Free Game Friday: Stunt Rally and Tricky Truck

I don't deliberately theme these game articles, but it seems to happen anyway.

Stunt Rally might not have the most original name, concept, execution or gameplay, but that isn't a bad thing. You drive a car jolly fast through a landscape and try not to screw up too much. It comes with an impressive 79 tracks spread over 11 different regions and it's even possible to play multiplayer.

Although the tracks are very much made for rallying, there's quite a variety and some of the loops and bridges and things are simply excellent fun. There's even a track editor if you feel a bit creative and the game is updated quite often.

Go here to get it (it's about 200MB):
http://code.google.com/p/vdrift-ogre/




Our other game today isn't quite as free. Tricky Truck does have a free version, but you need to cough up approximately eight quid for the full thing. You're actually best off playing the free version initially to see if it's your kind of thing. It's a challenging physics-based truck driving simulation.

The game is satisfyingly hard. The first couple of levels will seem a bit finicky and unnecessary, but you'll soon be trying some very challenging mountain tracks. Completing a level is... well, tricky and you'll feel a real sense of accomplishment in doing so. Failing may be frustrating, but it's one of those games where messing up is definitely your fault; you haven't been cheated, the game has not tricked you, you just turned that corner way too fast.





There's also a lot of enjoyment in taking a stupid risk and pulling it off or smashing and caroming your way around a track in a manner that you know you're not supposed to be able to. The first time I managed a track in a top fifty time, I was ridiculously pleased with myself. Playing on hard mode restricts you to views from within the cab which just adds to the fun sometimes. The best time I've scored on the first shorcuts track (24th place) was on hard. Hah!

Hang on a minute, lads. I've got a great idea

The free version limits you to one truck and only about ten tracks, but surprisingly does include features like the level editor. The full version gives you a lot more vehicle choice, many new tracks and a heck of a lot of other little fun bits and pieces that you can see some of in the video.

Grab it here (about 20MB):
http://www.gravitysensation.com/trickytruck/

Jpop: Okay AKB48, you really are freaking me out now

AKB48 - an ephebophile's dream

I like J-pop. It's true. I genuinely enjoy Japanese pop music and have quite a large collection. I even present a radio show about it on some tiny god-awful community radio station (it's not a popular show and everyone at the station hates me). So yeah, I do like j-pop and I don't care who knows it. But AKB48 are just the most monstrously relentless j-pop machine and I think they're going to enslave the planet.

The English subtitles on this Morning Musume hit are rather fun

It all started with Morning Musume, a manufactured girl group who have quite a lot of members. In order to keep the interest of the fans, the members of Morning Musume "graduate" from the group when they hit a certain age and new members are brought in. The girls are encouraged to be effectively "blank canvases" upon which a personality and role in the group will be placed. There are several sister groups to which graduate members can move and from which new members can be drawn. It's a slick operation and the constant turnover of members ensures a level of freshness. The downside is that the management are very strict and controlling to the point where one girl was sacked for smoking in public as it was at odds with the image chosen for her.

Momusu (as us seasoned j-pop fans sometimes call them) might seem extraordinarily manufactured and somewhat sinister, but AKB48 have taken the same idea and just run with it. It seems that every teenage girl in Japan is a member of AKB48. The main group is comprised of four teams (A, K, B and 4) of sixteen members. The point of this is to allow them to perform live every day - the band has its own theatre in the Akihabara (hence AKB) area of Tokyo with the teams taking turns to perform.

Now you might think that it would be difficult to sell out a theatre three times a day, every single day but AKB48 are so popular that tickets are sold out years in advance and are allocated by a lottery. Girls audition to join the various sister groups (of which there are fourteen at my last count) and then elections are held to choose girls to promote to the main group. To give you some idea of the level of their popularity, at the last election, more than a million fans voted. Cleverly, the voting forms are distributed within certain singles, so you have to buy one in order to vote.

