FunEffect.com

Inspired by the overhead world maps of 1980s RPGs and adventure games, Brett Camper created a Google Maps-style representation of New York City with 8-bit graphics. The map is interactive, allowing you to pan across the city and zoom in to see individual streets.

He wants to create more 8-bit overhead maps for other cities, but to fund that endeavor, he's looking to raise $3,000 through donation-ware platform Kickstarter. If he can raise that much in the next 30 days, he plans to use that money to cover web hosting costs and the initial computing time needed for drawing the maps (purchased using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud).

Camper already has eight cities he hopes to re-create -- San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Washington D.C., Seattle, London, and Paris -- and will hold a vote for people to elect seven more cities they'd like to see rendered in this 8-bit style.

If you live in a small town that's unlikely to even appear in the vote, you could always pledge $200 to the project to reserve an additional city for Camper to create. Depending on the size of your contribution, you can also receive 8-bit NYC postcards, 8-bit NYC postcards, and personal markers on a map.

"I hope that these maps will evoke the same urge for exploration and abstract sense of scale that many of us remember experiencing on the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Commodore 64, or any other number of 8-bit microcomputers," says Camper. "Maps offer us visual architectures of the world, encouraging us to think about and interact with space in particularly constrained ways. Let's set out on an 8-bit quest!"

[Via alinear]

Blizzard's Authenticator, a device offering an extra layer of security to World of Warcraft players by generating a random code to enter when logging in, is the target of a new Windows trojan virus designed to allow hackers to access WoW accounts and steal items/gold.

The trojan finds its way onto players' computers after they install a fake version of WowMatrix AddOn Manager downloaded through sites like Cursea.com and Deadlybossmodss.com (typos of legit sites Curse.com and Deadlybossmods.com). Google advertised at least one of these sites in its sponsored link section at the top of search results for "WoWMatrix".

Once the fake add-on manager is installed, it drops a file named emcor.dll onto the user's system, which then waits for them to log into World of Warcraft. When players enters a password and authentication code, the trojan sends incorrect information to Blizzard (preventing players from logging in), and send the stolen pass/code to a hacker.

World of Warcraft players who use the authenticator can check if they're infected by running a search for the "emcor.dll" on their system -- of course, if they find this file on their computer, their account has probably been compromised for some time already. Some anti-virus software, such as Malwarebytes, already detect the trojan.

[Via Wow.com]

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

Now would be about the time to write another Mag Roundup column, but since I've received only one new game magazine in the past two weeks (oh US Postal Service, why hast thou forsaken me), I'd instead like to show off some of the game-media archaeological work I've been up to lately.

Frank Cifaldi pointed out to me earlier that Google has incorporated the archives of the Milwaukee Journal, the Wisconsin evening newspaper that was folded into its hometown rival and renamed the Journal Sentinel in 1995, into its news search. Why should you care about this? Because it means that Google's put online a nearly-complete run of "Video Adventures," a weekly game-biz column written by longtime Electronic Gaming Monthly editor Ed Semrad for the Journal between October 1983 and December 1991.

Semrad, described as "a Milwaukee-area technical writer and video game whiz" in his Journal bio, provided some surprisingly in-depth industry coverage for his hometown paper. His first column dove immediately to the then hot-button topic of programmers embedding their names into their work (the first Easter eggs), and after that he settled down to a steady diet of console hardware and game reviews. Very timely ones, too; since he was writing on a short-lead weekly deadline, Semrad's column is a great way to tell exactly when your favorite classic-era games were released...and when the industry started falling apart in the mid-80s.

Video Adventures had a bit of an eccentric schedule for much of 1985, perhaps owing to the fact that there was simply nothing to write about. "It is hard to believe that the video game industry has come to an end," Semrad wrote in his April 27, 1985 column. "Just a few years ago the big companies like Atari, Coleco and Mattel were making hundreds of millions of dollars [...] Who would have believed that the end would come so quickly?"

Semrad reviewed The Dam Busters for the Colecovision in that April column, a title he rather dramatically called "the last video game made." Lucky for his newspaper-writing gig, then, that Nintendo showed off the NES at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show two months later, releasing it to test markets in mid-October 1985. Semrad was one of the first (and only) mainstream reporters to cover the system from its release, and he had some very prescient things to say about it: "Overall, if anybody can bring video games back, Nintendo, with its new fourth-generation game system, will be the one. The games I saw in June equal or surpass most computer games not only in playability but in graphics. With the robot, light gun and 17 games Nintendo is giving its best shot."

The column grew more regular as the NES ballooned in popularity, of course, and by the time the TurboGrafx-16 and Genesis rolled around, Semrad had a picture next to his bio and more space to work with than a lot of his compatriots in the monthly video-game mags. His stuff is really well written, too, and there's little doubt that his Journal work is part of the reason why Steve Harris hired him on for EGM.

