Nachimir

Recently, Alien Swarm and Thievery UT (<-- I wasn't on the original dev team for TUT, but they offered me a place after seeing a map I made for it. They beat splinter cell to multiplayer stealth by a couple of years, but, y'know, mods don't function on marketing bullet points ). There was much dreck and a few semi-decent deathmatch levels before that. I learned UnrealEd because I wanted to make 3D versions of the houses I used to draw on graph paper as a teenager. "Just one DM, to learn the toolset", I thought, and promptly got hooked on gameplay and art. Seven years and many maps later I still haven't built any houses Still working with Black Cat on a new project (Sequel to Thievery), but development is slow and other, paid jobs/obsessive projects are numerous.

I'm not really new, but regular visits here are a recent thing. I used to post at NaliCity because I'm an Unreal Engine mod maker, and when it finally descended into an incontinent spam fest of inbred clichés I was all prepared to flee. I like it here because it's a literate place.

'tis indeed, and I've been wanting to see more of it since TED released of the draft table sized demo he gave.I like that the hardware is so simple too; I hope there's no conflict with the patents Apple are trying to get for the iPhone screen.

That podcast is a good one that covers a lot of different topics (though not, IIRC, procedural music).

Someone has started making a DS card with an accellerometer in it. Of course, this takes up slot 1, meaning it will never work with official games, only homebrew on flashcarts. Passmes also take up slot one, so it requires anyone who uses it to reflash their DS firmware. There are already some homebrew toys/games available for it, shown at the bottom of that page, including the obligatory . Plenty of ideas floating around for it too. From the GBADev thread on it: Hehe! I was going to wait until a year had passed before voiding my warranty, but

If you'd like some further ownage, The Cathedral and The Bazaar (Print edition at Amazon) is extremely worth reading. It's about OSS and hacker culture, but applicable to any kind of culture getting on a network and open sourcing its methods. Back to gadgets: There are materials and finishes they could use to make them last a lot longer without scuffing or scratching. If gadget makers did that though, they'd have less leverage when trying to get people to buy the next generation of techgasm widgets.

Not a blog, but this is a journal and has lots of pictures and information about what's in them. My friend Charles went to teach English in Japan, and after that decided he was going to tour all of Japan on a bicycle. He's almost at the end of it, and has been putting photos and commentary up on his flickr stream for the past year: http://www.flickr.com/photos/1manjapan/

I'm happy to keep stuff in other pockets, and as a result generally avoid scratched devices for a lot longer. But yeah, it's the first few that are the most annoying. One reason I like to keep things in good condition is that I sell them when I upgrade, rather than having, say, a drawer full of old phones. A piece I read on the iPhone said "glass", not plastic, so it might be as hard to scratch as a watch... though very easy to smash I forsee a lot of spares or repairs one turning up on eBay. It's certainly exciting, but it remains to be seen if it will actually make sense/utility of mobile web.

The PS3 reminds me of a sandwich toaster. The 360 is much less hideous than its predecessor, whereas Sony seem to have gone the other way.

Remember those crappy animated .gif "awards" you'd see on websites circa 1998? I think there's a convergence of meaning going on There was a fantastic impromptu, undocumented rant against the BAFTAs at GameCity, mainly stating that games don't need a pat on the head from tv/film and it's just embarassing to have game BAFTA awards immediately followed with "Best Website". (Best if I don't give attribution)

Oh alright. I am overjoyed to see that the Amazing Screw on Head pilot has been put back up on YouTube. However, I am sad to see Emperor Zombie depart from here.

I found my way here because I've worked with Iain Simons occasionally, and saw the main site when he wrote a few pieces for it. I stuck around because it's a gaming forum without firearm and breast obsessions, though easily 90% of the sporadic periods I've spent here have consisted of lurking.

That's awesome. I've seen either this parrot or maybe one of a few African Greys every few years that have amazing verbal abilities. I also didn't realise they could live for so long, African Greys up to 50 years, Amazons up to 80.

The film set formula is some of the best industry news I've heard in ages. It just makes so much sense for games to follow similar models of production to other forms of media.

It appears so; there's another blank box on the credits screen next to the one for the helicopter clone. Adding these to the ini (one only) [secrets] Extra=Balloon [secrets] Extra=Hang Glider will make exploring a lot easier. Excellent game, like SMB meets Jet Set Willy.

