Auditorium. Auditorium. What does that make you think of? Auditorium. If you answered "I think of animated streams of light that, once controlled, yield tunes that sound like someone playing Myst in a Sharper Image," then you’re alone.
But correct. I stumbled upon Auditorium over at JayIsGames.com, a great source for all things BAW. According to their data, it’s actually the top rated game on the site, surprising given its own description of how to play:
Editor’s note: We’re re-posting this today as many folks who read the print version of TOC (luddites!) saw a mention of it on this week’s letters page.
Our weddings feature put out the call: Have your wedding at the TOC offices, and the magazine will set you up with a champagne toast, a celebratory dinner, after ceremony spa and hotel stay, plus flowers. Oh, and you won’t have to worry about the venue, because it’ll all go down in our conference room, decked out to look as much like a wedding chapel as possible—with more white butcher board paper than you can shake a really expensive stick-like centerpiece at. "There’s no way in hell anyone would want to do this," I was heard saying aloud, often to no one in particular. And this was coming from the guy who was slated to play guitar at said ceremony.
But I wasn’t counting on Colleen O’Boyle and Joe Avezzano.
Sometimes, you need a game that waits for you—that won’t reset if you need to duck into a meeting or blare annoying background music if you minimize the window to send a quick email. One that will wait up for you on cold, dark nights, and give you compliments like "ox" and "Christianity" when you’re feeling blue.
Luckily Funny Farm fills that oddly-specific void quite nicely. It’s a pretty simple conceit for a game, asking only that you type in words that link to previous words and categories. There are lines that connect each section to show you which words are related to which other ones. For example, "On the farm" leads to "ox," which leads to "bull," which leads to "BS," ending in "Magicians." Oh, that’s the other thing: When you get far enough out, you enter another screen with another overarching category. I’m doing okay with "On the farm" as well as "Religions," but "Poker stars?" Really? Nothing else you could put in there?
Luckily, the game encourages you to work with a friend, and you can save your progress anytime. Also, since it’s obviously Internet-based, cheating is only a click away.
What a dreary day out there today, huh? It’s not quite warm, but not quite refreshingly cool; wet with dry, biting air; daytime, but barely so (give it an hour and the sun’ll probably start setting). Days like this make me want to escape—to a place where the sun shines bright, and the cell phones are far superior to our American ones.
Enter the training ground of the Samurai Master. On his way to Tokyo, our intrepid little (literally) hero faces off against slashy-slashy warriors and shooty-shooty bow guys. The controls let you leap around brandishing your sword, shoot a "killing aura" (which pretty much looks like throwing stars) and perform a level-ending "super slash," decapitating foes. The number of bad guys increases each level, slowly building to the frontloaded final stage. The game’s pretty mindless, but the simple, cartoonish flash animation is pretty impressive. Plus, given my over-caffeinated self, I don’t think I have the attention span for much else on this dark pre-winter day.
I have to apologize to TJ Miller: Last week was a bit nuts (seasonal affective disorder kicking in; post-election analysis; super secret Comedy interview to hit newsstands and interwebs next week), and in the flurry of those first snow droplets, I inadvertently forgot to list your weekend shows at the Lakeshore Theater. Which is a shame, because TJ is better than he’s ever been. I had the chance to catch this comfortably-weird comedian six months ago at the Lincoln Lodge—where special guests Jerry O’Connell and Rebecca Romijn made an appearance)—and was blown away by his continued commitment to freshen sets with off-the-cuff jabs at audiences and himself. It makes for a set that feels fresh to TJ and audience alike. So yeah, basically I’m still kicking myself for the oversight.
Shows start tomorrow night, and you can get more information at Lakeshore’s website. In the meantime, here are some clips from his stupendous Live at Gotham set; and if you’re at all curious about his supposed SNL audition debacle, check out his rebuttal on Red Bar Radio. I believe ya, buddy!
Something incredible happened last night at the Impress These Apes finale. Alan Metoskie was in seventh place, despite his brilliant week seven parody of Future Human. He needed to pull out all the stops—but really, the show was over, as it was highly unlikely everyone above him would tank so badly that he’d have a shot at winning. Still, Metoskie was undeterred. He showed a video that followed him to a tattoo parlor, where he bartered his computer for the services of those skin artists. A few hours and plenty of shaved back hair later, Metoskie had done it: He had tattooed his entire back with the word, "IMPRESSED? " The lights went up; he returned to the stage and proudly showed off his creation. The crowd stood up and applauded.
The feedback was just as positive. "You’re in seventh place, Alan. Seventh place!" shouted guest judge Kristen Studard, winner of ITA Season Two. Hollywood Ape, though not allowed to verbalize the score, said, "I gave you the score that rhymes with ‘One more than nine.’ " My mind was racing: It’s my job to write the Best Of 2008 article in a few weeks, and I was already filling out space to include this wonderful moment. A seventh place contestant, with no chance of winning, permanently inked his body for a higher score/to go down in history. What commitment!
Except, of course, that it was all a lie.
In the world of stationary pencil-to-paper games, there’s perhaps nothing as predictable as a good ol’ maze. No matter how big or small the path, the rules are always the same: Guide your writing implement from the open end of the maze (the "beginning") to a different opening on the other side (the "end"); avoid walls—and for those of you who don’t mind a little cheating, reduce backtracking. (Although…has anyone ever finished a maze by simply guessing at each juncture, without peeking ahead? It’ll never happen.)
Thankfully, Maze Mouse flips the ancient maze tradition on its head.
Alex Fendrich left the Second City after acting in the last e.t.c. revue Disposable Nation, but his legacy lives on…through song! Here’s a video created by Fendrich featuring a song he performed on stage back in the day. The president he’s seeking may not exist yet, but if Obama secures a victory tonight, he/she might not be that far off.
My God, why is it not Tuesday yet? I’ve been only thinking about politics for the last month, and I’m certainly not the only one: The other day, Theater editor Christopher Piatt asked our IT department to block certain sites from his computer (read: Huffington Post) so he could finally get some work done. So of course, when it came time to pick a Bored at Work game for this week, I had to go political.
Two weeks ago, this video—in which a guy sings, literally, every thing that’s happening in the “Take On Me” video—made the rounds. But lest its creator fade into obscurity once his fifteen thousand clicks of fame were up, I decided to dig deeper and see what else he had in store.
I’m happy to report that I found this gem over at Dust Films. It’s a game called, quite simply, Play the Game, and it’s sort of like Simon-meets–Bar Mitzvah guided dancing. The game plays a sequence of four types of sounds—clapping, stomping, etc.—which are replicatable using the A, S, D and F keys. Your job is the keep with the beat (there’s a metronome for help) and play back what you just heard. Unlike Simon, though, this isn’t a game that builds from one note to many; instead, you’re thrown right in, having to play the equivalent of the drum solo from the Beatles’ “The End”—not too crazy complicated, but certainly not all that simple. Then you play it again. And again. And when you screw up, a big X appears over the note you missed, and you feel sad.
But once you get the hang of things, you’ll be pounding the keys with such abandon, you’d think you had joined some sort of low-impact Stomp ensemble.