Sadly, Google News doesn't make it terribly easy to browse through individual columns. If you want to get down to the nitty-gritty, use the advanced search, choose the Journal as your source, then search with generic video-game terms and see what happens. Let me know if you find anything else juicy!

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a really cool weblog about games and Japan and "the industry" and things. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]

So Google slipped a feature that combines some of the nicer features of Facebook with the sole feature of Twitter into their Gmail experience, which has 150 million users. In some meta-referential twilight zone of accelerating time as experienced by half a billion pampered twenty-somethings with ADD, this constitutes earth-shattering news. So let's dig in.

I personally use Gmail as the epicenter of my web experience. It's always open, I update my tag frequently to get my pithy phrase rocks off, I keep my unread mail count at 99 fitting a theme I stumbled upon at age 20 while blazed one night. I keep my number of drafts at 27 because 27 factors into - three sets, of three, threes - and I use drafts as my note pad or link repository. I am aware that Google is most likely failing at their mission statement of "Don't Be Evil" and will someday destroy me when I refuse to permit a Gchip to be implanted into my brain, but for now I'm comfortable with the arrangement. I also use Google Docs instead of office because it's easier than torrenting a crack for Microsoft Office, and it lacks that goddamned paper clip. I have an extensive network of contacts amassed since basically the start of my career, so in a way Gmail is bigger than any social network I've ever been a part of and will remain so.

I'm probably not representative of all 150 million Gmail users, but I am representative of I'd reckon at least 30 million, and that's a pretty strong core to produce content that the other 120 million will filter and then consume. If they can polish it up right, they might just hit the holy grail of short-form, web-based communication protocols, as the illustrious Craig Perko also notes.

But what I'm really interested in is how Buzz is going to change the landscape of social games. I think social games are the future of interactive entertainment, which is the future of entertainment, thus social games have the potential to be the next TV or film in terms of both audience size and revenues. I was hip to web-based gameplay being at the fore even though I followed the siren call of Wii development for a rato, and when I was trying to launch a casual MMO in 2007 I found that the barriers to entry in regards to building both the platform and the user-base was harrowing and complicated the already delicate task of making a good game. Platforms like Facebook, being the biggest example going on 400 million players, indemnify a lot of these issues, and Asia is already ahead of us with real-time multiplayer infrastructure baked right into the cake. On the other hand, the one business model that struck gold, time-for-cash, is clearly getting crowded and the mechanisms for pimping your game without advertising are similarly being blunted. When Farmville players in 2009, that age long past, messaged their friends saying "plzzzz, need 4 more neighbors for the expasion!" people listened, as if providing aid to natural disaster victems, and then themselves fell victem to the statistical arbitrage of virtual good ARPU distributions. But now there's a fuckton of games trying to do the same thing, and the market's getting more frictional.

So I see Buzz not nessecarily as the monolithic Twitter-killa and Facebook-thrilla that some are projecting, though it may well be, I see it as a step forward in the evolution of the market. First everyone tried to make platforms, remember in 2007 when the OC was full of wanna-be MySpace killers? Turns out people only really want to deal with one or two profiles on the whole internet and be done with it. Now people are crowding around one degree of abstraction from platforms, content systems, Farmville being the gorilla example. It's sort of like stock exchanges back in the 50s, or derivatives exchanges in the late 70s. Sure making money off every share or options contract ever traded is a good business model, but once the NYSE and CBOE are established, your better off starting a hedge fund than trying to build a new platform. That's what I see these social game companies as, basically, hedge funds, except instead of trading in financial derivatives they trade in human attention.

Buzz takes a step out for one more degree of abstraction, Gmail is now essentially a meta-platform for all forms of communication you can do on the net, from blogging to twitting to facing to mailing to photographing. At least, that's what Google portends for it. But the point again is that these platforms are being abstracted out further. I think the result of that will be a more efficient marketplace in human attention and a lower barrier to entry for original designs. The next step after that? More diverse business models and psychological hooks for these designs, so that folks like Zynga can't just commodify every theme and mechanic through rapid cloning - but that's another news story for a future date.

At 37, writer and gamer Gus Mastrapa is not old. Still, he writes, he's beginning to feel his age: he's particularly overwhelmed by all the young'uns playing MAG, the new online FPS that supports up to 256 multiplayers at once. How can an old man keep up with so many spry young upstarts?

In his GameLife article, 21st-Century Shooters Are No Country for Old Men, Mastrapa writes,

Everybody in the bar agrees: Young gamers are somehow better than older gamers. Is it because they have fewer responsibilities and more free time? Or is it their youth that keeps them sharp?

And what the hell can us old-timers, with one foot in our gamer graves, do about it?

