Weekly Links #7

I thought last week was going to be a dry spell, but then I had a whole bunch of interesting gaming news coming up on Friday, so it's all good.

First a couple of musical news. On the one hand, we have Kotaku announcing an upcoming musical shooter from the creators of Rock Band. It sounds weird... but yay for innovation in big-budget gaming! And on a completely unrelated note (pun not intended), here's how much fun one can have with a musical toy that was placed apropos of nothing in a random adventure game:

Do you still believe there's a "right" way to play a game?

To go on, we have an opinion piece claiming that the gaming singularity is near, if not already here, and an interview about the past and present of MMOs with one of the people who invented the modern, graphical MMO. And frankly, I trust his opinion a lot more than that of someone who never even played a MUD. Last but not least, Techdirt of all blogs treats us to an entertaining article on Microsoft and giving people what they want. Gee, you mean reality distortion fields don't work anymore? Must be the climate change...

I'll end by noting that in the wake of the Flappy Bird debacle there are now countless clones and parodies of the game out there. Even a friend of mine made one. But the most interesting I've seen is Flappy Space Program (no prize for guessing what other famous game it makes fun of), in which you're trying to put as many little rockets in orbit around a planet at the same time. It's still as difficult as the regular flavor, but I only stopped playing out of concern for the integrity of my dying mouse. And by the way, my high score was 3.

Also notable is how the web-based games in the list above are equally divided between HTML5, Flash and Unity, but the significance of that is worth discussing separately. Until next time.