Originally designed as a learning experience from a designer who wanted to learn Flash and JavaScript, The Human Brain Cloud is a brilliant stroke of simplistic game design and high-brow fun for those of us who still remember Scrabble nights with fondness. The ‘game’ starts out with a player typing in the first word that comes to their mind, allowing other ‘players’ to then begin associating other words with the original subject, creating a lovely (and large) mind map of words and bubbles. For instance, “pizza” might be associated with “cheese”, “Italy” or even “yummy” by other players, creating a sometimes humorous look into the inner workings of word association on the human psyche. Some interesting statistics have also popped up, as of this post, The Human Brain Cloud consists of 209644 unique words, 1934531 connections and 171984 humans , not bad for an experiment from a first time Flash scripter.

Brilliant: The Human Brain Cloud

In an interview early last week, Senator Ray Tenorio, a republican representative on Guam’s 15-member unicameral legislature, revealed that he is an avid gamer, specifically online role-playing games, starting his gaming career with Diablo 2, later switching to World of Warcraft. Currently playing a level 70 Dwarf Priest named Paleray on the Silvehand server. He also pros in Herbalism and Alchemy, but, Guam? Also, I’d be anxious to learn of Mr. Tenorio’s stance on the current anti-gaming sentiment which is tearing through the United States political machine (of which Guam is ‘protected’ by).

Read more: Senator from Guam, lvl 70 priest

With the announcement of Nintendo’s WiiWare, indie game developers around the world felt their extremities go numb, as the creative juices started flowing at the mere thought of being able to develop a title for this generation’s breakout console. Whether Nintendo will be as indie-friendly as everyone hopes remains to be seen, but, they certainly are taking an interesting first step, by featuring Plättchen - Twist and Paint as the first official WiiWare title. Developed by a relatively unknown firm named Bplus in the outskirts of Vienna, Austria and featuring a German name which will surely confuse the hell out of many in the west, but no doubt excite the German-obsessed Japanese market, Plättchen is described as a puzzle-shooter, whose concept was approved by Nintendo in April 2007. Hopefully some screenshots or videos will appear soon and more information on the upcoming Wii and DS titles Bplus have in development will come to light, which we’ll surely post here immediately.

Read more: Bplus | Interview with Bplus at Infendo

Playfully addressing issues such as intellectual property rights, file-sharing and domestic surveillance, Torrent Raiders creates a fun new look at the fight against piracy. By building a real-time game on top of live bit-torrent swarms, Torrent Raiders creates an arcade-style shooter within the net it’s self. Players are placed in the role of a mercenary copyright enforcer, capturing evidence against peers sharing files via bit-torrent trackers worldwide, in real-time.

Read more: Torrent Raiders

Editor’s Note: Please excuse our lack of posts lately. Playthrough and it’s sister blogs are in a transitional phase, with many changes behind the scenes taking place, which will all become apparent in the near future. Thanks again for your return visits and patience, we hope to get back to our regularly scheduled program shortly.

According to rumors from IGN, the upcoming sequel to Katamari Damacy, Beautiful Katamari, has run into trouble over at Namco Bandai. Sources are stating that the Sony PS3 version of the upcoming title has been axed, thanks to development issues and stalling sales of the extremely-overpriced PS3 console. Resources have supposedly been re-shifted to the Wii version of Beautiful Katamari.

Source: IGN

NCSoft, all things golden in massive-multiplayers that don’t end in ‘craft’, today announced the official launch of Dungeon Runners, their new MMORPG based on team-raiding fantasy-themed dungeons. Sporting a more playful, cartoony art style than Guild Wars, Dungeon Runners also features a similar price tag to GW, free! That’s right, Dungeon Runners is NCSoft’s first free to download and free to play MMO. There is a premium subscription model at $4.99 however, which gives players access to a bank to store their dungeon treasure, high-level equipment (such as armor) and the ability to stack potions in your inventory. All around, it’s looking good and I’m hoping NCSoft’s approach starts to work. Now, if they’d just quit screwing around and introduce that one-price, play-all subscription model similar to SOE’s which NCSoft’s CEO teased us all with a year or so ago!

Official press release after the jump..

Read more of ”NCSoft launches Dungeon Runners, free MMO“

With everyone going mental over Ubisoft these days, I thought it would only be right to post up the Raving Rabbids 2 teaser trailer which Jeux France recently broke all over town. All CG, there is no gameplay footage anywhere to be found in this video, but naturally we’ll be seeing much much more over the coming weeks from these wacky bunnies.

Video and press release after the jump..

