Everything that doesn’t fit into any other category.
I just saw District 9.
It is far and away the best movie that I have seen in a long time.
The most recent trailer is up on YouTube, but embedding is disabled.
Finally, here’s Alive in Joburg, the precursor short film that Neill Blomkamp directed back in 2005:
I feel like a lesser person for not being involved in the production of this film in any way.
I showed my third game prototype to some ex-workmates today.
Thanks for the constructive feedback from everyone who played the game. I’m not sure that it has super-wide appeal… but that’s not really the end goal! 😉
Unlike the first two game prototypes (which I decided to stop work on because they didn’t appeal enough to me) I’m going to put some more time into fleshing this game out. So there will be an update next Friday.
In related news, it’s been a productive fortnight and it feels great to be working alone – without the need for external consensus or funding. After an extended period of introspection earlier in the year, I feel that I know what I want to do; or rather, what I don’t want to do.
I don’t want to waste time working on things that have little intrinsic merit or that I have little interest in. I don’t want to produce shovelware, and I don’t want to do things that have been done before. Life’s too short.
Note: Thanks Andy for recently reinvigorating my interest in making games! 😉
The first thing I thought when I saw the Nikon COOLPIX S1000pj, an upcoming compact digital camera with built-in projector, was: “That is so cool!”
My second thought was: “If it can project images and take photos at the same time, you could use it as a structured light 3D scanner!”
Calibration shouldn’t be an issue since the projection lens is a fixed distance and orientation from the camera lens. If the camera has a decent processor, it may even be possible to make it process the data internally and output textured 3D models.
Hmmm… that said, it would probably be much more practical to just have it run a standard structured light pattern and save a series of images for post-processing on a PC. 😉
Update: More wild speculation. It could capture diffuse and specular textures by coordinating high-speed successive photos: without flash, with flash, and with a structure light patterns.
Red Remover is cute, fun, addictive, and short enough to finish in one sitting:
I love the schoolyard “yeaaah” when you complete a level. 😀
Highly Recommended.
I wanted to quickly post about two things:
The Zii Plaszma is the “Stemcell Computing Platform to Innovate and Profit”. Aside from stupid naming all around, it looks like a neat device simliar to the iPod Touch… but with hardware GPS, a HD camera, SDHC slot, 10 point multi-touch, and FullHD HDMI output. It runs a proprietary Linux-based OS called Plaszma OS, or alternatively Google’s Android.
You can pick one up for US$399 with the SDK, which runs under Ubuntu 8.04 and includes: Eclipse IDE, gcc, gdb, cmake, and the OpenGL ES API.
Here’s a video full of crazy jargon:
Now onto Open Source languages/IDEs that can target the iPhone – for people who are keen on FOSS or maybe simply aren’t down with Objective-C or Xcode (as a development environment).
Hugh over at Game Haxe has managed to get a basic haXe program running on iPhone using the C++ build target, statically-linked SDL, and a bunch of other stuff. This means that developers familiar with AS3 could use a very similar language (and libraries) to target the iPhone. Definitely something to keep an eye on.
In related news (but on a potentially bigger scale), Miguel de Icaza (of GNOME and Mono fame) recently blogged that the MonoTouch team has reached feature complete status and are looking for iPhone developers to try out Mono, and their MonoTouch C# APIs, for the iPhone.
Heidi and I rented He’s Just Not That Into You on BluRay over the weekend. Heidi wanted something pretty light, and it looked to be your basic Romcom.
I enjoyed it much more than I expected to. The acting was amicable and the writing contrasted a number of relationships in order to communicate a few key themes – which I will express here as pseudo-mathematical formulae:
I won’t say much else other than I felt it was surprisingly worth watching.
You‘re pretty cute-awesome, as evidenced by Dear Deer:
I remember you from somewhere else though. Oh that’s right: sex with ducks.
Man, I love how the internet provides me with limited tangential exposure to remote celebrities… often years late. I wonder if they’re still popular… “quirky” can sometimes have a pretty short life-span, but that doesn’t really matter.
