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"Planbeast is a free service that lets you find people to play your favorite Xbox 360 games with online. Planbeast allows you to schedule and join new online events for any Xbox Live-compatible title." And there was me all ready to build this (albeit just for Left4Dead)… and now somebody's gone and done it already.
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"This is a series of lessons on Blues Guitar." Simple, but thorough, and with some score/tab as well. Probably worth plugging through.
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"BUGFIXES: Fixed a bug that would sometimes cause characters other than Ken to appear on the Character Select screen during online play." Damn, that one's been affecting me too.
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"It is probably safe to say that, despite decades of ever more spectacular Hollywood visions of extra-terrestial domination, humanity in its worst nightmares never imagined it would have to contend with spawn-camping aliens." Chris Remo documents the end of Tabula Rasa from the frontlines.
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"How finished an artefact is is an important indicator of its relationship to the world: not just an indication of where it is in its lifecycle, but also one that explains how it should be understood, and that opens a dialogue between the observer and the artefact." Me, on Pulse Laser, talking about unfinished states as conversation tools, amongst other things.
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"Virgil is singing arms and a man". I must admit, I prefer "the man", but this is lovely nontheless.
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"I’ve always been curious about which drummers use a click track and which don’t, so I thought it might be fun to try to build a click track detector using the Echo Nest remix SDK." Analysing tempo fluctuation on a variety of popular recordings to find out who uses a click track; as you might have guessed, Ringo and John Bonham didn't.
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Finally, a decent video of Abel. Ignore the first round, where he gets hammered, and concentrate on the second two: he negates Sagat's ranged game by getting in close, throwing in some careful EX scissor kicks, and massive abuse of linking a juggle into the aerial grab throw.
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Some nice tips in here, mainly about blocking access to things and security.
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David Hobby goes to Cern, and has a ball. Also: takes some nice portraits.
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Useful tutorial on building Pagination, that goes beyond the Pagination library and points out what you need to be doing with the Model, too.
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Bandcamp add an automatic way to generate one-time use download codes for music – so bands can promote singles and the like. And then: they add automatic Moo Minicard generation to the mix. Bloody brilliant, and definitely The Right Way To Do Things.
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"where dreams become heart attacks" – photographs of revolting, calorie-drenched food "experiments".
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"I'm sorry to say that Demiforce is canceling plans for Onyx." This is a real shame, because I was somewhat excited that Demiforce wasn't just ramping up for "another game", and was instead building something that might benefit the platform. As it is: oh well. Those Apple T&Cs are killer, it seems.
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"I was reading about arcades and how you'd have to queue to play popular games as well as follow rules like no throwing in fighting game or the others wouldn't let you play. This seems rather strange. The money cost must have gotten expensive pretty quickly as well. I'm not old enough to have been to them when they were around so I'm curious about what they were like." And then, 18 pages of wonderful gaming oral history; you'll be smelling the aircon and the chewing gum by the time you're through with this thread.
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"The aim, then, is to explore what makes a good children's game, to consider how this oft-maligned market can sometimes reveal bad game design habits that we've been conditioned to tolerate, and to offer a guide to the best games for kids available now by looking at the four design areas that I believe are key to making a successful game for children." Dan Whitehead's roundup of games for children is really very good: some strong thinking, good comparative analysis, and best of all, parental insight. More like this, please, EG.
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Wonderful interview with Marty Stratton and John Carmack on Quake Live; there's some really smart insight on development and business in here, and also some tidbits of Carmack talking code. Definitely one to mull over.
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Dave Sirlin offers some analysis of SF4. I think, at the overview level, he's got a good point: SF4 is not actually as "accessible" as everyone makes out; it's certainly got a lower on-ramp than SF3, but it ramps up pretty fast. More on this in a blogpost, I think.
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"After being seen as cheap or low-rent housing for much of the 40s, asylums started to be seen as 21st century modern, and desirable places to live." All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again. Heathcote's Lyddle End entry is fantastic, and primarily for his writing/futurism.