Sorry

Now, here is something I want to see: Corey Delaney wearing this shirt… Oh, wait, he doesn´t wear shirts.

Christvertising? Hell Yeah!

Well, Pharyngula posted about this, but while he hopes it is satire, I would really want it to be true. It would be far more ridiculous.

Oh, I am talking about THIS.

Yeah, that introducory video left me with many questions too:

Time-Travelling Lesbians? Hell Yeah!

Just saw this image:

Source

Awesome Dudes Podcasting

Jeff Gerstmann (on the left) and Ryan Davis (on the right, duh!) recorded a podcast this Sunday and it came out earlier today, you should give it a listen.

There are a lot of awesome podcasts and blogs on the internet (including GUSzilla), but this one deserved to be posted. “Why?” You ask? Well because that dude on the left was the main reason I started writing about videogames, his work made me want to do it. And Ryan is also a videogame journalist I look up to very much.

Here is the podcast.

Or here:

And here is to hoping that next week they have Alex Navarro on.

PS: Would any of you out there listen to a GUSzilla podcast? If so I could get someone on to talk with me about crazy stuff that really belongs on the internet… and nowhere else.

Audiosurf (Kinda) Hands On

Audiosurf is an unusual game, unusual for many reasons. First of all it is a music game that mixes racing with a few puzzle elements and that Guitar Hero style of “notes” flying at the screen. Second, it uses the mouse and only the mouse as its default input device, something that is not even close to normal, unless you count simple Flash based games. The third reason is that Audiosurf is an independent game made by one man (that likes referring to himself as “we”) , something rare these days.

I first heard about the game a while back, when the IGF Awards´ nominees were announced. A friend of mine was very excited about this game and told me to download the beta, which I did. I liked the premise of the game, but was not sure about how well executed it would be (especially because I am not a big PC gamer). I ended up not playing the beta because it decided not to run on my computer. After that I read about the beta at Jeff Gerstmann´s blog and tried to install it again, which did not work.

On Monday I was told by my friend that Audiosurf was coming out on Steam so I pre-loaded it and patiently waited until Friday. That is when the problems began.

The Audiosurf servers were very unstable and finally went offline today and won´t be up and running again until tommorow. That made me realise how much of the fun I had with it came from the leaderboards.

Oh well, since I was not able to do a hands on today I will probably play it a lot to post a review here soon-ish.

GUS

Game Science Weekly

Last year I wrote two editions of this column I created: Game Science Weekly.

It was barely weekly and only lasted two editions because I got busy with other projects and the column had to be sacrificed.

So I am going to post them here.

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GEARS OF WARS AND 17 YEAR LOCUSTS

In Gears of War (X360) the villains are an alien race called the locusts and have, indeed, some familiarities with a species of bugs, but not locusts. The locusts from Gears of War are said to have emerged from the underground of planet Sera many decades after humans colonized it, before that, no human had ever seen a locust, nor thought one could exist.

The magicicada are a genre of cicadas that has the nick name of seventeen-year locust, that name is derived from the cyclical nature of their offspring. All cicadas lay eggs underground and so the larvae have to dig up emergence holes. What differentiates the magicicada is that their species have broods that emerge in synchrony; there are thirteen year cycle species and seventeen year cycle species. Those are very long life-spans for insects (the parents die not long before the next brood emerges) and could sure be an inspiration to the emergence holes in Gears of War and serve as explanation for the locust’s absence during the first decades of humans in Sera, maybe they have a decades long cycle, we still don’t know, since in the game we are only fourteen years after “emergence day”, maybe they will explore that in sequels.

There are fifteen broods distributed through the seven species of magicicada (three of which have a seventeen year cycle and four that have a thirteen year cycle. “So when will I be able to see a real life emergence hole?” you ask? Well you can see emergence holes from brood XIII right now, they where scheduled to emerge this year and so they are doing. The next thirteen year brood to emerge is brood XIX and they will come up in 2011. But you have to be in North America to see one of the E-holes, the magicicada are only found in certain regions of N.A.

 

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PLASMA GUNS

If you play videogames (and I guess you do, because you ARE reading this) you have probably seen plasma guns in games. This week’s column is about just that.

I will use the Halo series as my base to how plasma guns are portrayed, but you can find a lot of examples in games and movies. First of all we have the plasma pistol and plasma rifle, they are small, handheld guns that shoot beams of light that seem to be very hot and that, after hitting a surface, dissipate quickly. Then we have the plasma canons, mounted on bases or ships (like the tank used by the covenant), also, the rays that come out in different colors (green in the pistol and purple in other guns).

Alright, now let’s go to the science part of this deal. First of all let me explain what plasma is. Plasma is the fourth state of matter, it is an ionized gas where the molecules are further apart and move much faster than in a regular gas. Since there is a lot of energy, some of it is dissipated as light, that light has a color determined by the emission spectrum of the element in question.

Now this is why you can’t make a plasma gun today: since you need to heat a gas to a very high temperature (some plasma can reach Kelvin) you need a lot of energy, the kind of energy that doesn’t fit into a little handheld battery or even a twenty square feet canon. There are many academic institutions and research labs around the world that produce and use plasma on experiments, but all of them need huge, very energy consuming installations to ionize, heat and contain the gas.

Well, so that is it, I hope that I haven’t broken anyone’s heart by telling you that a plasma gun is not possible today. Maybe in the future we can find ways to produce energy much more efficiently and isolate it so it doesn’t melt your arm and the gun.

I would like to thank the help from Ettore Baldini, a very intelligent physicist that helped me research about the topic.

Here are some nice related links:

Color spectra of all the elements

Wikipedia article: Particle beam weapon

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GUS

2ND POST

Have not posted anything interesting here (unless you count that pseudo-watercolor) but this is just a post to say that I will.

First Post!

First of all:

Uhu, I have actually started a blog in english.

Now I can reach the international masses that hunger for stupid content revolving around my interests.

A “real” post shall come soon.

PS: That computer generated watercolor up there is very stupid, but I had nowhere to put it.