Crack shack or mansion?

Thanks to Kevin Chong for pointing out this delightful Vancouver real-estate game: Crack Shack or Mansion? I scored 14 out of 16 — let’s see how well you know your MLS!

Canadian teen creates hit iPhone app

He wants to work for Apple. Mom doesn’t him to leave home. Mom, let your boy genius work for Apple.

Naveen Sidhu is the creative developer and savvy businessman behind the world’s most popular free iPhone app of the moment, The Impossible Test.

He’s also 18 and lives with his parents.

Toronto libraries LFG—lowbies OK

The Star reports the Toronto library system wants to create gaming programs at branches around the city. I don’t know — I’m a big video game player, but I don’t think I want to cross the streams of those two worlds.

Extremely Bad Advice on late-night gamefests

Steve “Gramps” Murray offers some advice on how to get the kids to put down the video games and get to sleep. Dude, news for you: The Warcraft grind doesn’t sleep!

STEP TWO I’ve long thought that video games needed parental controls on them. Not to reduce the violence or anything, cause digitally blowing the heads off Nazis is awesome and teaches kids about the insides of heads, but rather for instances of all-night gaming. As it gets closer to bedtime, the character they’re playing can start to get sluggish, uttering things like, “Man, I better not nod off piloting this X-12 Pixelwing. A sleepy soldier is a dead soldier on Planet Repugnant.” The music can slowly shift toward lullabies, the environment can get hazy, etc. Your kid will more than likely get sleepy themselves due to the hypnotic nature of this tonal shift, but they’ll also recognize that their avatar needs a good night’s sleep as well. Sweet dreams, Colonel Lazer.

The Facts in the Case of Mr. Hollow

This creepily cool NFB film (six minutes long) led me to the Guelph band Johnny Hollow, which is kind of a cross of Rasputina and Portishead. Check out the Rue Morgue profile of them or preview the new album, Dirty Hands. The video also led me to My Pet Skeleton Productions (blog here, game A Murder of Scarecrows here and game Scuttlebuggery here). I kind of feel bad about not doing anything today.

Three Canadian cities make new Monopoly edition

Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto have all made it into Monopoly Here and Now: The World Edition. Strangely, Montreal has taken the place of Boardwalk, the most expensive property in the game. Everyone in Canada knows that should be Vancouver.

Previously:

• Is Vancouver the new Broadway?

Canadian gamers like to play naked

N00bl3xx0r has critted your eyes!

If you encounter a Canadian playing online computer games this Canada Day, there’s a chance they may be waggling their joystick naked.

Canadians have apparently developed a taste for playing computer games in the buff, with 17 per cent of men and 9 per cent of women saying they dabble in a little nude gameplay from time to time, according to a recent study conducted by Ipsos Reid on behalf of Microsoft Corp.

Young people between the ages of 18 and 34 were the most likely to admit to stripping down for a little action (23 per cent) while older players were less likely to enjoy a little naked button mashing – with only 5 per cent of gamers over the age of 54 admitting to playing naked.

The online survey of 1,026 Canadians was designed to find out how Canadians enjoy their video games.

Me, I like to blog naked.

Where on Earth is Waldo?

An Emily Carr student has created an art project/game that mashes up Where’s Waldo and Google Earth.

Players will be given the hint that Waldo is hiding somewhere in Vancouver and he can only be seen via Google Earth. In order to do this, a giant Waldo painting is being constructed and placed on a rooftop! The project will be exhibited at the Emily Carr Graduation Exhibit 08 opening May 3, 2008.

And to think I took English lit, where they made us write essays.

Adam Logan wins Scrabble championship

I looked for it on ESPN but couldn’t find it.

In a tense fifth game of the Canadian National Scrabble Championship finals, 32-year-old mathematician Adam Logan found a triple-triple play of pARI(T)IES scoring 113 points to go ahead 450-229.

His opponent, 44-year-old computer programmer David Boys, not missing a beat, deadpanned “Give up yet?”

Overcoming a 221-point deficit at this point was insurmountable, and Logan prevailed 492-354. It was a hard-fought battle, with Boys overcoming a two games-to-none deficit to force a fifth and final game.

Forget the Junos

The Canadian National Scrabble Championships are on this weekend!

Players from across the country are gathered in Toronto in the opulent Austin Gallery on the 12th floor of 1 King St. W. to vie for the title of Canadian Champion. There’s a total prize pool of $12,150 including a top prize of $7,000 and the right to represent Canada at the 2009 World Scrabble Championship.
…
You can follow along with the live coverage online, thanks to tourney director John Chew. If you’re really keen, you can observe some annotated games from the top tables, allowing you to follow along play-by-play at home.

(Image from CarbonNYC’s Flickr stream.)

Inside the EA factory

The Vancouver Sun tours Electronic Arts’ Burnaby campus and talks to some of the people who make the world’s most played games.

In a dark studio, two figures dressed in tight black bodysuits leap around while dribbling a basketball and taking shots at a hoop.

It looks as though someone has glued little white ping pong balls all over them. The white specks dance in the darkness. Around the perimeter of the room is what resembles a clothes line with lights clipped to it.

