QOTW

Remember this from back in Portal?

Somewhere in a hidden room near chamber 17 we suddenly see the following drawings and posters:

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In a world where most media forms are available as illegal, free copies before they are even available legally, people are constantly faced with the decision of whether to purchase legal copies of their games.  For some people, the fact that pirated games are illegal is a sufficient reason to avoid them.  But as one of our newer users, Sandeepan, asked recently, are there other reasons why gamers should purchase legal copies of games rather than pirate them?  Answers from several different users made a compelling case that yes, there are.

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Minecraft is a game that needs no introduction, but user ndefontenay asks What is the goal of Minecraft?

Minecraft is a sandbox game, and although the latest release brought achievements to the game, it still has essentially no structure, you’re free to do whatever you want. Because of this, players are free set there own goals of what they want to achieve with the game, and some of the things people have done are breathtaking! Here’s my top 10 favourite Minecraft ‘creations’, which can serve as inspiration to anyone starting out with the game:

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Meet P-Body and Atlas, the two co-op robot characters from Portal 2.

Ronan was wondering whether GLaDOS hates Altas, because while P-Body mostly gets comments, Atlas gets referred to as “Dead Weight”. Now we all know GLaDOS doesn’t like pretty much anyone and even if she did, she would probably try and gas them… But still is there any proof in the game that she actually hates Atlas (more so than P-Body)?

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Sejanus was wondering why on earth gaming consoles require a button-press, whereas on PC games you simply press any key and you’re straight in the main menu.

One of our local game devs, Sadly Not, pointed out that requiring a button press is an easy way to figure out who ‘Player One’ is, because he’s the most likely person to be in control. Obviously, when you’re sitting behind your computer, the one controlling the mouse is the boss. more »

Back in an ancient era of video gaming, when a portable console was something risky and unusual, two games, Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue were released. These games were focused on the collection of 151 Pokémon. However, through exploiting a common glitch, players were able to access some more Pokémon, ones the designers had not intentionally created. The most famous and easiest to access of these is MissingNo, the subject of this article.

MissingNo, and its counterpart ‘M, are the two that most people will most commonly come across. Usually, this involves the old man glitch. The cause of this glitch is related to the low memory environments that the Pokémon developers had to deal with. Each Pokémon in game is assigned a number between 0 and 255 (256 slots). This is not related to the Pokédex number. Each area with grass in it has a list of Pokémon that can be encountered, and the Pokémon are represented by these index numbers in the list. Of course, 256 – 151 means there are 105 unused slots. Under normal circumstances, these won’t have any effect – but there are one or two circumstances where they can.

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This post is based on our Gaming Question of the Week #1!

You may have heard that Minecraft can theoretically generate a map 8x the size of Earth. Is that really possible? Our very own Jim wondered just that.

In Minecraft, presumably the world is finite. What happens when you reach the edge of the world? Or will the world become too large to reasonably deal with before this happens?

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