Portal Giveth, and Portal Taketh Away (Outlook Sounds)

If any of you haven't yet played the amazing, wonderful game called Portal, you owe it to yourself to start up or install Steam and get cracking. It's incredible.

I'm listening to the soundtrack, and it appears that there was some sort of recording error in the song "Party Escort." Turn up the volume and go to 2:25. You'll hear it, plain as day: the Microsoft Outlook new mail notification sound? WTF?

Also, I found a pretty trivial bug in MacOS, maybe it will be fixed in Leopard? Damn, guess I'll have to get a copy of it to find out! :)

Regurgitated Press Releases

1UP is a fickle beast. Sometimes, they've got some very good articles. (Their "Northern Lights" series on Q? Entertainment was fantastic.) And when they write "news" based on rampant speculation, a problem the tech industry can't seem to get over, they've got the balls to fess up and apologize for it.

But this nonsense has got to stop. This article is basically a two-paragraph press release, and not a very good one at that. It is an advertisement dressed up like an article (surrounded by ads) trying to sell me 1) Haze, and 2) Korn. It ends with a link to their preview of Haze, so that you can see more ads all around the actual article.

Slow news month? Naah, I just haven't had the time to write much. I'll have Leopard impressions up, I guess.

DiGRA 2007: Tuesday Game Design

DiGRA 2007 is off to a great start right now, with paper and poster presentations, as well as symposia and panels. I've been attending the game design track for the most part, and it's fun to hear all the different theories. There are some good, relevant topics that my old Core III students would really enjoy, like generally defining the avatar, or the Magic Circle.

The most interesting topic so far was the "Playing Music" paper, which was a survey of the many music-centric games in our industry. He makes a distinction between games that quantize player action (like Rez) and games that make the player perform in rhythm (like Amplitude). What's most interesting about that is how my current project at ETC straddles that distinction quite easily.

Pictures of Japan forthcoming...

Off to Japan

Alright, I'm off to Japan!

I'll be blogging about noteworthy talks and exhibits at Tokyo Game Show and DiGRA 2007. Weird stuff I see in Japan will most certainly merit blogging, too.

Stay tuned, this will be a busy week at Knee of the Curve!

The New Vienna

There's a new version of Vienna, the open source RSS reader for Mac OS X. While I haven't been keeping tabs on the progress of previous updates, this new one rolls out a brand-new interface that rocks severe.



If you're using Vienna, you owe it to yourself to upgrade.

If you don't use Vienna....you owe it to yourself to upgrade.

Humor in HCI

I think it's hilariously appropriate for the iPhone Dev Team's anySIM to operate via Apple's "slide to unlock" mechanic.

Rez HD is Coming

Oh, now isn't this just super-exciting. Microsoft just announced that Q? is porting Rez to the Xbox Live Arcade, in high-def and with 5.1-channel sound.

What? Oh, sure, I could say more, but what could make you more excited than Rez HD? That's right, nothing.

Bioshock's Great. Not THAT Great.

The past few weeks, for many gamers, have been devoted to playing Bioshock, a graphically beautiful first-person shooter with some truly exciting gameplay. The game also came with a lot of hype surrounding its take on morality and Objectivism, Ayn Rand's philosophy which is outlined in her literary works. Specifically, 2K Games billed Bioshock as a treatment of Atlas Shrugged, a look into the effects on society, should an entire class of productive workers abstain from contributing.

Sadly, the game didn't live up to these lofty expectations (and the inherent hype of it being the spiritual successor to System Shock 2). Throughout this game, moral choices seem to be in abundance, but the game's design consistently fails to enable the player to make important gameplay decisions, or removes the pros and cons of the few that the player actually can affect.

If you don't mind spoilers, this is a nice, to-the-point critique of Bioshock's defusal of any morality in the "Little Sisters" mechanic. While the Little Sisters serve as the most fundamental aspect to Bioshock's morality, just look at Ars Technica's breakdown. It's virtually a zero-sum game.

It's a shame that such a fun, beautiful game tripped and fell on what should have been another bullet-point, but the hype machine seems to have taken hold. If you're looking for moral choices in games, I propose you look no further than Deus Ex. You can get it for pretty cheap on Steam now.

Scrabulous on Facebook

Scrabble is an awesome game. It's strongly emergent, multi- or single-player, accessible to many skill levels and most of all, loads of fun. If you're on Facebook then you owe it to yourself to check out the Scrabulous application, which will let you 'scrab with up to four of your Facebook peers. Give it a go!

GMail Collaborative Video

GMail's recent call for videos (CfV?) to make a collaborative "behind the scenes" movie has finally borne fruit. Here's the final version. It ended up looking pretty good:


My favorite part is when the arrow hits the next guy in the ear.

WTF Mac Store

WTF Mac Store
Originally uploaded by Jeff Carlson

Wish I could say I found this like I found the MacOS graffiti, but it's still some cool found Mac stuff. It's supposed to say "The Mac Store," but the word "the" is laid out...........ah, awkwardly.

Found Mac Art: MacOS Graffiti

Here's a cool piece of found art: A MacOS menu bar pasted up on a wall near my uni.

Couldn't even get a picture of it in time before someone ripped and tagged it. Apparently I'm not the only one upset that Adelaide isn't getting the new Bluetooth keyboards for four weeks. :)

Original ADVENT Source Code Found!

Too cool not to blog about....

