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Awesome: you’re a tank. You can’t die, but you are the weapon – so you ricochet around the screen from explosions trying to bump into enemies. As you level up, you increase the *number of enemies* which makes big combos easier. Silly, addictive, fun.
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“the more sophisticated applications of interactive data visualization resemble games and toys in many ways, and… game design can contribute to the solutions to several design issues … in the field of data visualization.” Kars on top form at NLGD.
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“TrailRunner is a route planning software for all kinds of long distance sports like running, biking, hiking, inline-skating, skiing and more.” Imports data from Nike+, apparently.
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Eric’s written a command-line interface to Basecamp. Very nice.
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“When I listen to music I see colors and shapes and when I watch visual art I hear sounds. I wanted to express my sensing of shapes, colors and music in this short animation.” Delightful animatino from Michal Levy. Made me grin a lot.
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“There’s only one problem with this theory of depression: it’s almost certainly wrong, or at the very least woefully incomplete.”
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“Designed to be simple and compact yet flexible, it allows you to focus on what matters most: the content.” Probably my favourite NNW theme of them all; legible and pleasant.
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“More than anything, I wanted a design that stayed out of the way. Reading posts via feeds instead of actual sites lets me consume more data. Having a simple, highly legible style makes it much easier.” Another great NNW theme that I’m warming to.
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“MGS4 is the game that contains everything Hideo Kojima knows about game design and storytelling – and that is precisely what’s so thrillingly right and so damnably wrong with it. Faced with a myriad of choices […] Kojima chose not to choose. “
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“I’m not terribly interested in proving Kojima a genius, but I believe we can accurately call him an auteur, and it’s this aspect of his nature as an artist that has me thinking about D.W. Griffith and some interesting parallels between the two.”
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“Big Contrarian is a weblog by Jack Shedd, a designer and a developer in the process of moving to Chicago, IL.” Beautiful, and full of great – and varied – content.
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“These rules were obtained from the text Designing the User Interface by Ben Shneiderman. [they] are derived heuristically from experience and applicable in most interactive systems after being properly refined, extended, and interpreted.”
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““It’s only a game” is a phrase that agrees with all of those who ever looked down their noses at the medium… who want to promote the kind of prejudice that will keep games from ever achieving widespread respect for everything they are.”
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“Charles Wheeler, who has died at the age of 85, set the standard to which all broadcast journalists of my generation aspired. We never reached it, but we knew that if we got close we were doing well.” Martin Bell on Charles Wheeler.
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“…that’s really the purpose of a web-based content creation interface—accepting something as quickly as possible to make the user happy enough to continue submitting more.” Leslie Orchard on message-queue-based design.
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“CKAN is the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, a registry of open knowledge packages and projects (and a few closed ones). CKAN is the place to search for open knowledge resources as well as register your own.”
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“There is not a lot to it yet, just a quick hack that displays the current build status in giant NES-like fonts and a little spinning cube”… which is fine by me. Heads-up visualisation for continuous integration. Awesome.
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“Back in black.” Michael Bay’s rejected Dark Knight script is perhaps the pinnacle of his career to date, neatly encompassing everything that has made him such a remarkable director.
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…and this is why games are great.
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This is, fundamentally, good.
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“All of sudden, I realized that the grime pirates had become a niche thing, a micro-culture that probably wasn’t that much bigger than the anti-pop vanguards that populated the pages of The Wire.” Simon Reynolds on grime for The Wire.
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“250 Trackmania players racing round the same track.” Beautiful; unlikely the merged-replay videos, these are real simultaneous players – and there’s still that lovely, fluid flow to it. I need to play this more than ever.
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“…toilets are the mirrors of culture with their prominence for everyone’s life in the society. the design of toilets can be a powerful element in providing anyone’s happiness, a sense of wellbeing, or even a feeling of small everyday achievement.”
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“An unprecedented act of corporate postmodernism, it’s the game that allows players the chance to rewrite history, succeeding where the game’s creator failed.” Remarkable; hard to believe this saw release anywhere. But it did! Games are great.
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“the eminent linguist tried to spoof the idea of converting Chinese character text into a phonetic (e.g. Latin alphabetic) system… Since every word is pronounced alike (except the tone), the entire essay becomes utterly unreadable in Mandarin.”
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Haughey is right. Some of the worst offenders in this regard are delicious and WordPress’ default templates. A useful reminder of what is, frankly, basic copywriting. Copy as interface, gang!
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“…no new water meters means, for practical purposes, no new houses — ergo, no more growth. You can see that in graphical terms via Trulia.” Trulia Hindsight being used to analyse and predict effects of peak oil based on previous evidence. Smart.
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“…words are a critically important driver in the success of the end user experience, and therefore a writer is a critically important player in the beginning. Period.” Spot on stuff here – makes me feel guilty for being lax on copy on some recent work.
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Moving away from modelling and into vast-scale collection; back to the ways of natural philosophy. Only this time: we really can collect enough *stuff*.
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Thayer uploaded her creature directly to Youtube from Spore Creature Creator. *That*’s the kind of integration I’m talking about. How hard can it be?
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This isn’t helping my suspicions that Melodyne is some kind of dark magic. Incredible.
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These are useful.
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“it’s a shame that a book as significant and thorough as [this] isn’t better than it is, a victim of poor editing, poor organization, and a frustrating inconsistency, as the book veers from true history to trite encyclopedia…”
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“the nintendo ds is an excellent platform for homebrew audio software – here’s an (incomplete) list of some of the excellent sound toys that are available for the platform.” Awesome. More listed in the comments, too.
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“sometimes we geeks forget about all the delightful and beautiful things we can build. The things that aren’t necessarily useful or purposeful, but pointless, silly and wonderful.” Tom on fire with lots of lovely examples.