Hello Monster!

Via Gamasutra, this East European crackpot has managed to bend Excel to his dark, 3D wireframe will. Videos and everything - highly entertaining stuff.

Damn, Bad Gods stole the idea for my new game! Not just that, they gave away cheats to our entire battle system. We can’t change it now, we spent years obsessing over the details and getting everything just right. Oh well, I guess it’s back to the drawing board!

This is so unbelievably bent I just had to post the link, live from the 12:39pm train to Brighton for the Develop Conference. In my idler moments I have often wondered if it would be possible to mechanize and engame some of the more tedious chores of the desktop (feeding the spam plant, mowing the defragment lawn, doing a mail merge with some kind of Space Invaders motif), but blow me down, somebody has just done it. Parody it isn’t, real it is - check out your own 3D Mailbox!

This is the Web 2.0 equivalent of Chindōgu and I think both hemispheres of my brain have started to split apart just writing about it for this long. PC only of course, sorry to all you Mac people - you can’t have all the cool stuff.

From the Amazon description:

Alter Ego is a cool concept book, presenting the phenomenon of
the contemporary avatar-the virtual characters gamers choose and design to engage in 3D worlds online. Portraits of gamers from the United States, Europe, China, and Japan (including leading figures of the gaming world) are paired with digital images of their alter egos, graphically dramatizing the gap between fantasy and reality.

Link to exerpted portraits.

I don’t think that there’s much I can say about this… who would have ever thought what might happen after Mario, Peach and Luigi leave the limelight of Super Mario World?  Apparently the people at Poykpac did and made a 5:20 documentary video of the whole sad story.