Hell
by Jeff
Image text: There's also a Katamari level where everything is just slightly bigger than you, and a Mario level with a star just out of reach.
This is a reference to the famous game of Tetris. If you have never played Tetris, I don't know where you have been for the past 20 years, but try this. The goal of Tetris is to completely fill one line, which then dissipates and grants you points. With a curved bottom, there is no way to gain points and no way to get anywhere in the game. You would have to hope for two straight pieces in a row to create and artificial flat surface.
In Katamari Damancy everything smaller than you sticks to you and everything larger than you is an obstacle. If nothing sticks to you, there is no way to get larger and then the game goes nowhere.
And Mario is the famous Mario Brothers series of games. Now, if you haven't even heard of Mario, then I do not know what else I can do for you.
Flatland
by Jeff
Image text: Also, I apologize for the time I climbed down into your world and everyone freaked out about the lesbian orgy overseen by a priest.
Flatland is a short story by Edwin Abbott Abbott. Yes, that is really his name. In Flatland, women are represented by lines, and the more important a man is, the more sides he has. The least important male would be a triangle and the priest, in Flatland, has so many sides, he looks like a circle. So, the image text is a reference to how an xkcd stick figure would look to the members of Flatland. The text for Flatland is on Wikisource here, if you feel like browsing on your Wednesday morning.
Miegakure is an actual game in development that will allow the player to move in 4 dimensions. The website is here, with a screen shot that looks eerily similar to panel 2.
And if you didn't realize, Spongebob is a reference to Spongebob Squarepants, the Nickelodeon cartoon about a sponge named Spongebob. Spongebob is a square (as his name implies) - so that is why the character in the comic is able to draw arms and legs on the square to make him look like Spongebob Squarepants.
Strip Games
by Jeff
Image text: HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF STRIP GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR?
Agricola is a board game in which you start out as a farmer with a spouse. It is a turn-based game in which you have two possible movements for each character you possess. Sounds enthralling...
Jumanji is the game played in the movie by the same name.
Poohsticks is a game played in the Winnie the Pooh books in which two "players" each drop sticks from a bridge and the first stick to make it to the end wins. Sounds enthralling as a strip competition...
Podracing is the type of racing featured in Star Wars Episode I.
Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma is a problem in game theory. It is the case that if two prisoners are taken into jail, but kept separate. If both choose to remain silent, they are given 6 months jail time. If they both accuses the other, they both will do 5 years in prison. If one accuses the other while the other stays silent, one goes to jail for 10 years and the other gets away scot free. When it is iterated, it is played over and over again.
Chess by Mail is just what it sounds like... and very slow.
Conway's Game of Life is a zero-player game and played by cells and here are the rules from Wikipedia:
- Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by underpopulation.
- Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
- Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
- Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell.
SkiFree
by Jeff
Image text: And from that day on, I wore this little 'F' key pendant everywhere I went.
SkiFree was one of the most simple and amazing games for early Windows Operating Systems in the Windows Entertainment Pack. There are a few different types of games in which you move the skier down the course gaining points. Besides trees, the main obstacle is the Yeti that periodically appears in the game and will destroy the skier.
The comic gets philosophical about death when the female character thinks that the Yeti symbolizes death because you can keep dodging the Yet, but it will get you in the end. However, the existence of the 'F' key to speed up those the girl's whole world into uproar. If there is an 'F' key in SkiFree, there must be something equal in real life, hence the 'F' pendant from the image text. I had no idea about the 'F' key to go faster.
You can download SkiFree from this site http://ski.ihoc.net/ - However, it looks like the xkcd effect has taken down the site. We will keep trying and update when it is back up.
UPDATE: Here's another site to download the game from and relive all your memories of SkiFree.
Nachos
by Jeff
Image text: 'Cheater!' 'Hey, gaming on wifi? You have only yourself to blame.'
This is another unclear conversation from xkcd right off the bat. The girl with the white hair calls the house of the girl with the dark hair and the guy. The guy answers and says that "Megan", the girl with the dark hair can't come to the phone because she is gaming. The girl in the white hair knew this already because she was playing against Megan. And probably knew that Megan was gaming over wifi.
Microwaves and wireless routers both transmit at the 2.4GHz range. In the case of microwaves, they use that range to cook food. If some of the waves leak out of the microwave, which they invariably do, they will interfere with a nearby wireless router.
And I agree with the comic wholeheartedly, why would you game over wifi anyway?
