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"An exposition of the philosophy of Carles as expressed on his weblog Hipster Runoff." Oh god, it's coming full circle
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"Two music games got it right on the DS this year, both eschewing fancy controllers, instead focusing on the system’s touchscreen to present their engaging concepts: Rhythm Heaven and Maestro: Jump in Music." Ooh, sounds interesting – will have to hunt that down. (Via Simon Parkin)
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"McGilchrist's suggestion is that the encouragement of precise, categorical thinking at the expense of background vision and experience – an encouragement which, from Plato's time on, has flourished to such impressive effect in European thought – has now reached a point where it is seriously distorting both our lives and our thought. Our whole idea of what counts as scientific or professional has shifted towards literal precision – towards elevating quantity over quality and theory over experience – in a way that would have astonished even the 17th-century founders of modern science, though they were already far advanced on that path." Sharp review of what sounds like a fascinating book; I particularly liked this quotation.
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"Building a working computer from Nand gates alone is a thrilling intellectual exercise. It demonstrates the supreme power of recursive ascent, and teaches the students that building computer systems is — more than anything else — a triumph of human reasoning." Ooh, that could be good, when I have an hour spare. (Another Google TechTalk).
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"Every day a song is posted, one second shorter than yesterday's. A tumblr by Tom Ewing." Awesome.
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"How does a game about killing people, the Old Testament, and the Borgias completely bore an Italian Jew?" Simon Ferrari didn't like Assassin's Creed II; he explains why. It's entertaining, for sure (but I'm still going to pick it up).
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Wonderful interview with Richard Mosse, who photographs (quite beautifully) plane wrecks.
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"I wonder what Tulon Ethabathel the Dwarf is doing right now." A US brain surgeon talks about his interest in gaming, the amount of time he gives it – very little – but the nontheless-important role it plays in his life. Lovely article, really; well-crafted and thought-provoking.
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"For Christmas 2009 the Really Interesting Group wanted to create a a gift comprising a series of 4 unique decorations based on each recipient’s use of the Flickr, Dopplr, Last.fm and Twitter. Having used a couple of the software APIs they were thinking about using (flickr and dopplr) and with experience of rapid prototyping we worked together to turn the data into something physical." Can't believe I haven't linked this already. Ours were wonderful; many thanks to RIG and Andy.
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It's Mario. And then it's Tetris. And then it's Mario. And then it's Tetris. Copyright-infringing Flixel awesomeness – much better than the concept initially sounds. You should check this out.
“Humor is when something funny happens”
26 December 2009
My friend Steve Gaynor has put up his review of the year in gaming over at his blog, Fullbright. He’s got some sharp points, but I really liked his commentary on Street Fighter 4 – one of my favourite games of the past year. It deserved quoting in full:
Street Fighter 4: Simply put, I haven’t laughed so much at probably any game as I have playing SF4 in the conference room over lunches at 2K Marin. The fact that humor in games is “hard to do” comes up fairly often– only because people think of “humor” as “jokes,” which lose their power after their first telling. But humor is when something funny happens, and games are the only entertainment medium capable of making funny things happen in completely unplanned and unexpected ways. In the right company, Street Fighter 4, with its cartoonish brutality, over-the-top animations, and always-surprising reversals of fortune is a consistent laugh riot. Thank you, Capcom.
(Emphasis my own).
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"The following is a list of 99 free games (in no particular order) that I’ve enjoyed this calendar year, nearly all of which have been released in 2009 or very late in 2008. So why don’t you take a break from funding corporate overlords and see just what a feast there is out there in the wide world below the big ticket level—all you can lose, really, is just a little bit of time." Turns out I've played a lot of these. Many are good; some are excellent.
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"Jcrop is the quick and easy way to add image cropping functionality to your web application. It combines the ease-of-use of a typical jQuery plugin with a powerful cross-platform DHTML cropping engine that is faithful to familiar desktop graphics applications." Wow – snappy, well-made, and very impressive.
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"Slammer gives you any grid you want, anywhere you want: Typographic Grids, Golden Sections, Fibonacci series or Rule of Thirds. Thats not all, Slammer also has Rulers, Crosshairs, Magnifier, Measurements & Screenshots. Slammer is a must have for any designer."
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Bleak, stylistically lovely, flash game about the drudgery of existence. Not cheery, but some beautiful touches. And I loved the cow.
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"Welcome to the home of the Generic Syntax Highlighter – GeSHi. GeSHi started as an idea to create a generic syntax highlighter for the phpBB forum system, but has been generalised to this project." As seen on the Panic blog: very impressive, in particular, the clickable documentation of Objective-C keywords.
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"…the Duke Nukem Forever team worked for 12 years straight. As one patient fan pointed out, when development on Duke Nukem Forever started, most computers were still using Windows 95, Pixar had made only one movie — Toy Story — and Xbox did not yet exist." Fantastic, dense, Wired article on DNF from Clive Thompson
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"For 16 days I lived with it strapped to me as I climbed through the valleys of central Nepal up to Annapurna Base Camp at 4,200 meters." Wonderful review of the GF1, framed as a travelogue, with real photographs. I'd be quite happy if all camera reviews looked like this.
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"Copenhagen was much worse than just another bad deal, because it illustrated a profound shift in global geopolitics. This is fast becoming China's century, yet its leadership has displayed that multilateral environmental governance is not only not a priority, but is viewed as a hindrance to the new superpower's freedom of action." Mark Lynas on the reality of China's actions at Copenhagen. Worrying.
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"Little stories are the internet’s native and ideal art form." Yes. This is a good one.
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"Grit: The skills for success and how they are grown, a new Young Foundation book published on Tuesday 30 June argues that Britain's schools need to prioritise grit and self-discipline. Drawing on evidence from around the world it shows that these contribute as much to success at work and in life as IQ and academic qualifications."
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"What’s happening here is a very neat trick. While Link can move a single pixel at a time, in any direction, the longer he continously moves in any direction the more he gravitates toward aligning himself with the underlying grid of the screen." Lovely little analysis of the different ways the original Legend of Zelda, and the subsequent Link to the Past, subtly correct the player's input to ensure they never feel cheated by pixel-perfect hit detection.
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"Then, after the Prince topples the evil Vizier and rewinds time, back to before the Sands destroyed everything, it's as though they've never met. When we realize that the Prince has been talking to Farah all along, and not to us, it is a perfect storytelling moment: funny, surprising, achingly romantic. I don't remember if Farah falls in love with the Prince after that, but I did." Mitch writes about Sands of Time in his end-of-decade list. It's still, I think, my favourite game of the decade.