game – Mr. Walker's Classroom Blog

A Slower Speed of Light Official Trailer

Published on Oct 26, 2012

A Slower Speed of Light is a first-person game in which players navigate a 3D space while picking up orbs that reduce the speed of light in increments. A custom-built, open-source relativistic graphics engine allows the speed of light in the game to approach the player’s own maximum walking speed. Visual effects of special relativity gradually become apparent to the player, increasing the challenge of gameplay. These effects, rendered in realtime to vertex accuracy, include the Doppler effect; the searchlight effect; time dilation; Lorentz transformation; and the runtime effect.

A production of the MIT Game Lab.

Play now for Mac and PC! http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/

Game On 2.0

For those of you enrolling in Introduction to Game Programming this year stop playing Dwarf Fortress, and who isn’t, and get down to OMSI and see Game On 2.0! Tell your parents it is educational, info from OMSI below:

Play your way through the past, present, and future of global gaming. From Pong to Gran Turismo, Game On 2.0 is a hands-on experience of video game history and culture, and includes over 125 playable games, including Mario All Stars, Wii Sports, Gran Turismo, Halo Reach, Pacman, Zelda and Sonic the Hedgehog.

Explore over 40 years of gaming entertainment; from the very first commercial coin-op game to the latest in virtual reality and 3D technology. Game On 2.0 celebrates game design, development, and production including original concept and character art and history’s most influential arcade consoles.

Challenge your parents to an old school game!

A trivia game where using Google is allowed

Traditional trivia games have a rule that you can’t cheat—you can’t look things up in books, you can’t ask your friends and you certainly can’t ask Google. But what if there were a trivia game where you could not only ask Google, but were encouraged to do so? Imagine how difficult the questions would need to be with the power of the world’s information at your fingertips.

A Google a Day is a new daily puzzle that can be solved using your creativity and clever search skills on Google. Questions will be posted every day on agoogleaday.com and printed on weekdays above the New York Times crossword puzzle. We’ll reveal each puzzle’s answer the next day in the Times and on agoogleaday.com, along with the search tips and features used to find it.

Just like traditional crossword puzzles, the difficulty of the questions increases over the course of the week, so by Thursday or Friday, even the most seasoned searcher may be stumped.

To prevent spoilers from appearing as you search the web, look for the answers on agoogleaday.com instead of regular google.com—we’ve made a special version of Google that excludes real-time updates and other things that are likely to include spoilers as people post the answers to the puzzle online.

Here’s a sample question for you to try:

As the world of information continues to explode, we hope A Google a Day triggers your imagination and helps you discover all the types of questions you can ask Google—and get an answer.

Start playing A Google a Day now—visit agoogleaday.com or look for the puzzle in tomorrow’s New York Times, just above the crossword. The clues are currently only in English, but anyone can attempt to solve the puzzles. And let us know what you think on Twitter at @agoogleaday or at agoogleaday@google.com.

The First Great Computer Game -> Lunar Lander

Forty Years of Lunar Lander

In 1969, an Apollo-crazy high school student wrote one of the most influential computer games of all time.

Benj Edwards of Technologizer has a nice summary of the history of Lunar Lander and the High School student who wrote one of the first computer games of all time. It started so many of us using computers, able to replicate lunar landings, so soon after we all watched images of the first man to step on the moon. I played this one for the first time in 1972 and it started me thinking, of imagining. That was a big deal, everyone knew computers counted things, but beyond what was being done at the time with computers it was easy to see more, especially when I wasn’t constrained by understanding how it worked, yet. I hope my students become as inspired.