Picture by Puramyun31

It's not just theatres that are part of the AKB48 empire as there's a chain of shops too selling nothing but AKB48 stuff and there are now even cafes being opened all over their sales territories. The group controls every aspect of their business and makes sure that fans are always able to spend money on AKB48 music and merchandising at any time.

Since their debut in 2005, AKB48 has been through (by my count)... 147 members. The fourteen sister groups all have multiple teams of 16 members too making for a total approaching around 1,000 current and former members in just a few years. By the end of this article, that number will probably have doubled.

As a further example of the marketing genius behind the group, sister groups are based in other cities and even countries in order to expand the brand and make sure that fans are able to (pay to) see their local chapter any time they like. The sister groups include: NMB48 in Namba, Osaka; SKE48 in Sakae, Nagoya; JKT48 in Jakarta, Indonesia; TPE48 in Taipei, Taiwan; SNH48 in Shanghia, China, etc, etc.

Akimoto Yasushi - he looks more like an
accountant than an evil genius, doesn't he?

AKB48 have dominated the charts in Japan since 2005 and often have more than one single charting at the same time. Obviously the girls don't play any instruments or write any songs - that's down to the evil genius behind it all and a team of composers. The music varies but is usually bubblegum pop of some variety, but what's truly amazing is the way that Akimoto Yasushi is able to dream up bizarre marketing ploys that keep the band in the news as well as the charts.

You can even visit their website and create your own clone and do stuff like download wallpaper of it

For instance, last year he created a CGI member of the group. Yes, that's right - a thousand girls weren't enough so he had to digitise them and make a computer composite. She (it?) appeared in an advert for candy (Ice no Mi - which I've tried and is quite nice) and then a video was released explaining how it was done.




The current fuss is over another advert for confectionery which is a remarkably clever way of getting teenage lipstick lesbianism onto mainstream TV during peak hours. Various groups have appeared on the news to condemn them for promoting fake homosexuality to impressionable children, but one has to wonder if the management aren't actually paying these groups to pretend to be outraged.

Just for kicks, Akimoto arranged for several of the girls to be trained to play instruments well enough to be able to actually play one song live (although they still needed a few real musicians in there to carry them and they're not very good). The official AKB48 anime series is in production right now and will be released later this year.




The latest wheeze is that AKB48 have launched their own ISP. As well as (surprisingly good) broadband, they offer exclusive access to various offers as well as various online features not accessible from anywhere else. Just click on the video above and be freaked out by the baby predictor. Yup, you can upload a photograph of yourself and they'll calculate what your offspring would look like if you mated with a member of the group. Crikey.




I've just realised that I've got to the end of this article without actually showing you any of their music. Well, here's an astonishingly popular song about birthdays. Don't enjoy it too much though - the youngest one is eleven years old. Despite all the appalling j-pop rubbish that I like, I don't actually like AKB48. It's hard to avoid them though and I fully expect Akimoto Yasushi to take over Japan in a bloodless coup and reveal that they're actually all robots.

Free Game Friday: Unusual game control systems

This week is a little different in that I've not been playing free games, but I've been controlling them with unusual methods (which are all free). None of this keyboard and mouse stuff for me.


FaceTrackNoIR is a face detection uh... thing. It detects your face in order to follow your head movements and it transmits this data to the game. You can lay out £150 for a TrackIR device or you can use a webcam and FaceTrackNoIR.

Who is that handsome devil?

It actually works surprisingly well for something that's a bit cobbled-together. It uses the free non-commercial faceAPI from Seeing Machines to monitor the position of your face and it does a good job even if you have a beard and a busy background.

Although I initially used it for a flight sim, it worked equally well in driving games and, in the video above, you can see it being used for a first person shooter. Quite impressive.

There are obvious limitations like not being able to look directly behind you or too far off to the side, but seeing as you don't have a monitor over there, it's not going to be a problem. I haven't tried it with a game that supports multiple monitors yet, but I think that could be quite interesting.

