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"I'm passionate about this because I'm building the camera I've always wanted to shoot with," he says. "When my grandkids and great-grandkids look back, they're going to say I was a camera builder. I did handgrips and then goggles and then sunglasses to prepare myself. But cameras are magic." Fantastic article about Jim Jannard and his Red digital movie-camera business.
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Brilliant, brilliant little advert.
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"VideoGamesHero brings you homebrew action at it's best – offering lasting fun and challenging action with over 65 Songs, 5 Game modes, Motion Card and Guitar Grip support, there is something for everyone!" Homebrew Harmonix-style rhythm action game for the ds. Awesome.
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"In this extensive interview, Yasuhara outlines his carefully constructed theories of fun and game design, including the differences between American and Japanese audiences, with illustrated documents." Lots of nice things in here, including a section on "tidying up".
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"APIdock is a web app that provides a rich and usable interface for searching, perusing and improving the documentation of projects that are included in the app." Handy.
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"I think the role of the architecture diagram, user flow, and wireframe belongs very much after the fact, after we’ve sketched and prototyped an experience. Those are tools to document what has been agreed through sketching and prototyping. They are not the best means for solving challenging design problems." That seems like a good way of putting it.
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"In this template you'll find shared layers (masters) for a title page, wireframe, wireframe/storyboard hybrid, simple storyboard, and storyboard with notes. Column guides and a regular grid make it easy to use and keep your layout tight." Nice .graffle templates for UX designers.
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Timelapse, merged photographs of videogames. Beautiful, especially Tempest.
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WikkaWiki is a flexible, standards-compliant and lightweight wiki engine∞ written in PHP, which uses MySQL to store pages. Forked from WakkaWiki. Designed for speed, extensibility, and security. Released under the GPL license.
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"The Morning After is a magazine-style theme for WordPress created by Arun Kale. The theme was created based on a brief survey on the WordPress forums about what people would want to see in a unique magazine-style theme." Looks great.
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Now that's what I call a UI. Nice idea!
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"Are you tired of browser-based games that are thinly veiled interfaces for databases? Finally, there's a game that just is a database!" This looks awesome.
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"A simple pocket knife can be more appealing and usable than a bristling Victorinox, and a dedicated little games machine like the DS can engage us far more than the sleek power of the PSP. You can feel admiration and even awe for the big power boxes, but for the DS you feel affection – and that, in marketing terms, is worth a whole heap more." I love Stephen Fry.
Tony Hawk’s American Sk8land
16 January 2006
A new game review up over at Pixelsurgeon, this time of Tony Hawk’s American Sk8land on the Nintendo DS. Very impressed with this – an amazingly good online implementation, which, in terms of how it links up with the internet almost puts Mario Kart to shame; lovely cel-shaded visuals; none of the nonsense that the Underground games brought in. As the review says, it’s essentially Pro Skater 5.
Castlevania: DoS review
27 October 2005
Self-promotion again: over at Pixelsurgeon, a review of the latest Castlevania game, Dawn of Sorrow. This time round, the series moves onto the Nintendo DS. It comes with a huge recommendation for me – the review will explain more, but basically, it’s invariably fun to play, has lots of longevity (and some killer bonuses I didn’t have space to write about), and harks back to a slightly bygone era. Fun to write, too. I’m really looking forward to having the chance to write more about games. Up until now, I’ve mainly been biting people’s ears off about them, so this new outlet will no doubt please those unfortunate enough to have listened to me droning on.