NOTE: If you haven't headed over to xkcd.com and witnessed the homage to Geocities that Randall has created, you are missing out.
Conversations
by Mike
Image Text: If the dysentery graph looks historically inaccurate it's because I got all my data from Oregon Trail.
Dysentery is a disease that causes fatal diarrhea. Frequently caused by an infectious bacteria, virus, or parasite, this disease was a common way to die in the computer game Oregon Trail. This comic suggests that it is spread more easily while on the toilet and with the rise in laptop sales (and rise in people are "conversing" over the internet while on the toilet) we will see a new rise in cases of dysentery.
UPDATE: "There are three graphs. It doesn’t imply that “we will see a new rise in cases of dysentery.”, it implies more conversations will take place with someone on the toilet due to using a laptop, when in the past it was due to dysentery." - Thanks Dave!
Scribblenauts
by Jeff
Image text: Let me look away and type 'guy who's just jealous that I beat all his MarioKart times' and turn back, and ... yup, there you are again!
Scribblenauts is a side-scrolling game for the Nintendo DS in which you can summon objects to help you in the game, such as a ladder, or plants. "A fundamental element of Scribblenauts is the ability of the player to summon myriad objects into the game. This is achieved by writing the name of an object on the touchscreen (or via keypad)"
This comic takes that one step further and pokes fun at the prospect of summoning a friend in Scribblenauts by the phrase "Pretentious Asshole" or "guy who's just jealous that I beat all his MarioKart times"
The first two frames are making mention of the fact that there was some fear that the large hadron collider in CERN in Europe would create a black hole through their experiments. This was widely debunked, but apparently in Scribblenauts in xkcd, it does make a black hole.
Oregon
by Jeff
Image meta text: A century later, the harrowing flight of the survivors from Oregon was dramatized in a popular video game.
This cartoon references the Oregon Trail computer game which every kid who went to elementary school in the 80s played in computer class. The best and most exciting part of this game for the kids was the hunting part.
This cartoon is speculating that if all these kids really travelled the trail, no one would have food because of the massive overhunting. Frequently, in the game, you would kill a 1000 pound buffalo, but you would only be able to carry 200 pounds back to your wagon, leaving the other 800 pounds to rot. I always thought that was odd.
And lastly, the cartoon recognized all the odd ways you and other members of your wagon could die in the game (often suddenly): dystentry, typhoid, measles, cholera. Unless you were a doctor in the game, but everyone knows being a doctor or banker is practically cheating.
Superlative
by Jeff
Image meta text: "Stay while I recount the crazy TF2 kill I managed yesterday, my friends."
Superlative is a comic that references the Dos Equis beer commercial which describes the "Most Interesting Man in the World." (youtube link)
The character in the comic is going through some of the most boring things in the world: recounting dreams to others, not speaking another language (the character in the commercial has been known to "Speak French in Russian"), making a blog with no content (first post!) and apparently drinking two beers and feeling sick.
The meta text is a reference to the Dos Equis tag line of: "Stay thirsty my friends." TF2 is Team Fortress 2, a video game available on consoles and for PC.
Accident
by submission
Image text: As far as treachery-as-driving-music goes, Katamari music is matched only by Guitar Hero music.
This submission is from Aaron Hill. Aaron lives in the finger lakes region of NY, where he works as a web developer in higher ed. He has a blag (http://blog.amhill.net) and is on the twitter (@aaronmhill).
Cueball is driving his car and listening to some music. This music either already was, or suddenly became, the theme music from the game "Katamari Damacy". Katamari Damacy was a video game for Playstation where the protagonist, controlled by the player, rolls around a ball of increasing size that accumulates anything that it rolls over that is smaller than the mass of the ball. The goal is to pick up as much stuff as possible in the time alotted. (There has been some discussion about the game being reflective of hyper-consumerist culture)
In the last frame, we learn that Cueball drove his car into a mailbox after the Katamari Damacy theme music began playing. As he tells Megan "The mailbox was smaller than me, it was just instinct," implying that the music induced a Pavlovian response to start veering into anything smaller than him.
The image text also refers to Guitar Hero, a game where a player uses a guitar-shaped controller to loosely mimic playing a guitar along with the video game. Presumably, someone who has car collisions from driving when the Katamari Damacy theme plays would also have difficulty driving when a Guitar Hero song comes on, as their hands would attempt to mimic the Guitar Hero button sequences.