Try it for yourself here:

http://facetracknoir.sourceforge.net/home/default.htm

There's a list of games that support it here:

http://facetracknoir.sourceforge.net/compatibility/games.htm

GlovePIE has been around for a while and basically allows you to control anything with anything. Originally designed to allow the use of those awful 'virtual reality' gloves, it's gone a bit further than that.

I decided to see if I could use my Nintendo Wii controllers with a flight sim and it was a breeze. The only other thing I needed was a Bluetooth adapter for my PC, but they can be picked up for pennies from ebay or Amazon (I had some spare Amazon credit). Here's a guy controlling Google Earth with a Wiimote:

In my case, it wasn't a total success. The Wiimote worked perfectly, but it wasn't actually any better than just using a joystick. I did try it with a driving game and that was a lot better although my arms did get a bit tired of holding it in the air all the time. But then I cam across this video and realised that I could do more with it.

Voice commands, eh? Well I've got several driving games where it's jolly difficult for me to perform certain functions because my hands are busy. He's playing rFactor 2 and I play the similar Race 07. I have difficulty arranging my pitstops because I've got two hands working the keyboard already, so when do I have time to navigate the menu to arrange my pitstop?

Voice command worked brilliantly. I play with headphones on, so there was no problem isolating the voice commands from the game noise. It uses the speech recognition engine built into Windows 7

I know there's a lot more that can be done with GlovePIE and writing scripts for it isn't terribly hard.

Get it here:

http://glovepie.org/glovepie.php

What worked especially well was combining the two. I played Race 07 using FaceTrackNoIR to track my head and GlovePIE to handle voice commands and that just let me get on with the driving. Entering a corner, I can look to the apex as I turn the car towards it, whilst telling my pit crew that I want different tyres on my next stop. Neither were particularly hard to set up (although I was using games with which I knew they already worked). Have a go yourselves and if there's any other unusual control method out there, let me know.

Programmable microchips weren't cute enough for Japan

asdasd

Check it out, it's an FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array)! What do you mean, "what's that?" - are you retarded? FPGAs are a programmable alternative to using ASICs. Still not with me? Oh my.

Non-ignorant readers can skip these bits:
In certain hardware there is a need for ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit). For instance in an MP3 player it might be better to have an ASIC chip dedicated to decoding MP3 files rather than leaving it to the CPU. CPUs operate in a very general way and aren't the best solution for any one task. An ASIC designed purely to decode MP3 data will be much more efficient than using the CPU and leaves the CPU free to deal with other tasks and increases battery life through reduced power consumption.


The main drawback with ASICs is that they're custom designed for each task. This can lead to long delays as the chips have to be designed and tested and the set-up costs before manufacturing the ASIC can be very high.


FPGAs are a step back from ASICs. They're designed to be configured and programmed after manufacturing. Thus a company can buy FPGAs off the shelf and start manufacturing whilst still working on the setup for the FPGA. They can even be programmed once the product has been deployed or sold to a customer. They're very flexible and their low pre-production costs can make them a good alternative to ASICs, especially in items that aren't going to have very high production runs.


Or, for complete idiots:
An ASIC is a chip designed and created to do a task. An FPGA can be programmed to do anything.

The picture above shows the logical layout of a particular FPGA made by a Japanese company. You can see how it's laid out and how it works. The only problem is that this is Japan and that's way too dry and non-kawaii, so it need improved.

This is the circuit-board itself. You can see the yellow power connector on the left, the two simple LED displays, the USB connector at the top in the middle and the two black interface connector on the right - allowing you to use this board to control just about anything. And here's the back of that board:

Way to go, Japan! I've seen various circuit board and chip companies hide small logos and graphics on their stuff before, but never an entire board given over to an image. And just in case you think this is arbitrary, the layout is perfectly functional and logical and has barely been altered to accommodate the design. There's a video that explain everything... in Japanese... with extremely cheerful j-pop music.