This is the sci-fi-like scene inside the motion capture (mocap) studio at Electronic Arts’s Burnaby campus, a sprawling 36,750-square-foot place where games and dreams are made. This is the highest-volume studio in the world, with 200-plus shoot days and more than a half-million seconds of animation delivered each year.

Canadian teachers wants boycott on video game

Teachers across the country gang up on the game Bully.

Bully: Scholarship Edition, produced by Vancouver-based Rockstar Games, pits a 15-year-old student against other students and teachers.

“The concern is that it is glorifying violence, [that] it is glorifying bullying,” Emily Noble, president of the Canadian Teachers Federation, said yesterday. “It is a story about a young lad who goes to school and his way of dealing with situations is to bully others.”

I guess they’ve never played on a PVP World of Warcraft server.

Anyway, Paul Chapman shakes his head at them on his Power Play blog.

I wonder if any of the academic geniuses have actually played the game up there in their Ivory Towers.

Thing is, Bully is actually a game that empowers fighting bullying in schools.

The storyline has a kid who’s rich parents stick him in a private school, Bullworth Academy, so they can spend their money travelling.

He gets to the school and is an outcast, and gets bullied by the jocks and the snobby popular girls.

He learns all sorts of tricks in how to beat the system, and yes, some of them involve mild violence, fist fights and sling shots. But there’s no blood, and get this, to increase your skills in the game you actually have to get “good marks” and be rewarded for doing homework.

What a horrible message eh, work hard, get good grades and stand up to school bullies.

Here’s the trailer for the game. Shocking, eh?

Lisa Birke: Search Engine and Canadiana

I came across this post on Beyond Robson about the art of Lisa Birke too late to catch her  exhibition, which is a shame. Looks like pretty wild stuff. The piece above is from her series Search Engine, made up of images selected from Google search terms. Here’s her artist statement:

Is it surrealism? Is it a mad woman’s collage of self-image issues and hysteria? No. It is an interpretation of the collapse of modern image representation, organization, and meaning through the eyes of a society viewing life and existence through cyber windows. Living in a computerized image databank culture, we are overfed on a constant stream of über-information, obese with hyper-entertainment and immediate quick fixes of adrenaline-infused knowledge. On a single computer screen we are able to overlay endless boxes containing related and unrelated, historic and contemporary, researched and fabricated, real and cartoon material, accessible with the click of the mouse. My canvases teeter on the brink of visual chaos as I collapse these windows into a single frame. Thick textured areas are combined with flat delineated forms overlaid with translucent figures, all rendered in oil. Even the canvases themselves appear to be stacked one on top of the other with their multi-layered construction.

I kind of prefer her Canadiana series though, such as Great Canadian Siamese Moose Trophy:

Is Vancouver the new Broadway?

Hasbro is launching a new international version of the game Monopoly later this year and fans are allowed to vote for cities they think should be on the game board. Given the high price of housing in Vancouver — it now takes 75% of the median pre-tax income to afford an average Vancouver home — it should really take over the spot now occupied by Boardwalk.

(Image is of a house for sale in Vancouver. Asking price: $1,250,000.)

The war of words

BlogTO reports on the Kingston Cup Match, where Toronto and Montreal battle it out for Scrabble bragging rights. BlogTO also points out the Kingston Whig Standard coverage of the tournament.

Over the weekend, 52 Scrabble enthusiasts – some more versed in the game than others – gathered at Confederation Place Hotel on Ontario Street and worked their word wizardry.

The tournament marked the 23rd time players from Montreal and Toronto met on neutral ground in Kingston.

“There’s no money at stake,” said Chew, a member of the Toronto team. “We’re just playing for bragging rights.”

The two teams were filled in with players from other parts of the province who wanted in on the action. The teams competed for three trophies, one each for beginners, intermediates and experts, such as Logan.

In the overall competition, Montreal has the edge in the top two tiers, while Toronto has the historic edge in the lower tier.

Could Scrabble become the next World Series of Poker?

(Image: Unfortunate Tiles from CarbonNYC’s Flickr stream.) 

Half-Life 2: Toronto

Torontoist reports on the Toronto Half-Life 2 mod that’s currently under construction by a team of George Brown students. Looks prettier than the real thing.

Now if only someone would do a World of Warcraft Toronto mod. I’d love to wreak havoc in Bay Street with my warlock. Curse of stockbroker agony ftw!

Anyway, the Torontoist story is here and the official site is here.

Canzine 2007

This Sunday is Canzine in Toronto. Featuring: “Indie Horror,” The Canzine Whodunit, video screenings and hotel room installations. What, you had other plans on a Sunday?

Video games becoming important part of Canada’s economy

The Entertainment Software Association of Canada has released a study showing that “entertainment software” — video games — are employing a lot of creative people in this country — and pulling in more money than Canadian films. That could be because of all the Canadian born-again gamers.

Canada’s video game makers directly employ 9,000 people at more than 260 development companies from coast to coast, according to a new study detailing the industry.

Released by the Electronic Software Association of Canada, the study is described as the first serious look at the economics behind an industry worth more than $1.5 billion in annual revenues — or four times more than Canadian movie box office receipts.

The full report can be read here (PDF file).