We have talked about my housemate Kyle before. He's a prankster, artist, and Gizmo torturer. I found him in the backyard last night with a chop saw building an oversized Jenga set:

It will stand about six feet tall, and Kyle warns that playing the game will be "slightly dangerous."

The PAX 10 list of the best indie games of the last year just went live, and, just as always, they look like good fun. Some are free, some have demos. Check them out now, or hit them up at PAX in a couple of months!

• This is you, if you're playing Catch-22.

The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner and Paul Hughes.

• Chelsea Mannella

Flash Arcade, a "traveling arcade" made up of local enthusiasts Tim Uomoto and Sean Bray's personal collection of retro video game machines, is now on display at gallery/lounge Vermillion. Among the 18 games, all available for 50 cents or less per play, are five pinball machines, three shooting games complete with fake plastic guns, an old-school Street Fighter II and a new(er)-school Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (!!!), and classic multiplayer side-scrolling beat-em-ups X-Men and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Not too long ago these bulky things were everywhere: restaurants, laundromats, 7-11s, malls. Now that there have been seven "console generations" and you can play Modern Warfare against someone from Russia without leaving your couch, the oversized, stubborn (Time Crisis II and T2: Judgment Day were broken, and Uomoto had to open up the X-Men machine to fix it at one point) machines are the definition of obsolete. This makes them the ultimate piece of nostalgia for a very specific age group. People who were older when these games were popular saw them as for kids, and anyone born after the introduction of 16- and 32-bit consoles—the same processing speed as most old arcade games—played them on a TV instead.

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It hasn't been the best day for gaming and teh ladies. Add to that this technically impressive but ewwww-inducing augmented-reality "date" with Hatsune Miku:

It starts off boringly enough, with Hatsune following the viewer around, but soon—with the help of Xbox Kinect tech—the viewer pats her on the head... then hits her over the head, flips up her skirt, and goes for virtual second base. Cf. Archer, as commenter #2 did over at The Verge. (Oh, and thanks for showing us our future, The Verge!)

In other gaming meets feminism news, Steve Heisler and John Teti at the Onion AV Club's Gameological Society debate whether the rainbow-spangled camp in Lollipop Chainsaw (what Teti calls "Male Gaze: the Video Game") works or not. (Skip ahead to the two minute mark.) They don't cover a ton of ground, but it's nice to see two thoughtful normal-human gamers engage on the subject.

Which brings to mind sikandro's gold-star comment on Cienna's post: "The problem with this conversation is 95% of it will be dialogue between those who care about gaming but not about the representation of women, and those who care about the representation of women but not about gaming. Which means 95% of it will be a total waste of time."

The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner and Paul Hughes.

This weekend and next weekend figure prominently in the holy cycle of Seattle gamer holidays: the NW Pinball and Arcade Show is happening right now through Sunday at Seattle Center, and the Seattle Retro Gaming Expo happens next Saturday and Sunday, 6/16–17, at the Bellevue Red Lion. (Boo to Bellevue, but yay to having twice as much space—last year at Hotel Deca was ridiculously if gratifyingly packed.)

The NW Pinball and Arcade Show gives you infinite freeplay on over 100 pinball machines and over 100 classic arcade games, including some seriously obscure titles—and in past years, the laidback, PAX-ian community vibe has meant that people are cool about not hogging machines. A one-day pass is $20, and time and money well spent (especially if you stay until they close at midnight).

What the NW Pinball and Arcade Show is for stand-up machines, the Seattle Retro Gaming Expo is for old-school consoles. In the freeplay area, you can play every US-licensed SNES and N64 game ever made—and they've also got tournaments, a big vendor area, and cool weird shit like a Steel Battalion War Room (for eight players, each on their own 40-button mech controller) and a fighting game tournament in which the winners go on to compete in Vegas. If you're planning to buy stuff in the vendor hall, today is the last day for SRGE pre-registration, which lets you get in an hour early to hunt for deals.

The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner and Paul Hughes.

Somehow we've neglected the first four iterations of this awesome thing, but the fifth Humble Indie Bundle has arrived, and it's well worth a look. Pay whatever you want for 4 to 5 awesome indie games playable on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and split your payment however you like between Child's Play, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the game developers, and the Humble Bundle site itself.

• These could be yours.

The games themselves are terrific:

• Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a sweet first-person horror/survival game from 2010 that used a much-beloved sanity system in addition to boring old health. Somehow we never got around to this one, but we're eager to get on it.
  
• LIMBO is a lovely, dark little puzzle/platform game from 2010 that caused the famous moratorium on using the word "atmospheric" in video game reviews that has only just recently been lifted.
  
• Psychonauts may feel like an artifact from a forgotten civilization, but it's one that's much more advanced than ours. 2005 was a good year, and this excellent, innovative platformer is a non-stop sugar rush.
  
• Superbrothers: Swords & Sorcery EP is a nutty adventure game from last year with great sound and visual design and a story worth following all the way through to the end.
  