I really want one of these. Really, really want one of these. I still want a Raspberry Pi, which is an entire computer on a single little board, but bloody hell, Japan, you've really managed to made a relatively interested bit of electronics into an object of desire.

Even the documentation is manga-ed up to the max

The Slovak Batman

Dunajská Streda is a town in southern Slovakia. Approximately 80% of the local residents at Hungarian and for many life is quite tough. But Dunajská Streda has something (or rather someone) that makes their town stand out: they have their own superhero.

Én vagyok Batman

26 year-old Zoltan Kohari lives in a derelict house without water, heat or power, but this hasn't stopped him from becoming the Slovak Batman. Having assembled his own costume from leather, Zoltan also builds gadgets to help him in his crusade.

Ez a nyitó konzervdobozokat

Unlike the 'real' Batman, Zoltan has a social conscience (billionaire Bruce Wayne never thinks of offering the Gotham police the same kind of body armour that he wears, etc, etc) and decided to make a difference in his local community by doing whatever he can to help.

Fighting criminals really isn't on the agenda much although Zoltan liaises with the police to keep them informed of what's going on around town. A lot of Zoltan's time is spent picking up litter and clearing rubbish as well as watering plants and cutting the grass on lawns.

Nézni. Várakozás...

Although Zoltan receives no payment for his activities, he's remarkably popular with the locals and they like to reward him with gifts and food. Personally I find it rather delightful that there is a real life superhero who actually helps people. There's a sudden rash of costumed superheroes in the States and they seem to concentrate on trying to intervene in crimes so it's charming and refreshing that the Slovak Batman picks up litter and waters plants. As someone once said in some comic or other "Thanks for saving us from the supervillains, but I can't help but think there weren't any round here until you guys showed up."

Az a titok biztonságban van velem, Batman

China wins the snooker

Jimmy White really did play the bad guy in a Hong Kong snooker movie versus Stephen Chow (Shaolin Soccer)

It's the World Snooker Championship at the moment. This annual contest is in the first round and will continue for three weeks. I'll be watching a lot of it regardless of whether I want to or not, because China is playing.

My wife's Chinese, from Taiwan. The political situation out there is complicated, but no matter what, she'll always regard herself as Chinese and cheer on the Chinese participants in... well, pretty much anything. And snooker's pretty popular in China these days thanks to Ding Junhui. Ever since DingDing (as he's known in my household) appeared, snooker has been changing.

Being female and attractive are important
qualities in a snooker referee

In 2001, professional snooker was in decline. The banning of tobacco sponsorship had hit snooker especially hard and there were problems with trying to attract new sponsors. One thing the WPBSA (World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association) tried was to bring in a female referee to uh, spice things up (they imagined). Although Michaela Tabb has proved popular with both fans and players and her refereeing has been solid, her rapid elevation caused a lot of ill-feeling with other snooker officials. Not for her the five year apprenticeship required of all other referees and, when the WPBSA needed to sack two of its ten referees to cut costs, she was oddly exempt from the last-in-first-out rule that had always applied. Oh and she attracted neither new fans nor sponsors.

In 2003, Ding Junhui turned professional after winning many under-21 competitions and becoming China's number one player. When DingDing appeared on our televisions, it wasn't obvious just how much snooker was about to change. There had been other Chinese-ish players before - Marco Fu of Hong Kong had been playing professionally for a few years for example - but Ding was the first player from mainland China to break into the professional game. Ding was living in England in order to better practice his game and he was already famous among the other Chinese living in the north of England. As soon as Ding appeared on television, yellow faces appeared in the crowd at his matches. Chinese TV channels began to cover the sport and there was a sudden influx of Chinese sponsorship. The mere arrival of Ding had rescued the game of snooker pretty much overnight.

