Blog Posts by Mike Smith

Connect 4: Better go first Simple to play though it is, Connect 4 hides a wealth of strategic
detail that’s not a million miles away from complex classics like Go,
draughts, and chess.

So how do you win? There are plenty of good tips out there, including
favoring the advantageous center column, thinking multiple moves ahead,
and stacking your lines one on top of another, so that if your opponent
blocks the lower, you’ll be able to win with the upper.

All helpful advice, but it turns out there’s a much simpler answer.

Just go first.

According to research conducted by Netherlands-based academic Victor
Allis in the 80s, a Connect 4 player who goes first -- and makes no
mistakes -- will always win the game. The

Starcraft II, NCAA Football 2011, and LEGO Harry Potter are all flying high in the software sales charts -- but is anyone actually playing them?

Modern Warfare 2 We found out with the help of Raptr, a service that's part
instant-messaging program, part Facebook-style social network, and part
achievement tracker. As long as you have its handy desktop client
installed, Raptr can tell you what you're playing, and how long you've
played it for.

Turns out, the most-played game in the world right now (according to
Raptr) isn't a new release. In fact, it's only barely in the top ten
selling games for July. It's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,
on Xbox 360, whose players racked up well over a million hours over the

Could Brad Pitt play John Marston?With videogame-to-movie adaptations apparently all the rage at
present, it's hardly surprising there's already chatter about this
year's surprise smash hit Western, Red Dead Redemption.

But who'd have thought a star of the caliber of Brad Pitt would be linked to the role of Redemption's star, likable (albeit a bit grizzled)
family man John Marston?

Yup, according to ShowbizSpy, Pitt has been given first refusal on Marston's role. If the movie follows the plot of the game, it'd see Pitt embarking on a sweeping hunt
for atonement (not to mention his captured wife and son) across the
embryonic American West.

An unnamed source told the blog: "The idea is to make this in the style of an epic

Playstation ButtonsIf you've picked up a game controller any time in the last fifteen
years, the chances are pretty good that its face buttons were marked
with a square, a triangle, a circle, and a cross.

Instantly recognizable, the symbols have appeared on every standard
Sony game controller ever since the birth of the Playstation in 1994.
But why did the machine's designers opt for such an odd set of labels,
instead of the then-standard set of capital letters or numbers?

A few reasons spring to mind: the shapes are culturally neutral, so
no matter what alphabet or writing system you know, you'll always find
them familiar. They're recognizable for very young children, and for
the colorblind. The circle uses

Mafia 2Mafia II

Platforms: X360, PS3

Sequel to a groundbreaking 2002 open-world classic, Mafia II hits the mean streets this week -- and it looks like Italian-American associations aren't the only ones a little underwhelmed with it.

While it's easy to compare the game to other open-world epics like Grand
Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption, Mafia II's story is much
tighter, critics say, giving players few reasons to explore its city or
pursue its sparse set of side tasks. But there's broad agreement that
if you can put up with its linear nature, it's well worth taking a walk
on the wiseguy side.

While praising Mafia II's "competent game mechanics and absorbing narrative," Destructoid's Nick

World of WarcraftWord to the wise: making money from running unauthorized World of Warcraft servers isn't a great long-term business plan.

Obvious though that might seem, it perhaps comes as news to one
Alyson Reeves -- doing business as Scapegaming -- who this week found
herself owing Warcraft developer Blizzard the impressive sum of
$88,594,589, in a default judgement handed down by the California
Central District Court.

Reeves' company was running an unauthorized, emulated World of
Warcraft server, allowing players to circumvent the $12-15 monthly
subscription fees Blizzard normally charges for its game. Such private
servers often include superficially attractive gameplay tweaks like
faster accrual of

HangmanWhat's the hardest word to solve in Hangman?

If you guessed some freak of linguistics like "onomatopoeia,"
"dybbuk," or "benzodiazepine," you're barking up entirely the wrong
arboriform growth.

Take it from Jon McLoone, director of business development for
Wolfram Research, the company behind popular mathematical modeling tool
Mathematica. McLoone was inspired to investigate the English language's
hardest-to-guess word after his six-year-old daughter asked him how she
could beat her Hangman computer game.

To find out, McLoone wrote a program that would play Hangman with
all 90,000 words in the dictionary, attempting to guess each one in a
semi-random way similar to a method a good human