To a certain extent all of the above, but in no way did I mean to say that games having their own conventions is a bad thing; I think it's vital. Gameplay is more important than anything else. However, any conventions around that are just one of many possible takes on the medium. There's a difference between mimicry and influence. Games need to take on things from other bits of culture and reform them according to the nature of games, not reform games in the nature of other media. Sorry if I didn't state that clearly enough. (Again, Katamari is a very good example: Very ludic, influenced way from leftfield. Implementation of "collecting" that is unlike any prior one). Insularity lends itself to immaturity, and in that sense I think there is a parallel between games and comics. Actually, in comics it's pretty much just the big two publishers that make money off stereotypical comics, there's a whole lot else out there in terms of content. Take a comic shop in my hometown: 80% of their shelf space is taken by non-superhero type things people wouldn't generally expect from comics, and it sells. In spades, to the point where they have dubbed the customers for that "the real mainstream". Comics have had a whole lot of culture infused into them over the past few decades, but public awareness is taking longer to catch up. Nintendo marketing in the 00's seems to be pitching the perfect follow up to Sony marketing in the 90's, which encourages me. The move towards crew based production and the willingness of publishers to support pre-production are also good. But still, many games are shallow and insulated in every respect, churning out repetitive implementations of familiar concepts - it's not as bad as it was a few years ago though. Clearly, there's a hell of a lot of territory left to cover technically for games, but I think the same is true culturally too. Gears of War set to piano music just isn't cutting it. Manny is right though, it's a long, slow and painful process, and the things that actually push the possibility space outward come from the fringe rather than the mainstream. Film now is like film in the 1940's, but it has a lot more artistic experience behind it, many more cultural influences, and a much bigger and more powerful toolset than it did back then. For the most part, that development was artistically driven rather than market driven. (Edit: cut the length down a bit )

Vib-Ribbon would be fairly easy... The cover of Katamari Damacy would be difficult, but awesome. Edit: Or you could go absolutely nuts with a paintbrush and do Spheres of Chaos: Imagine breakfast with that.

I agree with you for the most part. Film literally used to be modelled on pointing a camera at a stage. This made them uderstandable to a lot of people, but also tragically limited them. Apparently when jump cuts were first used, some people got up and walked out of cinemas in disgust because they didn't understand. Games are clearly a medium in their own right (Though the label "game" is troubling when you get onto virtual worlds, etc.), but it's important that they borrow from other media. The conventions of games so far built are pretty shallow and insulated from the rest of culture, so people's concept of a game is often equally shallow. Comics wandered around in the same wilderness for decades due to the superhero and horror cliches that early popular work relied on. Games take every other form of media and remix it in a unique way, and in respect of that it doesn't make sense to not borrow from other forms. The Katamari games are a great example: I can explain them or show them to a non-gamer and they look incredulous because it doesn't fit anywhere near their concept of "Video game". When I add that Keita Takahashi was a sculptor before he was a game designer it makes a lot more sense to them. That kind of cross fertilisation is maturation for the medium, but if it's not underpinned by gameplay or development of other unique aspects, then you're right: It's deeply harmful. Games have already borrowed far too much from film.

Pah indeed right now, but it's kind of to be expected that early games in the console cycle won't be that amazing or use the hardware efficiently. In that sense pretty much everyone is yet to see any benefit from going next gen. I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with them a year or more on, but right now haven't bought anything from the newest gen for exactly your kind of reasons. I like the idea of live arcades etc., but word I got on XLA is that there's a big queue of well known publishers with games ready or in development, a restricted schedule of release slots, and a lot of indies going without. UCC seems to be something of a marketing bullet point than a business philosophy, and I guess because of that the online marketplaces might end up as "video games industry lite" while completely missing stuff like Armadillo Run.

The editing makes it appear that there was much hamster poking. The music took me straight back to being tiny, sulking with my older brother every time he hogged the joystick, and not being able to get Monty safely through that rainbow thing. Thanks

That review in particular is spectacular. wrt the term "DRM-fucked", all DRM = fucked. Cracked in hours if not days, and otherwise just gets in the way of honest users. Such as any sucker who bought Plays4Sure music and would like to use it on a Zune. Now, I wonder how long before it gets RockBoxed or suchlike and the wifi is wide open.

I'm especially impressed that it automatically puts DRM on everything you shove on it. Including non-copyrighted work

Same as Miffy on Trace memory. I admired the clever stuff they did with the DS, but any care I had for D and Ashley was offset by the flawed and hollow seeming mechanics. Plus, it really annoyed me that "speed up dialogue" and "repeat entire dialogue" are mapped to the same button.

It seems Citizen Siege is going to be a very political project. I was at the keynote too, and Lanning spent a good deal of it talking about his personal politics and making games into a socially relevant, mature form of media. I snagged a crappy shot of the logo too.

Fair enough. I will laugh very hard indeed if EBA outsells Ouendan in Japan. I see that image as really cheesy and disconnected from human motives. The fire of Ouendan struck on the nature of motivation, but that woman above, like all the characters in EBA, just doesn't express the same determination. (Edit: I also agree with you on the Cleopatra level of Ouendan, and pointed it out as the most EBA like of the bunch, and likewise the weather woman as most Ouendan like of EBA). I see a big difference between the artisans, small business proprietors etc. of Ouendan and the treasure hunter types in EBA. The contrast isn't absolute, but I still think it's a profound reversal between the games. Ouendan just didn't have the showbiz aesthetic they've put into EBA.