It's a few years since then and there's isn't a player's waistcoat that doesn't have Chinese characters on it. Many tournaments are sponsored by Chinese companies you've never heard of. The China Open was revived and suddenly the Shanghai Masters competition was created. Every player benefited from new sponsorship, new prize money, new tournaments and a whole new audience. And still the commentators couldn't pronounce Ding's name (丁俊晖 - Dīng Jùnhuī - ding june-whey). But they really had better start practising their Chinese names as Ding's success didn't just create new fans, but a whole new generation of players and even a referee.

Zhu Ying - professional snooker's newest referee

Michaela Tabb might be officiating the finals of the World Championship this year, but Zhu Ying will be refereeing several matches and is younger, prettier and, being Chinese-ier, appeals to a much bigger audience. Oh and no one cheated or bent the rules to get her a job.

There's a whole bunch of Chinese players suddenly appearing in the competitions too. Appearing alongside Ding Junhui in the 2012 World Championship are Cao Yupeng, Liang Wenbo and Liu Chuang. Marco Fu's in it too, but as my wife puts it "No Chinese wants to see his ugly Cantonese face. He's a Hong Kong bastard - he's not real Chinese!"

Liang Wenbo and Ding Junhui - one lives in Romford, the other in Sheffield

And the new crop of Chinese players aren't slouches. On Saturday, Liang Wenbo took number one seed John Higgins down to the last frame before missing a crucial shot. Sunday saw Cao Yupeng beat world number seven, Mark Allen. (Note to commentators: it's pronounced ts-ow you-pung whereas you're calling him "cow" or "sow" which both mean "fuck" in Mandarin). Although Liu Chuang is unlikely to beat Mark Williams on Wednesday, Ding will likely beat Ryan Day leading to a match between him and Cao Yupeng.

As well as those in the World Championship, there are a whole lot of other Chinese players zipping up the rankings. You can expect to see Jin Long, Li Hang, Li Yan, Liu Song, Lu Ning, Mei Xiwen, Tian Pengfei, Xiao Guodong, Yu Delu, Zhang Anda on your TV shortly and it'll be hilarious listening to the commentators stumble over their names.

One of the main differences with the Chinese players is the approach they take to their snooker careers. As well as being a professional snooker player taking part in all the main contests, Ding also has to take part in every major Asian event as he's got to be China's number one guy in as public a manner as possible over there. A further demand on Ding's time is that he's a student at Shanghai Jiao Tong University studying Business Administration and Management. Oh and he now has a chain of snooker clubs across China (although this tends to be the kind of thing you let your family run if you're Chinese, heck it was probably their idea). He's easily the busiest of the pro players and it's interesting to see just how much Ding is concentrating on securing his future after snooker; something that many other players would do well to emulate.

It turns out that many Chinese actually are inscrutable

Ding Junhui is a quiet and gentle man with the extraordinary burden of being a national hero from a country where that means much more than the chance to appear on ballroom dancing shows. Reading his (Chinese language) blog shows Ding going out to play in the English snow with his friends and it's quite touching to see how he shares details of his student life, encouraging his Chinese fans to study as much as they can (Ding will post pictures of things like his enrolment certificates and class schedules so his followers can see exactly what university is like). It's quite astonishing how quietly dignified Ding is. I'd be freaking out if I had the kind of pressures that he does and I definitely wouldn't be able to bear them with such serenity.

My wife fucking loves Ronnie O'Sullivan for the respect he shows to Ding

Ding rarely shows any emotion in any of his matches and, although he is very polite, you don't get much hint of friendship between him and other players. Other non-yellow players that is. Amongst the Chinese players, Ding is god-like. He opened the door to international snooker for China and it's doubtful that any of the new generation of players would be there without him. Liang Wenbo was the next guy to make it up to the top ranks of world snooker and it's clear that he and Ding, both living in England for a few years now, are genuinely friends. But emotion is clearly something to keep private. Occasionally a small smile might be visible when he wins, but there's really only one time that Ding's been seen to emit an actual feeling and that was when a match with Ronnie O'Sullivan went badly wrong and Ding walked off thinking it had finished when it hadn't. I was very impressed that O'Sullivan was the first to go after him and spent time calming him down and cheering him up enough to return to the table. They're clearly stayed fairly close friends since then.

