Brian Kerr

Following are some recent searches that brought people to this blog, with some answers and pointers from me. Thanks Ed for the format. Games are always a popular topic in the search logs, even though I post about them sparingly.

animal crossing music

Good luck finding it online. The music is pretty good, better than you’ll appreciate through the Nintendo DS’s tiny speakers. I really like the guitar work on the title song — it’s worth plugging into your normal sound system at least once. I don’t play Animal Crossing so much any more, but I really enjoy traveling over wifi: here’s where to find me if you’d like to visit or entertain a visitor.

ann arbor warhammer

Warhammer 40,000 is a tabletop wargame. (I’ve never played it.) If you want to play this in Ann Arbor, you’re probably out of luck. For several years, there were play groups at The Underworld, a comics and gaming shop on South University. After The Underworld closed, Phoenix Games set up tables, but it opened and closed in less than a year; they were on Fourth Street, in the spot just north of Eastern Accents, now occupied by the Washtenaw Democrats. The Vault of Midnight is going strong on Main Street, but they focus on comics — good for me, bad for persons seeking Warhammer.

“perhaps the same could be said of all religions”

Dracula’s erudite retort in the opening sequence of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, a 1997 Playstation game. Although Symphony of the Night was an excellent, instant-classic video game, it had a pretty lousy/nonsensical English translation, made even worse by half-baked voice acting. Here’s an MP3 of the opening dialogue, if you want to assess the damage.

rich text wiki

You probably want a wiki without the ugly wiki markup. I have some notes on installing a rich text wiki using Oddmuse. Fancy wiki vendors have low-cost or open-source versions to look into as well.

umich si logo

You can get the SI logo in a couple of formats at the School of Information intranet. Here a direct link. The SI logo is a galaxy/sphincter image (tastefully called the “swirl”) plus the name of the department in uppercase Bembo.

weirdest interactive fiction

It’s a pretty crowded field. I am biased towards games that are (a) short (b) intense and (c) more focused on storytelling than puzzles. A few candidates, ordered roughly from weirdness of content to weirdness of format:

• 9:05 — short, elegant slice-of-life story which you will definitely enjoy the second time around;
• Book and Volume — the less you know about this before you play it, the better; if you must know something about it, here’s my Book and Volume post from about a year ago;
• The Gostak — internally consistent text adventure written in its own language (here’s one player’s attempt at a dictionary);
• Aisle — a very short game: in fact, it’s exactly one move long, and you’ll be surprised at how much breadth and character development you can unpack in a single turn.