Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is

Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time.

Is the greatest zombie-themed game ever a mod? Rockpapershotgun, PCGamer and Kotaku think it just might be. Day Zero is a an open-world co-op permadeath zombie survival game set in the 235 square kilometer world of Arma 2. A comprehensive primer is available on the Something Awful forums (membership may be required for that link), and you can grab a copy of the work in progress here.

Walden The Game sounds thoreau-ly interesting. I am so, so, so sorry. [via]

Notch of Minecraft fame says “EA releases an ‘indie bundle‘? That’s not how that works, EA. Stop attempting to ruin everything, you bunch of cynical bastards. Indies are saving gaming. EA is methodically destroying it. The games in the bundle are good, I’m not questioning them. I’m questioning EA” on Twitter.

Minecraft in Minecraft: Mineception. [Download]

Taylor Clark’s recent Atlantic essay quotes the somewhat annoying Jonathan Blow (of Braid fame) saying

There’s no nice way to say this, but it needs to be said: video games, with very few exceptions, are dumb. And they’re not just dumb in the gleeful, winking way that a big Hollywood movie is dumb; they’re dumb in the puerile, excruciatingly serious way that a grown man in latex elf ears reciting an epic poem about Gandalf is dumb.

Brainy Gamer would like to differ. Here’s their catalog of 365 smart games.

PlayMapsCube is a tilt-to-roll marble game using 3-D data from Google Maps. If your computer’s anything like mine, it’ll make smoke come out of your speakers, but it’s pretty cool. It’s a ‘Chrome experiment’ but it seems to run OK on Firefox 12, as well.

We’re about to run the greatest con game in the history of the multiverse and you are the bottleneck. Cave Johnson on the Perpetual Testing Initiative.