There are a lot of references in the game. Some that i've found, i am sure there are a lot more:
Chapter 1: Fisty's Bog
Sign: "Fisty swore he would never be like those tadpoles that grow up and shoot colored gems out of their mouths."
-> The successful casual game Zuma by PopCap.
Chapter 1: Ode to the Bridge Builder
-> Physics puzzle game Bridge Builder.
Chapter 1: Ode to Tower of Goo
-> Tower of Goo is 2D Boy's freeware predecessor of WoG.
Chapter 3: Burning Man
-> Burning Man is an annual event held in the Black Rock Desert, in Northern Nevada.
Chapter 4: Bulletin Board System
Sign: "I bet we'll be able to tighten up the graphics around level three."
-> Silly game design school commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ-QSJmEgHU
Last modified Sun, 10/19/2008 - 04:31 by Blueskied |
How about Fisty not wanting to be like that frog that shoots colored balls out of it's mouth?
Zuma by PopCap. |
Thanks, I wondered what that one means.
I've added it to my list to have a nice overwiew.
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Burning Man is some kind of festival in Nevada. [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_manWikipedia knows more[/url]. |
Ah yes, i've heard of that event before. Added. |
Chapter 4, since I'm a computer scientist:
Hello, World
A "Hello, World" program is a simple program that simply prints out "Hello, World" to the screen.
It's the first program you learn to write in any language, so you can get a handle on the basic structure, syntax, how to run the compiler, etc.
Hello, World is the only level (that I noticed) that has NO sub text on the title screen. Reflective of a Hello, World program (which prints out "Hello, World" and immediately terminates).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hello_world_program
Bulletin Board System
This one's already been covered (and there's not much more to it, I don't think.)
Grape Vine Virus
Grapevine Virus A is an actual virus that affects grape vines. One of the symptoms is a reddening of the leaves. In this level, your infected goos turn red.
In the sense of passing information ("I heard it through the grapevine"), a grapevine virus would be a computer virus passed through unofficial or unknown channels, often without any act of dissemination by the virus or virus writer. Instead, a grapevine virus relies on people to actively view, copy, or otherwise engage the virus by coming into contact with an infected host. Once infected, the "vine" grows, and you can draw neat little graphs showing how the vine started and how it spread and such.
Graphics Processing Unit
That would be your GPU, essentially your video card.
256 colors refers to 8-bit color. The mention of green (and it's use throughout chapter 4) is obviously a throw back to older computer systems and displays who only had 1 color, often green, amber, or white.
But I don't see any specific, clever references in this level.
Road Blocks
Just a pun - "tech supports", referring to both "tech support" in the typical sense, and "supports" (of your "tech", the bridge) in the construction sense.
"The traveling virtual sign painter" is probably a reference to the traveling salesman. (How to traverse a graph in the most efficient way. Turns out it's computationally a "hard" problem.)
I believe this is the level that does the branching in this chapter, which may or may not be another intentional reference to the traveling salesman problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_salesman_problem
Alice & Bob & the Man in the Middle
Whenever you talk about message passing and security in computer science, the analogy involves Alice and Bob sending messages to each other. The level itself semi-resembles a man in the middle attack. (I was afraid that I would lose if I simply blocked the message stream, lol).
The level's subtext "someone's listening" and the "Virtual Sign Painter is Listening" all play on this theme.
"Highway Bandits" refer to actual highway bandits, and of course, the information super highway (vroom!).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob
Graceful Failure
Graceful Failure refers to the concept of designing a program to NOT screw things up if it crashes.
The subtext "unblocking" could refer to the practice of removing any locks on files, memory, etc. in the event of a failure.
The signpost's references are pretty obvious - packet sniffing, sockets, ports, blocking, brute force, etc. Google any of them if you want more info.
The Server Farm
A server farm is a big group of servers, often working together on a single task or several related tasks, such as serving a website and it's database, or running a 3D render job or simulating the weather, etc. (CPU cycles at low cost refers to the practice of selling CPU time on a large system. Researchers often buy CPU time to run their science, because the cost is far less than owning and maintaining hardware. Companies such as IBM lease out time on their servers to people needing to run complex jobs that would take a looooooooong time on a typical computer.)
The signpost is a reference to uptime guarantees. When you buy hosting or a similar service from a company, you probably want your website / whatever to be working all the time. Amazon probably loses thousands of dollars per second that their site is down. The standard is a 99.9% uptime guarantee - it's like a 5 star crash rating.
The * refers to the level itself being unstable, and of course the fine print in an uptime guarantee. (Scheduled maintenance is often not counted against the uptime, some companies consider downtime to start only when the first request fails, so if you're down from 3:00 AM to 4:00 AM and someone tries to access your site at 3:30 AM, that's only 30 minutes of down time, not 1 hour, etc.)
MOM's Computer
Just some general references. One screen showing the formulas for force due to gravity and force due to a spring, one screen listing some fun documents, including a power point on reliable time travel. Nothing really to "get" other than the general computery stuff.
Neat things include your cursor changing to the 4-way arrow when you're grabbing an application (like when you're moving a window), the games being kind of springy, and one of the applications defining itself (a rectangle, 50x50, mass 20, etc.).
Last modified Sun, 10/19/2008 - 15:28 by sexconker |
You Have Too Burn The Rope - the f@cking most epic game evah! (: |
Misty's Long bony road is a referance to a level from the game "World of Goo" and it is about a tadpole of the same shape and nature. |
I'm thinking given the probable audience of the game, only a very few people caught this one, but there was one point when the sign painter mentions a spider over the fire... and I'm pretty sure that refers to a Jonathon Edwards sermon:
From Wikipedia :
> from Jonathan Edwards' famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"—it
> includes the line "The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one
> holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is
> dreadfully provoked..." |
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