Reading Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table in Dulwich Park at the weekend. Lovely weather; a remarkable book. A happy memory worth sharing.
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"After replacing the old plist, you can use your Hori stick with MacMAME!" Fantastic. Six-button fighter action agogo.
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"A version of the match-three game is set to launch next Thursday within the World of Warcraft MMO (massively multiplayer online), letting players kill time with puzzles during raids and long stints farming rare items." Oh god no. Don't cross the time-sink streams!
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"And if there was a "prize" in this lottery, it was not so much the object itself, but the letter and the awesome mysteries of unfathomable spiritual connections, and the very gesture itself from this dear, dear person and the timing!" What a story.
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"Introduced by Dr John C.Taylor, Invenit et Fecit" – or, to translate, he invented it, and he built it. Video explaining some of the finer points of the chronophage. Stunningly beautiful.
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"He calls the new version of the escapement a 'Chronophage' (time-eater) – "a fearsome beast which drives the clock, literally "eating away time". It is the largest Grasshopper escapement of any clock in the world." Stunning new timepiece for the Corpus library. Breathtakingly beautiful.
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"Computer Entertainment Thirty-Five Years From Today: A solo spoken word performance by Bruce Sterling" Wonderful, surreal, exciting; Sterling's keynote from Austin GDC. Good stuff, and worth a read for gamers, futurists, and designers alike.
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"This is something I said about Spore a while back, actually. I thought Spore could be a little like what Understanding Comics is to Comics. As in something from the form which uses the form to explain the form." Oh, I like that as an idea. He can be a smart one at times, that Gillen.
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"I've just finished attending the AIR tour and during the final (particularly funny) presentation, I completed a TextMate plugin that has full API completion support." Useful – some syntax completion, and a shortcut for application preview.
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"We hijack innocent tweets, subject them to our patent pending penisization process by replacing certain words with 'penis', and republish it for your entertainment. We find it funny."
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"I was at Aperture Foundation a Tuesday to see a panel about collecting photography, and I haven't been able to get this image out of my mind since." Oh wow.
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"You might argue that an iPhone without connectivity is, well, an iPod, but its not. To state the (obviously overlooked) obvious – it is a phone without connectivity and that over time the ease and evolving practice of disconnecting fundamentally changes our assumptions of what we can expect from a phone, which in turn alters our expectations about the connectivity of other people." Jan Chipchase on pause buttons and understandings of what "social" means. Excellent.
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"Well-designed games make us forget the technical impediments to the enjoyment of art, and this is more than half the battle."
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Yes.
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"KeyCue gives you an instant overview of the overall functionality of any application, plus lets you automatically start working more efficiently by making use of menu shortcuts." Awesome. Really, really awesome. I might well end up registering this.
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Jos Buivenga's font foundry, with many free faces (usually in a few weights – other weights are paid-for). Some beautiful stuff in here.
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Beautiful, free, sans-serif font. Gorgeous – especially at 900-weight.
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"His advice for those attempting a project like this, is to get people who understand the web. DICE hired a web development director, and a web producer. "Without those people, we would have never made it as far as we have," he says. He also recommends a web tech director, which DICE did not need to hire "because we had a team in DICE who were pretty strong."" Excellent article about building games for the online age; the section on the socially-driven BH website is very incisive.
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"Bandcamp isn’t Yet Another Place to Put Your Music. We power a site that’s yours. So instead of our logo plastered between banner ads for Sexy Singles Chat, your fans see your design, your music, your name, your URL. You retain all ownership rights, and we just hang out in the background handling the tech stuff." Via Waxy; looks really excellent, and some wonderful stat-gathering tools for bandowners.
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"…then, after destroying his nano-network, as an admonition to the audience, extended [Arthur C Clarke's metaphor]: 'Any truly advanced technology is indistinguishable from garbage.'" Excellent summary of what sounds like a wonderful GDC Austin keynote from Bruce Sterling.
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"'What we've done in MMOs and what we tend to lean toward is building an enviroment for the new player to explore that is essentially a safe environment… the newbie zone. For our explorative learners, we've given them safe zones to explore.' But that doesn't work for imitative learners." Excellent article on styles of learning, with particular attention to how MMOs teach players game mechanics.
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"Very recently an anonymous poster on /b/ claimed to have hacked Sarah Palin's Yahoo e-mail account." 4chan members get into Sarah Palin's barely-disguised Yahoo mail accounts which she used for business.
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Oh boy.
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“I decided to create Flatshare fridge because there is nothing more disgusting than a dirty fridge in a shared flat,” he says. “At the time, I was living in such a flat!” Amazing.
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"It occurred to me that if I could somehow tether a DSLR to an instant-on device like an Arduino microcontroller I would have less weight to carry around and could get more work done. After mentally spec’ing out what I would need, I realized the solution was right in front of me – because I bring it with me for Mario Kart wireless races on long night jobs – (In the manner of John Lasseter’s slow epiphany voice): “Use-the-Nintendo-D-S.” Duh." Oh wow.