Read more of ”Raving Rabbids 2 teaser trailer“

JoWooD, Austria’s once mighty publishing label, has announced their ongoing negotiations with new developers for the creation of Gothic 4, JoWooD’s lifeline product. It appears that an unknown split has developed between previous developers Piranha Bytes / Pluto 13 and JoWooD, not a surprising occurrence with developers in a relationship with JoWooD. Gothic 4 will be developed by an unknown developer for both console (I’d assume Xbox 360) and PC release, though I find it difficult that a suitable developer could be found to carry the brightly burning torch that Piranha Bytes will be handing off.

Official statement from JoWooD by their outstanding marketing department:

JoWooD confirms having been in promising negotiatons for the development of Gothic 4 on PC and console with various prospective development studios. Releasing Gothic 4 on current-gen console is the next logical step for the Publisher’s strategy. JoWooD puts most of its focus on high quality standards as well as reacting to the communities comments and requests for the sequel to its flag-ship title.

Since Pluto 13 and JoWooD have not come to terms regarding the development of Gothic 4, the collaboration has come to an end. However, JoWooD will continue supporting the released and coming Gothic titles.

Read more: May 23rd in Austria, Gothic 4, JoWooD | Email this | 1 comment

System3 CEO Mark Cale recently sat down with PALGN to talk a little about their upcoming DS, Wii and PSP titles Leaderboard, California Games and Ferrari Challenge. Essentially remakes of retro Commodore 64 titles, System3 is enhancing the visuals and game play of these classic titles and bringing them to everyones favorite handheld, the Nintendo DS (and not everyones favorite, the Sony PSP). Some of the enhancements to California Games, one of my most favorite games EVAR, is the addition of online multiplayer! A long-desired feature of the arcade elite of yesterday. The DS version will have four player multiplayer, with up to 8 players being able to shred head to head on the PSP

PALGN: You touched on California Games, which was such a massive hit back in the day, can you tell us a little bit about how the modern day remake is going to be handled?

Mark Cale: We’re re-skinning the game, bringing it up to date having the original available to play, which is the total 64 version, not emulated but totally redone from scratch, but using the exact 64 animations and positions as well as generally re-skinning, bringing it totally up to date with the look, the feel and the sound and then to merge we’ve got the original character in the new re-skinned background, that withstands the test of time. California Games however withstands the test of time in terms of being a sports title and a great, fun title to play against your friends. Unfortunately, the one disadvantage it has is that it that it only ever had six events. So, how do we get over that? Well, the simple answer for us is that, what you do is you have your six events, which if you recall were the surfing, the BMX, the Frisbee, the Keepy Uppy, half pipe and rollerblading. Once you compete in these events, if you get a gold medal in one of the events, it unlocks Summer Games 1 and 2, and you are then chosen the represent your country, and then you represent your country playing Summer Games 1 and 2, so what it does is that it actually unlocks a whole sort of a game series, instead of giving you just six events, you’ve now got twenty two events.

Read more: Mark Cale talks California Games

Rumors are swirling that 10tacle, one of Europe’s fastest growing developers, is still looking to expand through Europe, building more development studios to work on their internal and licensed projects. With studios already existing in Hannover (Germany), Bratislava (Slovakia), Charleroi (Belgium), Singapore and London and 10tacle being a German-based company, the search began for clues to where in Europe 10tacle would expand. Well, a handful of Google searches later brought about the answer. Vienna, Austria, once home to Rockstar Vienna, at one point one of the largest development studios in Europe and shutdown last year by parent company Take 2.

During this handy dandy Google search, we came upon http://www.10t-vienna.com/, what appears to be the landing page for the forthcoming 10tacle Vienna. Some questions remain. Like what exactly would 10tacle Vienna be doing? If development, what projects and what platforms are they looking to target? Vienna has an abundance of console and handheld development talent thanks to the Rockstar fallout, however, what talent would back 10tacle Vienna? Vienna’s (best and) most experienced developers have already been snatched up, with the creation of Team Vienna and Games That Matter, two new studios both formed by former high-level management from Rockstar Vienna, and the small successes of smaller local independent developers such as Xendex, Sproing, Greentube and last but not least, JoWooD, who all have been recruiting lately. There is little to no studio management-level experience left in Vienna, which means 10tacle would (hopefully) bring in external studio management and begin recruiting locally in Vienna by targeting the staff of other studios, which could be a risk for 10tacle’s local image if developers begin shifting companies.

Whatever the case, if it’s true, great for Vienna, Austria, a wonderful city with a tight little game development community who could really use new blood in the scene.

Update 1: Have now heard that the studio will focus primarily on production of 10tacle projects developed elsewhere. Snore. Also, it’s teamvienna.at not teamvienna.org.

Hmm?: 10tacle Vienna | 10tacle