There are snooker soap operas in China now, there's even a cartoon series specifically about Ding (no kidding)

Ding's status as a legend is assured, but what's less certain is the future of snooker. It's already slightly weird that the majority of the money and TV audience comes from China and yet most of the competitions are in England. Luckily most of the players are still English, but with waves of eager young Chinese players on the way, how long is it before they're in the majority? And when that day comes is snooker going to be a game where all the audience, money and players come from China and yet the games continue to be played in England? Well, goodness knows what's going to happen, but I'm going to be watching it (I don't have any choice in the matter).

Proper writers like to do a little trick to round off articles where they make reference back to the opening sentence or the title, even if it means fudging in a semi-pun, telling a lie, saying something slightly pretentious or even merely repeating a word or two. My wife glanced over at the television earlier today after a non-yellow match and asked me "Who won the snooker?" China did, oh wife of mine, China won the snooker...

People think that Confucius is the great philosopher sage of China, but actually it's Jimmy White

"Legend of the Dragon" 1991 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100047/

Mystery Monday: Is this the tomb of Jesus Christ?

Is this the tomb of Jesus Christ? Nope.

This mystery solving is a lot easier than it looks, huh? So what's the story here?

Once upon a time, there was a television station dedicated to showing documentaries and other factual programmes. It was quite a good channel, but the executives in charge decided they would like it to have mass market appeal and started adding populist crap like Shark Week and American Chopper. Soon the channel decided to forego education and accuracy in favour of controversy and ratings.

So when an ossuary with a tenuous link to Jesus turned up in 2002, the Discovery Channel jumped at the chance to host a press conference with the Biblical Archaeology Society. The ossuary (a box for storing skeletal remains) had an inscription on the outside saying "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus". That the Biblical Archaeology Society are amateurs and that the owner of the ossuary had been suspected of forging biblical antiquities many times before didn't seem to bother them at all. The Discovery Channel were only too happy churn out a series of documentaries even whilst the owner, Oded Golan, was investigated and then arrested for forging antiquities.

Back in 1980, a tomb (yeah, that one in the picture at the top) was found in East Talpiot, Jerusalem. It contained ten ossuaries, six of them with inscriptions. The tomb was investigated by archaeologists under the aegis of the Israel Department of Antiquities (now called the Israel Antiquities Authority). The tomb had been found whilst digging foundations for an apartment block and, after the archaeological investigation was completed, the block was finished and the tomb carefully covered.

The entrance to the tomb as it is today

After the ossuary gained publicity in 2002, there was a relatively thorough investigation by the IAA (Israel Antiquities Authority) which concluded that the box was genuine, but that the inscription was a modern addition. It all became a lot more confusing when the Israel Geological Survey tested the box and found that the box had a patina consistent having been in a cave for a long time, but they also concluded that the same patina covered the lettering. So was it fake or not?

At the end of 2004, Oded Golan and four others were arrested on suspicion of faking antiquities for the last 20 years. They were charged with 44 counts of forgery, fraud and deception including the ossuary inscription. So you'd think the Discovery Channel would be keen to distance itself from any claims as to the origin of the ossuary until there was some consensus. Nah.

There was some suggestion that the ossuary had come from the Talpiot tomb, so a film crew gained access and filmed inside the tomb. Originally there had been ten ossuaries in there, but this time there was one missing and it corresponded neatly with the James ossuary, leading to speculation that, if the ossuary was genuine, that the tomb contained the members of Jesus's family and possibly even some relics of Christ himself.

