Because I don’t have anything clever to say right now, I’ll just post this picture. I can’t even think of a good caption, so you’ll have to come up with something witty on your own.
Do your best, I’m counting on you.
Last weekend I wrote about my enduring affection for System Shock. Now from Mike’s Pensieve I learn that there is a game coming that re-unites the System Shock 2 team to try to recreate the magic of the original games. It isn’t based on System Shock, but it IS based on the ideas behind it. The game is called BIOSHOCK, and isn’t due until sometime in 2007.
They don’t seem to have a website going yet, but the guys over at SSHOCK2.com have gathered a bit of info, or perhaps rumor, about the game. Instead of being set in space, it looks like the game is set in an underwater lab, so it still has the isolation and solitude of the original. It looks like the game has even more open-ended gameplay.
There isn’t much news available, but here is what I could find:
Ken Levine (General Manager at Irrational Games) interview with IGN
The Looking Glass BIOSHOCK fansite
Here is a first-look overview of the game, courtesy of the From the spamming shills at Gamespot
A BIOSHOCK fansite based in the UK. These guys have a heap of screenshots worth seeing.
The game doesn’t even have an official website yet, and I don’t expect we’ll see anything we can sink our teeth into, news-wise, for many months.
It’s going to be a long year. Sigh.
This is very amusing. Bring a towel.
This December I got my first cell phone as a gift from my wife. I’ve used them before, but actually owning one has given me some time to really think about this technology and how I use it. Now I have a question: Why are these things so damn small?!?
I’m only 5’11, so I’m not an unusually large man. My hands are normal sized, and yet cell phones always feel so tiny in my hands. Using the pad to enter numbers is difficult without a tool, because the buttons are smller than my fingertips. When I hold it up to my face it feels like I’m talking into a toy. Its too short, so that when unfolded it audio input is aimed at my cheek. It’s too narrow, and doesn’t really fit into the palm of my hand the way a mouse or electric shaver would. I can’t imagine how big guys even make use of these things. The audio output is so small that it does a poor job of covering my ear, thus letting in a lot of external noise. This isn’t just my phone, this is every cell phone I’ve held in the past couple of years. What’s going on here?
I understand why there was such a push to make phones smaller in the past. The first cell phones were clunky and heavy. Nobody wanted to talk into a brick. But the trend of smaller phones has progressed to the point where it no longer makes a lot of sense. I assume this push is in response to consumer demand, but I can’t imagine why people want phones this small.
What I’d like to see in a phone:
Make the phone about 25% larger. Use some of that extra space for more battery. Use the rest of some sort of internal cushioning or shock absorbtion. Drop support for watching movies, downloading songs, playing music videos, video games, and all of that other non-phone junk. I’m sure that won’t make the phone lighter, but it will get rid of a lot of needless clutter in the interface. You won’t need to waste so much surface area with web interface style buttons, which will free up space on the keypad so that the buttons are useful to adults. All of this would make a phone that is sturdier, more practical, more stable, and (most importantly) easier to use. I’d rather have a great phone than a mediocre phone that is also a mediocre video player / gameboy.
But that’s just me.
So, I submitted my terrain series to digg. Let’s see if anyone diggs it?
See the step-by-step of building a terrain rendering engine. This series starts off in a world of blue wireframe and develops into a nice texture-mapped world of mountains and valleys. You can read the technical details behind development, or just gaze at the pretty pictures.
UPDATE: Later. Nope. Only six people found it interesting. Tough crowd. Tough crowd.
Just testing the “blog this” feature on Flickr.
While we’re here: Why “Flickr”? What’s wrong with “Flicker”? Need to buy a vowel? Carpel tunnel kicked in when naming the site? Any suggestions on how we should pronounce this without adding the non-existant E?
Maybe deliberatly misspelled stuff is trendy. Maybe I should start calling myself Shams.
I’d be so hip.
A guild in World of Warcraft has decided to hold an entire server hostage. The guild has created the item that allows them to open up a great deal of content in the game, but they are refusing to use it until somebody pays them 5000 gold to do the deed.
I wouldn’t call these guys “terrorists”. Ever. (They are being called that by fellow players) People need to stop using the word “terrorist” to mean “a**hole”. Terrorists slaughter innocent civilians. A**holes mess up your computer game for their own amusement. There is a difference, and if you can’t spot it then you shouldn’t be writing headlines. Grow up already.
Anyway. These guys are being jerks, on purpose, for no other reason than they can and they want people to “remember” them.
This is just the sort of thing I was talking about a few days ago when I made the case that multiplayer gaming was not the magical future that some claim it will be.
UPDATE: The thread on Digg is now flagging this as a “hoax”. As in: The guys doing this were “just kidding”. The hilarity of the “joke” escapes me. Either way, they are being idiots. The people calling them terrorists were being melodramatic, and above all I’m glad I don’t depend on these people to take part in my on-line entertainment. Kids get bored with the game and decide to amuse themselves by spreading rumors, causing problems, perpetrating hoaxes, and being a bunch of drama queens. They make for poor playmates, and anyone who thinks the single-player experience is “an abberation” should spend a few hours locked in a room with these defective brats.
And while we’re all here: Happy President’s Day.
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
As someone who loves Tolkein lore and despises silly MMO quests, this game left me deeply conflicted.
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
What lessons can we learn from the abrupt demise of this once-impressive games studio?
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
What did web browsers look like 20 years ago, and what kind of crazy features did they have?
People were so worried about the boring gameplay of The Old Republic they overlooked just how boring and amateur the art is.
T w e n t y S i d e d
