games

Chris Knight's avatar

What the heck is wrong with Hollywood lately? This has been one of the best years for filmmaking in recent memory. But alas! It does not appear as if it was meant to endure. Yesterday word came that a remake of The Karate Kid starring Will Smith’s son is in the works, and there’s also a redo of Footloose headed our way.

But this next item is something that is certainly… different, in ways most of us weren’t expecting: The Hollywood Reporter is breaking the news that a movie based on the board game Monopoly is in development and that none other than Ridley Scott has been attached as producer, and likely will be directing it as well. Scott is looking at the project “with an eye toward giving it a futuristic sheen along the lines of his iconic ‘Blade Runner.'”

The story also reports that a movie ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

A couple of weeks ago I had to go to Burlington, North Carolina, about thirty minutes away from home here in Reidsville, on a business errand. I wound up with some time to kill and thought I’d drive around my old stompin’ grounds, since I lived there for a few years while a student at Elon. The west end of town in particular has grown a lot recently, what with a new Target Supercenter and a Best Buy and a new movie cinema and all kinds of other good places.

Anyway, it was while on south Church Street that I came across HyperMind…

With a name like that, I couldn’t resist going in.

It turns out that HyperMind, now at its second and larger location since first opening in 2006, is a game store. And to the best of my recollection, there hasn’t been a place like this serving ...

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19-year old Russian math student Nikolai Sazhin has won the title of world chess boxing champion. Chess boxing is a new “sport” that was inspired by a French cartoon back in the Nineties. Competitors like Italy’s Gianluca Sirc (shown in the photo) meet in the center of a boxing ring and play chess for 4 minutes. Then the board is cleared away and the contestants duke it out for 3 minutes in a regulation boxing match. A chess boxing match consists of 6 rounds of chess and 5 rounds of boxing. The winner is decided by checkmate, knockout, or points.

Maybe this can be an Olympic sport someday! 🙂...

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Yesterday I posted about the death of Gary Gygax, who co-created Dungeons & Dragons and is regarded as the founder of the role-playing game genre. Lots of people who are around my age will probably remember that Dungeons & Dragons aroused considerable controversy in the early Eighties because a lot of Christians claimed that the game promoted witchcraft, demonic worship, suicide, and pretty much every other undesirable practice that you can think of. Many of these people wanted the game to be banned completely.

It wasn’t enough to stop publication of Dungeons & Dragons but the game has never completely shaken-off the stigma that it is somehow a breeding ground for followers of Satan.

This afternoon I received an e-mail from a reader of this blog, and I learned something quite fascinating: that Gary Gygax, the mind behind Dungeons & Dragons, was a born-again Christian. That link takes ...

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It’s weird: I was just thinking of Gary Gygax last week, after reading a review of the new 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons. It was back in the early Seventies that Gygax, along with Dave Arneson, created the first Dungeons & Dragons game. Gygax has since been widely hailed as “the father of the role-playing game”.

Now comes the sad news that Gary Gygax has passed away at the age of 69.

I think it’s safe to say that Gygax’s influence on popular culture for the better part of the past four decades has been profound, if subtle. Gygax’s rules for Dungeons & Dragons became the basis for not only pretty much every role-playing game that followed, but also made an enormous impact on video games and even some real-world simulations and tools for education. Gygax’s work had a tremendous effect on many movies and television series… ...

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…and it might be set 4,000 years before the time of the movies.

Here’s the story at TheForce.net and it’s breaking out in quite a few other outlets right now too. The full scoop is that, allegedly, BioWare is creating a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG for short) based upon Knights of the Old Republic, their 2003 smash hit which is widely hailed as the best Star Wars game of the past several years. Knights of the Old Republic broke away from the traditional “Rebels versus Empire” motif of just about every previous Star Wars game and went into bold new territory: a time four millennia before the rise of Emperor Palpatine.

I loved Knights of the Old Republic (it equals TIE Fighter as my all-time favorite Star Wars game). It’s an extremely beautiful and well-crafted game. And it’s setting in Star Wars history is lush with untapped potential....

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For the past few weeks I’ve been playing Guild Wars a lot. If you don’t know what it is, Guild Wars is an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) with, at last count, about 2 million active players. But it’s different from most MMORPGs out there, like World of Warcraft. For one thing, there are no monthly fees you pay in order to play the game: you buy the software and create your account and that’s all the money you’ll ever have to plunk down. It’s not an entirely game-wide “persistent” world though: you can meet other players from around the world in places like cities and outposts, but once you leave those the game is an “instance” created just for you and your party of fellow players (if you want to play alone though you can hire “henchmen” from the cities to follow along and help you). It’s also ...

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