Oded Golan and the James Ossuary

As is typical with pretty much all religious antiquities cases in the Holy Land, it's now descended into a clusterfuck. The IAA aren't able to produce any experts that are willing to conclude with 100% certainty that the ossuary is a fake, but maintain a public stance that it is so. Oded Golan has been mixed up in countless dubious finds of antiquities, there's even a picture of his home from several years before the ossuary was officially discovered showing what very much looks like the James Ossuary sitting on a shelf. Annoyingly uncritical TV stations like the Discovery Channel and the History Channel keep shoving out lazy, ill-informed speculation disguised as documentaries. Golan was finally tried and acquitted of forging the box, but the judge was very careful to point out that just because no one had proven the inscription to be a forgery didn't mean that it wasn't one; after all, no one had proved it genuine either. The judge was also scathing of the Israeli police forensics labs saying that the way they'd handled the box had made it impossible to run further tests. Golan continues to shoot his mouth off and it's surely only a matter of time before he "finds" another important religious artefact.

And that's where the story grinds to a halt. There was some DNA testing carried out on the remains in the tomb and it concluded that the bones that were maybe Jesus and the bones that were maybe Mary Magdalene (yeah, really) weren't related maternally. In other words, they didn't have the same mother. The Discovery Channel documentary (the uncritically-named The Lost Tomb of Jesus) claimed this showed they were husband and wife, but no one really believed them, apart from credulous TV viewers. But the confusion is great for business and the deluge of books and TV shows about Jesus's tomb will continue for the foreseeable future. Sigh...

Tottori Sand Sculpture Contest

In Tottori, Japan, there is a Sand Museum. I don't know too much about the museum's exhibits, but I do know that every year they have a sad sculpture competition. Each contest has a theme and this year's is 'Great Britain' which has proved interesting. As well as the Japanese teams, there are fourteen foreign sculptors taking part.

My favourite is the last image showing a rainy day in London. What do you think?

Horse Racing Simulators in Japan

Before she lived in the UK, one of the many jobs my wife had was designing coin-operated arcade games. As you might imagine, there are some types of game that are peculiar to certain countries or regions. For example, mah jong (real mah jong, not the tile-matching stuff) games are very popular in China and Japan and there have been hundreds of such games produced over the years. One type of game that is oddly popular in the region is that of the horse racing simulator.

To me, these have always seemed the dullest of games. Most of them are as exciting as picking a number between one and five and waiting 30 seconds to see if you're right and yet these games have been popular for many years. In recent years, attempts have been made to make the games more interesting and also to create a form that can be played on home consoles and computers.

After a number of hit and miss titles over the years, the genre has been revitalised at the hands of Riichiro Mashima. I first became aware of his work when he created a number of ski jumping clips for a video by girl duo Halcali.




These clips were adapted from his hit pachinko game Ski Jumping Pairs. Now that he's taking on horse racing, Riichiro Mashima has brought his sense of humour with him and has managed to create a hit series of horse racing games that barely even feature any horses.









It seems like there's always a new way of looking at any genre... the Japanese way. You can actually play this marvel of gaming yourself at the following link:
http://www.jra-jwc.jp/

There's even a thread on Reddit talking about it and explaining how to play (seeing as the website's entirely in Japanese). Let me know if you figure it out!
http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/hjt60/can_you_say_game_of_the_year/

What's that you say? Could I finish this article off with another fabulous Halcali video? Probably.

Something for the weekend

It's the weekend so I don't bother posting stuff. So here's a collection of interesting and delightful things from the internet that aren't actually worth me writing an article about. Join me again on Monday for more fawning appreciation of oriental cultures and poorly thought out ramblings.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/04/11/5-things-to-see-at-the-gadget-show-live/

Y'know those super cool hand signals you see military chaps doing in films?
http://www.lefande.com/hands.html

How to make your own Volkswagen camper van bunk bed thing.
http://www.instructables.com/id/The-Micro-Bus-Bunk-Bed-and-Playhouse/