Thoughts on Google's "A Google A Day"

Time for something different! Today I discovered "A Google A Day" (link currently not working properly), where Google posts a strange trivia question and challenges you to use your Google skills to find the answer. To make it so that you don't get spoilers for your question, the Google engine used for these trivia questions is based on the state of the internet the day before the question comes up (unfortunately spoilers for old questions can and will get through), which I think is a brilliant solution to the problem. I had a ton of fun going through the two months worth of questions currently available, but throughout the experience I had one persistent thought.

Humans vs. Zombies

So the post every other day idea failed miserably. Oh well.

Anyway. Recently, the people of my residential college have begun playing a game of Humans vs Zombies. For those of you that don't know, HvZ is basically a complex game of tag. You start with an original zombie (OZ), who doesn't have to mark themselves as a zombie, and seeks to tag other players to turn them into zombies. Humans are identified by a red band worn below the neck, zombies (other than the OZ) wear the band neck and up. Zombies are required to 'feed' every few days by tagging a human or else they starve and are entirely out of the game. Humans can defend themselves from getting tagged by stunning the zombie with either Nerf or foam weaponry (or just some rolled up socks), stuns last for 15 minutes. The game continues until all the zombies starve or all the humans are turned into zombies. In our game, the moderator for the game has created missions for humans to undertake, and the humans can only win if they can continue the story for the missions and complete the final mission.

The reason I'm writing about HvZ today rather than video games as usual is mostly because I can't think of something to write about for video games. Coming up with topics is tricky business. Aside from that, though, I did actually want to discuss briefly what makes HvZ so fun.

Apologies, Updates, Tentative Schedule, and Random Thoughts on Braid

Apologies:
I can't say it's unexpected, but having a full course load at college really gets in the way of posting things here regularly. To all (probably zero) of you that actually read this, I apologize for not posting these past two months. And I apologize for my partner not posting at all.

Updates:
A joint (as in, written by both me and shoofle) retrospective review on the PS3 game inFamous has been in the works for the past month and a half or so, with me having played through the game on the 'good' path and shoofle on the 'evil' path. Hopefully we'll get that out before inFamous 2 comes out, so we can make it look like we planned it this way.

The two of us are also currently in the middle of a video game project of our own. Within the Student Game Developers at UVA, we're directing You Should See Someone About That (YSSSAT), a 2D platformer with a story inspired by the movie Inception and gameplay inspired by Super Meat Boy. Hopefully we can finish it in time (deadline is May 1st) and it'll be a decent game for having been made in a semester.

Tentative Schedule:
In the meantime, in order to make this blog look like it gets a lot more love than it does, I'm going to attempt to post something video game related every other day (or every day, if I'm feeling like I have a lot of spare time) for a while. These may not always be long amazing meaningful posts, but I'd rather take quantity over quality when choosing quality drops quantity to zero.