At 27 -- maybe because I'm expected to freak out about this sort of thing ten years earlier than you fellows are -- I am terrified of aging. And I am aging. I've started applying eye cream at morning and night, and when I sit down to play a video game, I feel old. And childless. And I know I am losing my touch, that I can't quite make my way up the Xbox Live leaderboards, and that I am turning into a cat lady. I worry a lot about whether I am wasting time.

I'm not alone. Last May, Andrew Fitch took several paragraphs to lament his "old-man hands":

Even though my mind knows that Von Kaiser goes into a slight pause before rearing back to deliver a punishing uppercut, my hands don't process this information in time -- and I get a series of terrifying Teutonic fists to the face as a result. I sorta feel like that wily thirtysomething southpaw who's lost his fastball.

And just last month, Stephen Totilo wrote a column about his Mario fixation, which is as much about nostalgia as it is about age-panic, and yet that pressing worry lingers:

But as I played Bowser's Inside Story, there was that reaction again: Maybe I'm too old for this.

I am having trouble adding any real thoughts of my own before the deadline, so in my desperation, I just typed "gamers scared of getting old" into Google. That search term yielded a popular John Mayer song lyric ("So scared of getting older / I'm only good at being young") and, inexplicably, this photo of a statue of Heihachi, the elderly badass from the Tekken series, wearing reading spectacles.

The song lyric made me feel really sad. The photograph made me feel better.

[21st-Century Shooters Are No Country for Old Men]

[Originally published on Mod DB, these interviews from Leo Jaitley of Dejobaan Games explores the neat nooks and crannies in indie gaming. This week the spotlight's on Rob Jagnow, founder and CEO of Lazy 8 Studios.]

What do Lazy 8 Studios of San Francisco, CA and Dejobaan Games of Watertown, MA have in common? Both studios are Independent Game Festival (IGF) Finalists in the "Excellence in Design" category. In this, the latest in Dejobaan's interview series titled "Half a Million Seconds with and Indie Developer," Leo finds out why Rob went Indie and gives you some insights into what it takes to be an IGF Finalist.

They say your name is Rob....tell us more...

RJ: Hey, folks. I'm Rob, Founder and CEO of Lazy 8 Studios in San Francisco. In a way, I feel like I stumbled into game development. I interned at Pixar for a couple summers while I was getting my Ph.D. and I fully expected that when I finished school, I'd travel around the world for a year and go back to Pixar. But when graduation finally came, I found myself in an accidental relationship -- one of those, "when you're least expecting it" relationships. So I went ahead with my plans to travel the world for a year and then ended up back in Boston to be with my boyfriend. The job hunt led me to Demiurge, a small game studio in Cambridge, and I fell in love with game development. When my boyfriend graduated, his job hunt led him to Google, so we moved together to San Francisco and I decided to try my hand at starting a company of my own. And thus, Lazy 8 Studios was born. Continue reading

Organizers of GDC 2010 are reminding that today is the last day to register for up to 35% off pass prices for the March 9th-13th event, with the free Android phone offer also expiring today.

The Moscone Center, San Francisco-based event has just announced a raft of new lectures, including highlighted talks from Pixar notables, Lionhead's Peter Molyneux, Double Fine's Tim Schafer, and Final Fantasy XIII's director Motomu Toriyama, and a surprise lecture from Metroid co-creator Yoshio Sakamoto.

However, Thursday, February 4th is the final day that GDC is accepting registrations at the early rate, which includes up to 35% discount from final pass prices. The early reg rate will be open until 11.50pm ET this evening.

In addition, today is the final day to register for free Nexus One and Verizon Droid by Motorola phones with GDC 2010 attendance, as part of a promotion between Google and Game Developers Conference. Select All-Access Pass and Summits & Tutorials Pass attendees will receive the phone, and more information is available on a GDC website page.

As well as the nine major Summits, from iPhone to indie and social games -- and notable tutorials on the first two days of the show, there are six main Tracks - programming, art, production, business, audio, and design - for GDC 2010. These include lectures from the creators of Assassin's Creed II, Splinter Cell: Conviction, Uncharted 2, Braid, God Of War III, Dante's Inferno, APB, and a host of other acclaimed games.

Game Developers Conference 2010 -- part of Think Services, as is this website -- will also play host to the GDC Expo Floor, including a host of notable tool companies, the recruitment-specific GDC Career Pavilion, the 12th Annual Independent Games Festival plus Awards and the 10th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards, open to all pass holders.

More information on many of the highlighted areas of GDC 2010 is available on the official Game Developers Conference weblog, and the GDC 2010 website has a full list of lectures, passes, and opportunities at this year's event, as well as specific on registration pricing and options.

Attendees are also reminded that they can email GDC 2010's registration staff -- or call them at 866-535-8997 or +1 (415) 947-6926 from 9am to 4pm PT each weekday -- if they have any issues registering. (All GDC 2010 registrations commenced before the 11.50pm ET deadline will be honored, even if any technical issues occur.)