SPIEGEL Surfs the Web Search and Enjoy: Google Games
Google is a pretty useful tool, but programmers are also taking it as a stepping-off point for making some more light-hearted diversions. Googlebattle is a head to head match of serach terms, the winner being whichever is more popular. Guess-the-Google pulls images from Google and asks you to guess which search term was used to find them. The creator of Guess-the-Google also made Montage-a-Google , which creates a montage from any search you enter.
Rides Through a Nuclear Ghost Town
On the evening of April 25th, 1986, Pripjat, a small town near the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, prepared itself for the communist glamour of its annual May 1st parade. When the sun rose the next morning, it was clear that the parade would never take place -- the reactor had melted down, and 135,000 people were being evacuated. Now, nearly 20 years later, Elena's diary of her motorcycle tour through the Chernobyl region includes photos of the long-empty Pripjat, a town that will probably never see a parade again.
Food Force
The game's plot somehow doesn't sound as exciting as the latest offering from the Grand Theft Auto series: "Each mission represents a part of the process of delivering food aid to an area in crisis. The final mission shows you how food aid can help people rebuild their lives in the years following a disaster." That's how the World Food Program describes its newly-released game, Food Force . Designed to teach young people about food aid work (and dramatize it), the game takes a player through a humanitarian crisis and shows them -- in the pixelated light of a modern computer game -- just how difficult and complicated the process is. The game is being highly praised by educators as a breakthrough, but it's hardly the first time UN work has been turned into a game.
