Happy New Year.
My vacation is nearly over. Regular blogging will recommence shortly. Stay safe, have fun and have a great New Years holiday!
Dear Fan Sites.
You should always make sure you have some sort of direct contact info (email, AIM, etc.) visible somewhere on your page, just in case a certain BELOVED GAME DEV wants to get in touch with you personally without posting HIS contact info in your sites comments pages. Especially over the holidays, when I – er… a certain BELOVED GAME DEV has oodles of free time and is obsessively reading your sites.
That is all.
This pleases me.
‘Tis the Season
A handful of lunatics are playing the Desert Bus portion of the old (and unreleased) Penn and Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors game non-stop, raising money for Child’s Play. For those who aren’t familiar with Desert Bus, allow me to shamelessly steal from Wikipedia:
The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada in real time at a maximum speed of 45mph, a feat that would take the player 8 hours of continuous play to complete, as the game cannot be paused.
The bus contains no passengers, and there is no scenery or other cars on the road. The bus veers to the right slightly; as a result, it is impossible to tape down a button to go do something else and have the game end properly. If the bus veers off the road it will stall and be towed back to Tucson, also in real time. If the player makes it to Las Vegas, they will score exactly one point. The player then gets the option to make the return trip to Tucson—for another point (a decision they must make in a few seconds or the game ends). Players may continue to make trips and score points as long as their endurance holds out. Some players who have completed the trip have also noted that, although the scenery never changes, a bug splats on the windscreen about five hours through the first trip, and on the return trip the light does fade, with differences at dusk, and later a pitch black road where the player is guided only with headlights.
As you can see, volunteering to play this game non-stop for 120 hours straight is an act of benign holiday madness. So you should make sure to donate. After all, how often can you do something good while ALSO causing a stranger to suffer?
Public Service Announcement
As the holiday season kicks into full gear, I’ll be on the road a bit and doing less bloggery whatnot. I will, however, continue to relentlessly post on Twitter.
So if you’re interested in tracking that sort of stuff, my Twitter profile is:
http://twitter.com/JoshDrescher
If you’re not interested, I’ll get back to more regular blogging in the New Year (which is not to say that I’m on full blogging hiatus, just… ya know… I’m LAZY).