I picked up Wii Sports Resort the other day, and playing it reignited something that burns me about recent trends in videogame design.
I get the feeling that fewer videogames are being built upon thoughtful design, clever problem solving, and storytelling. In contrast, it seems that there’s an abundance of games that feature mindless collecting, whiz-bang toys, pointless achivements, crap user-generated content, and an abundance of make-your-own-fun sandbox simulations.
It all reeks of lazy game design and disrespect for the player. I don’t want a box of toys that I could use to possibly make my own fun. I bought a game damn it. Set an objective. Teach me the rules. Challenge me fairly. Don’t make me do menial tasks. Give me a dozen good levels over a million ordinary ones. You can’t placate me with your hollow achievements! Don’t patronise me!
Designing for “emergent gameplay” tends to be the gaming equivalent of producing reality television – it’s easy and cheap to produce. Just create the set, plant a few challenges, and wait for the “magic” to happen. “Sandbox gameplay” is a often catch phrase for providing the equipment for a game, but no game itself. It’s like kicking a ball around. It’s exercise, but it’s not sport. Football is what people dedicate their lives to.
It’s easy to see why game developers would seek to include these new types of gameplay (maybe they should just be called “play”). They’re low-hanging fruit and seem to appeal to a broad market. I’d also throw in that people can be very insecure (and companies very adverse to risk). Why risk designing something that consumers might not like when you can just provide them some fun toys and let them do whatever they want?
There’s nothing inheritly wrong with toys (or reality television). Why don’t we just call them toys though? I don’t want to see games always seek to include toys to supplement poor gameplay or to cover the lowest common denominator.
And now back to Wii Sports Resort. As expected, it’s a collection of fun toys and shallow games. Fortunately, it doesn’t purport to being anything else.
I’ve amassed a fair games collection over the years.
I guess that I’d always hoped to curate a sort of video game museum, gallery, or library. However, it’s not something that I’m really that interested in now – at least not enough to pursue it anymore. I’m much more interested in just having less stuff.
I’ve previously trimmed my collection down, but now I just want to get rid of it.
It’s not that I don’t like all these old games. (Quite the opposite, I love them!). It’s just that keeping them doesn’t serve any purpose. It’s not likely that I’m going to play them again – and they just sit there in case I ever want to.
I’m not sure exactly how I’ll get rid of everything. There are heaps of options: eBay, GameTraders, setting up my own online store, etc.
Donating to a library seems like a good option because it will make the games available to a wider audience. I performed a few quick searches for video games on the State Library of Western Australia website, but all turned up nothing (aside from related books and movies). So I sent the following email:
Hello,
As an avid video game player, I was wondering if the State Library or public libraries in Western Australia, have any video games in their collections. Much like literature, film, and music – video games contribute to the cultural environment and background of a large portion of the population.
I am also head of “Let’s Make Games”, a local initiative to support the local video game development community which has a 20+ year history and is currently growing very quickly. I would love to see products of the Western Australian games industry collected as a means of recording this emerging culture and community.
Could you please let me know if video games (locally developed or international releases) are collected? If not, are there any plans to collect them in future?
Best Regards,
– Nick Lowe
I hope that I didn’t come off as too smarmy or directive.
Anyone out there have some other ideas for (or experience in) dissolving a games collection? Please comment!
What a load of whiny crap:
Translation:
What you like is stupid. You should like what I like.
It doesn’t take a genius to determine why mainstream titles sell better than esoteric “art” games. There is obviously much broader market appeal for high-quality 3D graphics and familiar gameplay, compared to low-res 2D graphics and confusing interactivity.
Since when is Passage objectively better than Assassin’s Creed? And why should the average mainstream gamer be held accountable for their subjective preference – not donating money to support stuff that they don’t like?
I’d love to see more people embrace games like Passage… just so that pretentious game journalists lose their perceived moral high ground and have to find some other cause that they can champion and feel superior about.
Note: Obviously, people should donate to indie developers if they want to support them. Calling mainstream titles crap, and talking down to consumers for buying them, is clearly not the best way to go about encouraging people to do so.