Tag Archives: Social Experiment

Microsoft Game Room, stepping away from the Xbox

  By Will | March 26, 2010 - 2:29 am | Gadgets, Games
3 Comments

Microsoft released their Game Room yesterday as part of their “House Party” (or “Block Party” if you live in the USA) event. Apart from some intriguing teething problems its been an interesting experiment. Essentially Game Room is a MAME type emulator of arcade games (currently limited to Atari and Konami cabinets from the late 70s and early 80s) as well as the Atari 2600 and Intellivision consoles. And these seem to be the original ROMs based on the ROM boot sequence some of the games show. The emulation is wrapped up in a customisable virtual arcade for your avatar and friends avatars to roam through. The games are OK, but the brilliance is in the execution. When you first start (provided it can connect to the game room server, that’s where the teething problems lay), you can demo the games, usually for about 10 minutes (or less if you leave … There’s more →

This is No Laughing Matter

  By Darren Byrne | June 4, 2009 - 10:05 am | Cat Laughs, Comedy, Events, Featured Post, The Culch
4 Comments

Let me tell you about someone rather special. His name is Hans Teeuwen (pronounced toy-wen, I think) and he is a comedian (I use the term loosely). He is an off-the-wall act - he’s confrontational, challenging, unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, loud, neurotic and perhaps psychotic. He is all of these things and more. The problem is - he’s not particularly funny. On Saturday evening last, at the Kilkenny Cat Laughs Festival, we went along to Adam and Jason’s Spotlight on…Hans Teeuwen. We weren’t entirely sure what to expect. The rumour was that Hans didn’t exist and that Adam Hills and Jason Byrne had made him up. Sadly, that was not the case. When going to see Hans, I think it important to bring with you your own stock pile of irony. His act, which includes referencing probably non-existent Dutch TV shows, sing-alongs that don’t work, criticising Disney’s overly … There’s more →