This Is NOT A Top Five Games List
Consider this a “I have some gift cards left over and want to get some games” post.
Since GTA4 stormed the charts earlier in the year, I left that of the list, though it’s worth mentioning off the top. This is mainly for the games I’ve been playing lately, and think everyone should try, regardless of what system they’re playing on.
It should be noted that I don’t mention any PS3 exclusives, because it’s the only console I haven’t played anything on this past year. I don’t HATE-hate the PS3, though I was ticked off at some of their design choices. I already had an Xbox 360, and the PS3s exclusive content isn’t compelling enough to make me plunk down the cash. If you have a PS3, any of the games I mention here that are available for it are worthy.
So, in no particular order:
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Cut&Paste Asks Toronto Designers To Do the Fairly Ridiculous
That’s how contest founder John Fiorelli himself describes the Digital Design Tournament challenge to take up pen and tablet and create something from scratch in 15 or 20 minutes on stage, in front of a cheering crowd. Begun in New York in 2005, Cut&Paste has dragged its lasso from Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston, over to London, Berlin, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney, and now, finally, Toronto — which the press release memorably characterises as ‘kissing Lake Ontario’… um, ptooey?
The magic wand-off will take place on March 14, 2009 (but the first mandatory test round is coming up fast on the weekend of January 10-11), at a location to be announced. There will be separate competitions in 2D design, 3D design, or if you’re interested in the long kinetic haul, 8 hours of motion design: each category with its separate rules, and separate winners who will earn a chance to vie against the best of the other burgs in a global championship (which is also new this year), presumably for the title of King of All Media.
The promotional video depicts graphic design heroes of rockstar-like proportions, bringing new meaning to the phrase, ‘performance art’ (via blogTO)…
Cut&Paste Digital Design Tournament 2007 from Cut&Paste on Vimeo.
Blog@Newsarama to Highlight Webcomics
There is an entirely new blogging team at Blog@Newsarama, the old team having quit en masse last month due, as far as I can ascertain, to a surprise redesign and a glitchy comments system. The new bloggers seem, so far, eager to connect with the community, and particularly bullish about webcomics, which would be encouraging if it weren’t for the way they parrot all of the current conventional wisdom about ‘new’ media. That the web is only good for bite-sized information, for example. (Perhaps we should just pat HTML on the head and give it a sippy cup full of Coca Cola?) Or that the web wants all of your output to be 4:3. (In that case, why are there scrollbars on all of Blog@Newsarama’s pages? Why must only those who draw pictures and word balloons follow this prescription? Doesn’t the vast majority of the web, in fact, scroll?) You get the picture. More of my counter-reasoning from the comments section of Sarah Jaffe’s opening webcomics salvo…
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An rgbFilter Review: Playstation 3’s Wireless Keypad
It’s no secret that communicating via text chat during online play is an integral part of gaming, and that the hunt & peck method of text inputting is a massive pain in the ass. You COULD use a USB keyboard, but playing online with a full-sized QWERTY on your lap the whole time is impractical, at best. Microsoft recognized the need for a text input device back in May ‘07 and gave us the 360 Chatpad, effectively solving all our online chatting needs. Never one to admit its been outdone, Sony has now followed suit with the Playstation 3 Wireless Keypad, and, while it does offer up a few new options that the Chatpad doesn’t, Sony’s answer to the TID dilemma is an offering so clumsy and awkward that the idea of keeping a cheap wireless keyboard handy isn’t such a bad one after all.
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Australian Net Censors To Target P2P
Imagine that you went back in time to the invention of the printing press, which revolutionised human communicative efficacy, only to discover the Kings and Queens of the realm trying to install unwieldy automated mechanical filters on every typesetter. That’s how truly bizarre it seems to me to watch a human government attempting to stifle P2P applications like BitTorrent: technologies which have hit upon, by amazing groundswell, the most robust communication protocols yet known.
[Submitted by The Laroquod Experiment.]
“Star Wars: A Musical Journey” a reality. I have a bad feeling about this.
It’s actually not as bad as it might sound.
In Star Wars: A Musical Journey, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra will play a live score as excerpts from the six films are shown on a cinema screen.
The show has been put together by director George Lucas’ company Lucasfilm and composer John Williams.
It will premiere at the O2 arena in London in April before a European tour.
It will not be a traditional musical with actors playing characters from the films, but will feature live narrators.(BBC)
So at least we’re not going to to see a “Sound of Music”-like rendition, or have Boba Fett fall into the Sarlaac pit behind a silhouette sheet a-la “Wicked”. Instead, what you will experience is a rare opportunity to hear the music of John Williams performed live by one of the greatest orchestras on the planet. If you can get past the fact that Lucas is obviously trying to cash in as much as is humanly possible on the franchise, you might even enjoy yourself.
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Human evolutionary ‘tree’ reveals why video games suck
Scientific American has posted a Hominin evolutionary tree, which is interesting, if for no other reason, then for the way they posted it — via the publishers of effortlessly zoomable online documents, issuu.com. The science is fascinating, but I’m more intrigued by this new method of online presentation than by the magazine artist’s visual rendering of evolution. Ever notice the way the living Hominins (i.e. you and me) will consistently squash any inconveniently branching structure into a linear one of their choosing, as if that is a good way to sum it up? That is not a good way to sum it up. But it’s a pretty good way of summing it down!
Mind you, we can’t really be blamed as individuals, since the best way we have available to represent branching data is through interactivity, and we just don’t seem comfortable yet as a species reading interactively. ‘But but but,’ you’re probably thinking. Yes, branching commonly occurs between articles on the web, but not within them. We have timidly restricted our range of choice to what to experience rather than how, in a sort of faux-futuristic smorgasbord of prehistoric cuisine. World-flattening conventionalism is the reason this planet’s imagination seems thus far doomed to strain the multivariate bolus of inter-causal events that is the Universe and Everything, into the shallow, unitary stream we actually live by.
Ever wonder why, no matter how many times you play your favourite simulated game world, it always tends to collapse into the same general storyline as the previous run? It’s that old branch-blindness at play. It’s as if we think that multiple outcomes cannot hold meaning, and so in order to communicate we must play the reductionists. Where I come from, this is not the case (or cases, as it were) — just the opposite. Compare the upper and lower halves of this evolutionary spread, for example. They simply aren’t saying the same thing. Not even close.
[Submitted by The Laroquod Experiment.]
Canadian Builds Robogirl; Feminists Panic
From my home Toronto suburb of Brampton, ubergeek Trung Le, in “[his] basement using [his] credit card and [his] entire saving account as funding”, has made international news by building a robotic companion who answers simple queries, responds to pain, and who looks like a classic anime ingenue but talks like Data. (”I do not like it when you touch my breasts!”)
It’s all quite simultaneously interesting and funny and disconcerting and slightly sad. In other words, awesome. But according to quite a large portion of the commenters on Feministing.com, it’s just sexist and creepy and disgusting and should never have happened — because she’s a 24/7 slave. No, really. Furthermore, everything Trung implemented to show off his technological achievement (useful functions, response to stimulus, voice synthesis), is repeatedly interpreted as nothing but a political statement, and Trung himself is compared to a street molester and labelled a “sick fuck”. He gets some impassioned defences, but mostly from men: the gender divide is pretty stark.
So, here’s a demo of the alleged robjectification of Aiko, Your Cybernetic Female Symbol of Oppression Who’s Fun to Be With™, and a link to Trung’s website…
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MP4 640x360
iTunes Video