Engadget: Spotify will shut down ‘Heardle’ on May 5th. “Spotify has some disappointing news for Heardle fans: the company is shutting down the song-guessing game, which it bought last summer. ‘Thanks for playing Heardle, but unfortunately we have to say goodbye,’ a message on the Heardle webpage reads. ‘From May 5th, Heardle will no longer be available.'”
Techdirt: Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Tower Tree Stories. “Those of you who have followed the game jams over the years will surely recognize that name, because this is David’s fourth straight win, and the third in this category. In the past his winning games have all shared a common purpose: guiding players in an exploration of one or more paintings that had just entered the public domain that year. But this time we’ve got something very different. Tower Tree Stories isn’t based on a famous painting or an artist, but rather on something a little more low-key: the 1927 yearbook of Greensburg High School in Indiana, a full copy of which is the backbone of the game.”
Techdirt: Game Jam Winner Spotlight: To And Again. “So far in our series of posts on showcasing the winners in all six categories of the fifth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927, we’ve featured Best Remix winner Lucia and Best Visuals winner Urbanity. Today, we’re taking a closer look at the winner of the Best Adaptation category: To And Again by Perrin Ellis.”
PR Newswire: Up to the Challenge? New American Academy of Actuaries Web App Puts You in Charge of Fixing Social Security Financing (PRESS RELEASE). “A new ‘Social Security Challenge’ web app published by the nonpartisan American Academy of Actuaries at actuary.org/socialsecurity immerses users in an animated virtual trek where they endeavor to solve one of the most consequential public policy challenges of our time: how to address the financing shortfall that could lead to future 20% cuts in payable Social Security benefits.”
Lifehacker: ChatGPT Created Its Own Puzzle Game, and You Can Play It Right Now. “ChatGPT’s new game is the result of a back-and-forth between the AI and one Daniel Tait, who was interested in seeing if the ChatGPT could recommend him a puzzle like Sodoku. ChatGPT responded with a list of five alternatives, all of which Tait had tried already. So, he upped the ante, asking ChatGPT to invent a Sodoku-like puzzle that didn’t already exist.” More context: it appears that the game created was not entirely original.
MakeUseOf: The 6 Best Chrome Extensions to Enhance Roblox. “Roblox is a great game, but that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be better. There are loads of features that are just missing from the game, which the developers may never add in. Luckily, Chrome extensions let you quickly and easily add these new features right into your game with almost no work. All you have to do is install the extension, and it’s like you have a brand-new game. Here are the six best Chrome extensions to enhance your Roblox experience.”
Lifehacker: This App Turns the World Into a Wikipedia Scavenger Hunt. “You might think your know your hometown pretty well, but I’m willing to bet there’s a lot you don’t know—something noteworthy that happened in a spot you walk or drive past every day without thinking about, like the building that’s been there forever, or the park you relax in every now and then. Well, there’s an easy way to learn all about your neighborhood, or any neighborhood in the world, in a way that almost feels like playing Pokémon Go, but for real life.”
Boing Boing: Fun game makes you guess what year a photo was taken. “Chronophoto presents the player with a photo and a timeline ranging from 1900 to current times. The closer you get to the exact year of the photograph’s creation, the more points you’ll be awarded.”
Datamuse Blog: Our 2022 Waterloo co-op term: In which organising words is a labour of love!. “This past Fall, Datamuse hired three talented computer science students from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. Over the course of their three-month co-op they improved our word-finding apps and built a new game. These projects required a diverse set of skills, spanning topics in natural language processing (NLP), data visualization, distributed data processing, design, and web application development. In this post, we will showcase eight of the projects the students completed during the Fall term.” I use the Datamuse API for one of my Search Gizmos, Smushy Search. If you like words and word games, you definitely need to check out the Datamuse site.
Washington Post: Cine2Nerdle is a remarkably fun Wordle-like game for movie obsessives. “…if you love the movies — and come on, who doesn’t? — Cine2Nerdle may feel like a breath of fresh air. The game looks like Wordle and has a name that’s similar to Wordle, but the main underlying mechanic is quite different. Cine2Nerdle presents players with a four-by-four set of tiles, each with a word or phrase on it that corresponds to a movie.”
WIRED: You Can Use This Silly Game to Do Some Serious Physics. “The game works like this: You start off with a rocket on a very small planet. Click on the rocket to start, then you can use the arrows on your keyboard to turn on the thruster, rotate the spacecraft, and find other planets and a few fun things that are mostly inside What If jokes. That’s it. That’s the game. It’s silly and fun, and I love it. But it turns out that you can use even a simple game to explore some key concepts in physics.”
University of Virginia: Play This New Addictive Game Created by UVA Alumni – It’s a Mind Grind. “A product of the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce, Collin Waldoch, 29, has already started and sold a profitable trivia company, been featured in The New York Times and is five months into a new project that’s making headlines.”
The Verge: In 2022, cozy games went from niche to video game fixture. “While open-world games with low stakes and minimal violence have existed for decades, it wasn’t until more recently that they became a genre all of their own, referred to as ‘cozy’ or ‘wholesome’ games. The mechanics and goals in games like Stardew Valley, Ooblets, and Cozy Grove may vary, but they share a common vibe wholly separate from the cis-male, RGB streamer setup that’s become analogous with gaming culture.” Hello from Cozy Rimworld.
Techdirt: Gaming Like It’s 1927: Get Ready For Our Next Public Domain Game Jam. “It’s that time of year! Ever since works in the US finally started entering the public domain again, we’ve been hosting an annual game jam for designers to create games based on the year’s newly copyright-free works. This year, it’s Gaming Like It’s 1927!”
Lifehacker: You Can Now Stream Games Directly From Your Google Results. “Google Chrome users in the U.S. can now launch select video games directly from Google Search results, much like you already could for movies, music, and TV shows.”