• Bastion, last year's breakout indie action RPG, is only available if you pay more than the average Bundle buyer, which is currently set at the stupid-cheap $7.72.

You also get soundtracks for all five games, the games are DRM-free, and for an extra buck you'll get activation codes for Steam as well as your downloads. This is a terrific deal for a terrific set of causes, so head on over and do your part.

The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner and Paul Hughes.

For us this morning, Jesus was just blocking traffic...

• Sarah Cass
• Calvin Johnson Hunts chickens with guitar.

You could cut the tension with a dull butter knife!

How was the dentist?
It was very satisfying.

Have you been fighting the cavity creeps?
I guess so. I've been fighting and winning, because I haven't had a cavity for years.

Have you been flossing? I floss sometimes and it's a bloodbath.
Almost once a day. It seems like enough, according to the dentist. If you just did it every day for like four or five days, it wouldn't be like that.

Here we have "Live Hygienic Tips" from K Records and Calvin Johnson. Anything else you'd like to say about the hygiene?
Um, uh, no.

Read the rest here >>

Like are you fast? Very fast? The fastest? Sure, you can unlock your iPhone to the right—anybody can—but what about to the left? What about two unlocks at once? In two directions? Are you better than all your friends at unlocking your phone? Are you better at unlocking your phone than anyone in the world? What if there were a global leaderboard for people who were really good at unlocking their iPhone? Perhaps amazingly, there is—thanks to this ridiculous but ingenious but super-meta nugget of pure game-ness.

The app is free, but for 99 cents, you can "slide in ultimate style" with "Golden Sliders"—which seemed like just an arch joke about microtransactions until we realized how much money they've probably made off it. (Warning: This game has been around for forever. But we kind of can't stop playing it.)

The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner and Paul Hughes.

Are hardcore gamers—the folks who spend kilohours playing the same game trying to hit the top of the leaderboards—wasting their lives? It's a go-to punchline used to assert dominance over nerds, but, as Patrick Miller says in this terrific post on Insert Credit, something deeper is going on. The essence of his piece is that becoming good at a game necessarily involves learning how to be good at something, and that's worthwhile even if it's achieved unintentionally. Not everyone will make use of that meta-skill in their non-gaming life, but it's still worth developing. Plus, he makes his case in part through a dialogue with "Johnny Doughnuts," who doesn't acquit himself well despite his name.

Check out the rest of the site while you're there. Insert Credit is a great, thoughtful blog written by smart people interested in games and gamers, and it's refreshingly free of press releases, "game news," and other clutter. If only it were updated more frequently (IOIWUMF).

The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner and Paul Hughes.

We blogged about seeing Fez at PAX last year (as part of the fabled PAX 10 indie elite), and we're thrilled to see that it's finally hit Xbox Live—both because it's an intricate, gorgeously produced game that deserves a wider audience and because it's a trimuphant case study for French-Canadian-socialist games-as-art indie development. We only got a glimpse of Fez at PAX, but we've been playing it the last couple days and it's downright wondrous.

If you saw Fez before, you know the basic schtick: you're a 2D character (cutely fezzed) in a seemingly traditional 2D puzzler-platformer world, but then one day you discover that there's whole other dimension right around the corner. This 2D/3D world translates beautifully to the 360's controls, because you can quickly rotate the world left and right on its axis with the triggers or bumpers. Fez starts out feeling you're like playing a Bran Flakes album, but then it takes several mood and tone shifts as you dig deeper into its densely folded geometries. Definitely play Fez with headphones—and even if you're not a gamer, check out Fez's original soundtrack, maybe the best game album since Katamari Damacy's.

If you're looking for other sunny-Friday distractions, we're also liking:

• the big feature on Jon Blow (of Braid) in the new Atlantic
  
• Ben Kuchera's PAR write-up of Legend of Grimrock (how's this for an endorsement: "I spent an uncomfortable amount of time sipping a cup of coffee while deciding which member of my party should wear a particular helmet")
  
• Super T.I.M.E. Force, which didn't make the Boston Indie Showcase but still looks amazing. The Contra-style game's ridiculous and awesome conceit is that each time you die, you go back and play the level again—only this time, accompanied by your previous life's ghost, until eventually you have an army of your past lives moving together through the level like an unholy undead assault team:
  

So game company EA won/lost Consumerist's 2012 Golden Poo for "Worst Company in America" last week, beating out the sweeties at Bank of America and many other, seemingly more nefarious corps. EA has many, many faults—they nickel and dime their customers to death with premium downloadable content, they ban players for forum infractions and are helping to kill off the used-game market. Contrast that with foreclosures, hidden bank fees, and the global economic catastrophe, and you'd think there'd be no contest, even given the preponderance of opinionated gamers on the internet.