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Soulja Boy reviews Braid. Oh dear. (Although: much as I want to mock it, he is correct that time-rewind mechanics are, usually, a lot of fun in and of themselves. But still.)
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"To be seen as art, games need to be easier. A lot easier. They don't have to be only easy. They can provide Elite Super Awesome levels for the enjoyment of those who love to be challenged." Eesh, I don't know. I think there needs to be easier games – hell, games are getting easier all the time – but a super-hardcore game like Psyvariar does _not_ need a built-in easy mode. Its purpose is to be hard. Not convinced by this article at all, unfortunately.
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"Because stupidity is such an unthinkably terrible thing in our culture, the students will then spend hours constructing arguments that explain why they are intelligent yet are having difficulties. The moment you start down this path, you have lost your focus."
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"Innovation seems to mean doing something so significantly different that you alienate the userbase that should be familiar with your product. More applaudable, in my mind, are those games that smuggle in small amounts of unique and exciting gameplay that enhances the experience without fundamentally redefining it… Warhammer Online is a game that abounds with this kind of innovation. From elements that are purely new and thought provoking, to small gameplay tweaks that subtly push new perspectives on tired MMO cliches, there is a lot of good stuff to be found in the game." Brandon Reihnart takes a look at WAR.
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4chan /b/ thread on the American economic deficit, which explains things quite well, and has stick-man-anon illustrations to boot.
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"Unlike other video platforms, Panda is not just a service for encoding your videos for the web; Panda handles the whole process. From the upload form to streaming, Panda takes control." Open source, Merb-based video platform that anyone can use – runs on top of Amazon EC2, S3, and SimpleDB.
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Kars releases the source for his travel-time map of the Netherlands. Nice to see the artefact-as-code, as well as the artefact-as-design.
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"Apple’s current practice of rejecting certain applications at the final hurdle – submission to the App Store – is disastrous for investor confidence. Developers are investing time and resources in the App Store marketplace and, if developers aren’t confident, they won’t invest in it." Fraser Speirs hits the nail on the head over the problems with the current App Store model.
TIGSource Bootleg Demake Competition
12 September 2008
Introducing: the TIGForums Bootleg Demakes competition. To explain:
The term “demake” was most likely coined by one Phil Fish, to describe a remake of a game on older-generation hardware (or, more likely, a remake that is made to look as though it were running on older-generation hardware). The most obvious demake is, of course, the 3d-to-2d demake.
Got it?
And to explain their notion of “bootleg”:
The term “bootleg” generally means “unauthorized or unlicensed copy.” For this competition it means that you cannot use any trademarked names or ripped materials. Everything must be 100% your own (although obviously inspired). Think “Cogs of Conflict,” “Master Chef,” “Great Giana Sisters,” etc. It is your decision how far to take the bootlegging, but under no circumstances can you violate someone’s intellectual property.
Sounds good so far. What blew me away was the quality of the responses in the month since the competition began.
Here is the post summarising every game that has some form of playable code. As you can see, there’s a lot, and they’re all worth a dig – some are funny, some are clever remakes, some are remarkable technically, and some play with the original game concept.
Highlights include:
- Dysaster, an ASCII-roguelike that riffs on Crysis
- VipeÜt Vectrex, a Vectrex-style demake of Wipeout.
- Gang Garrison 2 and Buddy Base II, two pixel-art sidescrolling pastiches of TF2.
- Dance X2 !Revolt, a one-button dance game. Notable for its dedicated hardware controller, and the hilarious official gameplay video.
- Super Maria Cosmos, a delightful piece of homebrew DS programming.
- The Black And White Plane, an Atari-style demake of Ikaruga.
- Advanced Set The Rope On Fire Cartridge, an Intellivision-style demake of You Have To Burn The Rope – funny both for its style but also its twist on the original’s gameplay.
But three really stand out for me.
The first is Super 3D Portals 6, a Portal demake for the Atari 2600. Not “2600-style”; this is actual code that will run on 2600 emulators, and thus should do so on a real 2600 as well. Outstanding for its commitment to retro-dom. (Note: I believe this was completed before the competition was launched, but it’s so awesome I don’t care).
The other has been linked up in many places, and is just remarkably thorough: Soundless Mountain II. The thread is long, and covers a lot of development, but the NES-style survival horror has some impressive touches and is clearly a real labour of love.
I think my favourite demake in the competition turned out to be STACKER: Nuclear Scavenger. The title screen makes it look like a STALKER demake, but in fact it’s so much more: it takes Diablo II-style inventory management, adds a Russian twist… and turns into a Tetris-clone. The more I think about it, the more it makes me smile. Gaming reduced to inventory management. Fantastic.
Anyhow, I thought all the games in the competition deserved bringing to people’s attention, and so that’s what I’ve done. I’m off to sit in a tent for a few days. Back soon!