This guy has analyzed the original source code to Adventure. Notable in that sentence is that he actually has found the source code to Adventure, in a backup of Don Woods' account. This is a phenomenally important piece of code, and I think it's incredible that it's managed to survive into an age where it can be preserved.

Looking at it a bit, it's funny to think just how unlike the game itself this code is. Today, you can at least read many parts of code and see the game itself in the source. Whereas some game code to pick up an item may look like:

int Player::itemCollision(Item item)
{
if(Player.myInventory.isFull())
{
Alert("You can't carry any more items!");
return -1;
}
Player.myInventory.append(item);
}

The Adventure 0 code (in Fortran-IV!) to "CARRY" something is:

C CARRY

9000 IF(JOBJ.EQ.18)GOTO 2009
IF(IPLACE(JOBJ).NE.J) GOTO 5200
9001 IF(IFIXED(JOBJ).EQ.0)GOTO 9002
CALL SPEAK(25)
GOTO 2011
9002 IF(JOBJ.NE.BIRD)GOTO 9004
IF(IPLACE(ROD).NE.-1)GOTO 9003
CALL SPEAK(26)
GOTO 2011
9003 IF((IPLACE(4).EQ.-1).OR.(IPLACE(4).EQ.J)) GOTO 9004
CALL SPEAK(27)
GOTO 2011
9004 IPLACE(JOBJ)=-1
9005 IF(IOBJ(J).NE.JOBJ) GOTO 9006
IOBJ(J)=ICHAIN(JOBJ)
GOTO 2009
9006 ITEMP=IOBJ(J)
9007 IF(ICHAIN(ITEMP).EQ.(JOBJ)) GOTO 9008
ITEMP=ICHAIN(ITEMP)
GOTO 9007
9008 ICHAIN(ITEMP)=ICHAIN(JOBJ)
GOTO 2009

My, my, how far code has come. Anyway, if you're interested, I recommend at least thumbing through the source. It's a nigh-mystical artifact to some of us. :)

Why Unreal Engine Is Closed Source

Silicon Knights is suing Epic because improvements that Epic made to Unreal Engine 3 didn't trickle down to SK, thus making Gears of War superior by default to Too Human. This is a great example of why you should be hesitant to trust closed-source technology in your multi-million-dollar game production.

What I think happened is that Epic and SK defined "Unreal Engine 3" in two different ways. Epic made this thing called "UE3," and aside from building their own games on it, they also licensed it out so others could, too. While Epic made some enhancements to the engine, they considered such work part of Gears of War, and didn't distribute it to UE3 licensees (their competitors).

What if both Epic and SK had been using an open-source engine? Gears of War's release would have required the release of the entire source tree for the game, and the same would have applied to all other users of said technology.

Is this a bad thing? Well, it depends. Do you want your games to advertise their superior engine features, or superior game design? In an open-source world, the playing field is leveled, and your skill in crafting a good game is now more important than your skill in supporting the latest shaders, environmental audio, et cetera.

Gee-whiz technical features versus compelling game experiences. Your choice.

Twitterfication

Oh sheesh, I signed up for Twitter. I've got it installed on this blog and Facebook, and I'm running Twitterific on my Mac. Follow me if you're on Twitter, and I'll follow back!

Rabbit-Proof Fencing Available!

I've whipped up a subsite for a Panda3D-based game I made last semester, called Rabbit-Proof Fencing. You can see screenshots of the game, and Windows (XP and Vista) users can download the game right now and install it. I'm working on the Mac version as you read this.

Yes, all you do is hit rabbits with the spacebar. :) If the game seems a bit simplistic, that's because it is. RPF was made more for the final ETC Show than to be a particularly intricate game.

Panda3D is a very cool framework. Besides being (kinda) triple-platform, it also is why we can make these games so fast. Very cool tool, I recommend you check it out.

Nick Montfort's "Narrative Variation"

Just a quick link right now, if you're interested in Interactive Fiction at all you should check out Nick Montfort's dissertation on generating variant narratives:

http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2007/06/20/playing-defender/

A very cool spec for a system called nn that splits up a story between what is being told, and how it is told, something that until now has been controlled by only one entity. Montfort's approach consists of many smaller modules, and is making me pine for a version of nn to try out on my own.

BT on the iPhone

I was looking at the iPhone demos on Apple.com and noticed BT's album This Binary Universe in the music library. Click for a larger view:



I'm not really that much of an iPhone fanatic, but the end-of-semester crunch is reducing any meaningful posts, and BT is always worth a mention. :)

Apple Prank Calls

Just a bit of humor. The first real iPhone adverts have hit the airwaves, one referencing a supposed Californian seafood restaurant named "Pacific Catch."

Engadget looked them up for reals:

"Pacific Catch, may I help you?" "Hi, I just wanted to know if you were getting a lot of calls tonight?" The hostess answered, "Yes." "Do you know why?" "Yes."

I love it.

StarCraft 2 and the ETC-AU Blog

A lot of people have been complaining about the new StarCraft, saying it's not different enough. I couldn't be happier that it's not changing, because that's what made the original StarCraft so good. It's a sequel done right: Take what works (superb class balance, for one) and leave it the hell alone. Now add things that don't pollute the formula. Height, 3D environments, etc etc. I guarantee you Koreans will be owning us in StarCraft 2 for many many years to come.

Life is still hectic, and I don't have much time to post these days, but that hasn't stopped me from working on yet another blog! This time, I've taken charge of the ETC-Australia blog, so yours truly will be keeping you in touch with the goings-on in Adelaide! You can also check out our podcast, again organized by me.