wife, she shocked me by tossing it into the basket along with all the other crap we were buying.

There is no mistaking this game is a Japanese import. It has a very quirky style, with very odd English titles which undoubtably are a bad translation from some equally quirky Japanese. The backdrop: the King of the Cosmos has destroyed all the stars, and they need replacing. You are the Prince, a strange little green guy who gets to push around a magnetic ball called the Katamari. When the Katamari rolls up against a small object, it will stick to it, and the ball gets bigger. The bigger the ball gets, the more stuff will stick to it. At first, you can only pick up tacks and dice. As the game progresses you can pick up dogs, humans, boulders, giant octopuses and supertankers. Upon completing each level, the Katamari is converted into stars.

It is very quirky.

And fun. The graphics are fairly simple, but incredibly varied. There are all sorts of things going on in the house, town and city in which you work. The sheer variety is very compelling. It reminds me vaguely of the experience I had when I played Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the first time: the town was the first town in a game that felt like people lived there. Similarly, there are all sorts of things going on in this town: dogs barking, elephants, schools, bears, sumo wrestlers, cranes, and a billion other objects. It’s really pretty staggering. And fun.

Did I mention it was fun?

If you are looking for a cute game, with unusually innovative game play, simple, non-violent, try checking out Katamari Damacy.

Half shadow puppet theater, half first person shooter: Deanimator.

Link courtesy of Dan.

While watching the World Poker Tour today, I saw Mike Madusow survive going all in against a pair of aces, and surviving by hitting three kings on the river. During the break, they had this question as a quiz:

Which hand has the best odds going up against A♦ A♣ in the hole?

• K♦ K♠
• 10♦ 9♦
• Q♣ J♦

It seems obvious that the third is right out, but what might be a teensy bit surprising is that you have a better shot with 10 ♦ 9♦ against a pair of aces than you do with the pair of kings. Apparently the additional chances to hit straights and flushes outweigh the additional rank which is mostly useless against the aces. You can use the GNU poker eval program to verify this:

[fishtank] % ./hcmp2 AD AC KH KS
1712304 boards
  cards      win  %win       loss  %lose       tie  %tie      EV
  Ac Ad  1388072  81.06    317694  18.55      6538   0.38     0.813
  Ks Kh   317694  18.55   1388072  81.06      6538   0.38     0.187
[fishtank] % ./hcmp2 AD AC TD 9D
1712304 boards
  cards      win  %win       loss  %lose       tie  %tie      EV
  Ac Ad  1338249  78.15    367143  21.44      6912   0.40     0.784
  Td 9d   367143  21.44   1338249  78.15      6912   0.40     0.216
[fishtank] % ./hcmp2 AD AC QC JH
1712304 boards
  cards      win  %win       loss  %lose       tie  %tie      EV
  Ac Ad  1450987  84.74    254763  14.88      6554   0.38     0.849
  Qc Jh   254763  14.88   1450987  84.74      6554   0.38     0.151

I thought it was cool.

Gamespy talks about Will Wright’s newest game Spore. It sounds fascinating on many levels.

The BBC has the 1984 Infocom adventure based upon Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy running as a Flash applet. Cool stuff. Don’t forget your towel!

While watching the amateur video program The Packet Sniffers, I was introduced to Stair Dismount. It is a wacky little “game”, where you basically aim a force at particular portions of a stick figures anatomy to push him down a long flight of stairs, and then get points depending on how hard the various bits of his anatomy contact the stairs. As a person working in CG films, I appreciate the programming and physics involved, while the sick puppy in me just likes to see him bounce off the stairs.

Check it out!