Is this evidence of the increasing importance of the game industry in American culture? Not so much. Like all internet balloting (except legally binding Slog polls, obviously), sampling bias drops a heavy thumb on the scales, and recent events have made EA an inviting target. Mass Effect 3 came out recently, and as the latest EA-related title to feature hot all-dude action (between space marines, no less), it's attracted a shitstorm of homophobia, though a much milder shitstorm than the one that ME and ME2's all-girl action prompted. EA is trying to pin all their woes on this one point, but while they should get an A+ for their efforts to expand access to all gamers, the homophobes aren't driving this on their own.

• Bioware
• Spoiler alert: This is not the space marine you are looking for.

Gamers have been pissed at EA for years—all the while buying their games, their DLC, and their merch—and the Consumerist released its poll at the worst possible time for the company. Hundreds of thousands of gamers had just reached the end of Mass Effect 3, which offers what is widely seen as an extremely disappointing ending to a much beloved series. Add those white-hot points of frustrated rage to wild homophobia and mounting nausea over terrible customer relations, and you've got a recipe for a Golden Poo.

The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner and Paul Hughes.

Too many games put us in the role of a dude/lady with a gun/sword killing zombies/aliens. Not that we mind—Mass Effect 3 is eroding our free time even as we write this—but we're still grateful for the indie gaming renaissance that's freeing up new options. For a nice, freaky e.g., check out this promo video for The Ant Experiment a Kickstarter project that aims to create a MMO focused on ants and their busy, busy lives:

The folks involved have made decent-looking games before, and seem to have learned quite a bit from studying Minecraft. They don't specifically call out the old classic SimAnt (which is available for free, at least on 32-bit PCs), but The Ant Experiment feels like a spiritual successor. Just a $10 support pledge toward a $300K goal gets you the game on Android or iOS when it comes out in December, and more $$ gets you sweeter (and sometimes weirder) returns.

The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner and Paul Hughes.

Check out this great Q&A with ferociously smart—yet accessible!—video game designer and critic Ian Bogost over at Slashdot. Bogost famously devised the Facebook game Cow Clicker as a distillation of everything that's wrong and terrible and anti-human about social games. He writes clearly about the absence of politics within games as a political statement, his own gaming preferences, and how we might one day be able to move beyond Farmville. Even if you don't have a burning passion for collecting trophies or clicking cows, he delivers the goods on what your friends and coworkers are doing all day.

• Ian Bogost
• Bling Cow. Cost: 10,000 Mooney. This is your cow.

The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner and Paul Hughes.

Listen to the sounds of science here.

Enjoy ace-difference-noticer Aaron Shepherd's list o' differences after the jump.

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In an editorial titled "I'm Tired of Saving the World," Jason Lomberg at Joystiq writes about the trouble with video games:

Most games would rather task you with saving the world than with rocking a baby to sleep or patching up a failed relationship. This intransigence on the part of developers to create idiosyncratic stories that resonate with the individual is holding the medium back.

Why should gaming's prime inspiration be Michael Bay instead of David Lynch, David Mamet, Paul Thomas Anderson, or even Mel Brooks? An interactive medium like this has the potential to tell complex stories in ways that are sublime, irreverent, and evocative.

Gaming could explore the human condition by interfacing with the player like books, movies, and TV never could. Instead, we do battle with rogue Russian nationalists, storm Normandy for the 47th time, or fight off an alien invasion. I can't relate to any of this.

Outside of the occasional casual game (Jetpack Joyride currently owns my cortex) I don't play video games, partly because my hand-eye coordination is atrocious, and partly because I choose to read books instead, and I know that video games would swallow up all my spare time. I don't own a console—do they still call them consoles?—and while I try to keep up on what's popular in the gaming world, I basically don't know what I'm talking about.

But that's never stopped me before, so...

I don't think video games are quite at the point that Lomberg mentions here. Video games still seem, to me, to be very branch-oriented. You're given a binary choice of yes or no, and the game responds to that choice. I've played around with and enjoyed free-roaming games like Grand Theft Auto, but the first thing I do when I play those games is I try to figure out where the ends of the world are. I feel my way around the boundary and figure out what's possible and what's not possible. Soon enough, everything feels very small and closed-off. And games that I've played which are more story-oriented have long cut-scenes that basically take the choice out of the player's hands, reverting back to movies.

I have no doubt that video games are art. And I have no doubt that they are genuine narrative devices. But the thing that makes them a unique and exciting medium, to me, is that you are the protagonist of the story, and your choices affect the narrative. Maybe I want too much choice, and that would make the game cease to be a game? I want a Batman game where I can play a manic-depressive Bruce Wayne who just decides not to fight crime, or decides to reveal his secret identity to the world. Or a crime game where I can try to become a legitimate businessman on the earnings from a big bank heist.

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That what's ensuing now as the result of this sad tale about a couple of pre-ordered PS3 controllers and a theatrically douchebaggy retailer.

As Gabe says, "Trust me when I tell you that this is one wild ride. I’m serious, Mr. Toad would look at this ride and just give a slow clap while shaking his head." If you like Internet drama and harsh justice on the gamer frontier, check it out for yourself.