Excellent comic by Virtual Shackles.
In other Oil Disaster related news, this map will overlay the size of the disaster on your hometown, based on your IP address.
It’s really depressing to think how utterly screwed that area is. Hopefully today’s efforts to stop the leak doesn’t make it worse.
This is amazing; it makes me want to get my Lego from my parents’ house and build something that will never come close to how awesome this is.
Actually, nevermind… *sigh*
Via Eric
So you may have noticed that I have a store now. At the moment, I’m selling a girl’s and guy’s t-shirt with a high resolution version of the above lolz. I come up with ideas for gaming shirts from time to time, but I’ve never gone to the trouble of creating any of them.
This weekend I picked up two old GameCube favourites of mine: Metroid Prime and Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. I had not played these games since I beat them years ago, and dipping my toes into those worlds brought on a deluge of memories.
My last game save on Wind Waker was in 2006, but I played the bulk of it the Spring & Summer of it’s release in 2003. Between the time that I was fully immersed in that archipelagic world, and when I went to the disc channel on my Wii to play it this weekend, I’ve:
Roger Ebert brandished his old media sword as he crept into the lair of the internet, defiantly shouting that games could never be art. He stood against a torrent of nearly 2000 comments on his personal blog, and an innumerable quantity of blog posts like this one referencing his mantra. He remains stalwart; a protector of all true art until the day he dies no matter how many flames he must endure or 20-somethings telling him he just has to play Shadow of the Colossus.
The question we, as gamers, must ask ourselves is thus: who cares?
Who cares what labels are placed on a medium? Who decides what is art? Certainly not a critic grounded in only one medium and certainly not a games-obsessed youngster either.
What does the label of art imply? Prestige? Government funding? Respect? Saying something is “Art” does nothing to the content. It’s simply a superfluous packaging on top of a product that already affects our emotions one way or another.
I had a lengthy Twitter discussion with my friend Andrew Bernacki a few days ago regarding several things including Apple’s domestic squabble with Flash and the App Store & it’s various quirks.
And by quirks, I mean big flaws.
Don’t get me wrong; the App Store has been the absolute best thing to happen to digital distribution in a long time. It was the first mobile platform to get application distribution right. It certainly helped that the single platform meant your application could be in the hands of any present day and future iPhone/iPod touch user, rather than creating a different version of your application for every crappy monochromatic Nokia phone available now and in the future.
This is a 2007 phone. Compare this to the 2007 iPhone.
CP_Blastoff is a Team Fortress 2 map made by Jason Lamb and I for our senior thesis project in the Multimedia program at McMaster University. We’ve already handed it in, but we’ve still a presentation to do on it this coming week. We plan to add more lights and fix some textures up before we make the final .bsp release to the public, but you can check out what it looks like right now in the photos posted above.
We’ve spent roughly 100 hours on it between us learning the SDK and Hammer (properly!) and doing multiple “orange” revisions before settling on a design that both we and the beta testers agreed was fun and fair for all classes.
This post contains possible spoilers for Heavy Rain and Prince of Persia.
Recently, I’ve begun to think about how the actions of the player impacts the game world, the plot, and the overall experience in a game. This came about through finishing Heavy Rain a few days ago with my fiancee and then moving on immediately to Prince of Persia on PS3.
I’ve been trying to Tweet about this game for the past 12 hours to no avail. There’s some things that can’t be said in 140 characters and a description of Heavy Rain is one of them.
So far, Ashley and I are about 5 or 6 hours in and we nearly didn’t put the game down for the night despite having work the next day. If you let it, this game will grip you and whip you around. I’ve never lost sleep over any media consumed the night before, but both Ashley and I woke up feeling terrible because of game-induced nightmares. This game doesn’t play on the same monster-in-the-closet fear that many thriller games subscribe to, but rather deals with emotional fears of losing loved ones.
Your decisions in the game carry through; once a character you control dies, that’s the end of it. The tension during life-or-death quick time events is such that once you’re in the clear you remember you’re supposed to be breathing.
…And now for something completely different! Cadet 227 is an indie game designed with the blind and visually impaired in mind. It has no visuals, only audio. Pop on some headphones and listen to the trailer (it works better if you close your eyes when listening). It’s not obvious how the game will play out in terms of mechanics, but it definitely shows some promise with the immersive audio work.
If you’re interested, you can show support for this project on Kickstarter and keep up with the one-man dev team at Shen Games. Cadet 227 is due to be released this Summer.
As a side note, this is exactly the kind of stuff I was thinking of doing as my main area of study for grad school.
