Are you a “game photographer”?
That is: do you screenshot the living heck out of every game you play? Rock, Paper, Shotgun would like to know.
The current state of smartphone and tablet gaming.
Basically: Apple’s iOS continues to dominate as the preferred platform for developers. Android continues to show lots of promise that is far slower to be realized than its proponents say will be the case. And at least one big-name mobile gaming developer has set its sights on Windows Phone 7, especially in the wake of the Mango update thereto.
Speaking of mobile gaming…let’s look at the state of iPhone games.
Just ten (10) publishers account for over half of the top 300 paid iPhone games. Naturally, Gameloft and their prodigious output probably account for quite a lot of these.
Deus Ex 3 (also called Human Revolution) is evidently finished, and has gone gold.
The release date is August 23rd.
Another awesome Skyrim trailer!
This time featuring a frak-off big spider, more dragons, and dual-wielding.
How to survive in the games industry for 35 years.
The Guardian interviews Atari, Activision, and Accolade veteran Alan Miller. It’s an insightful, enlightening interview that anyone contemplating a career in game development should read.
Has anyone checked out Dwarf Fortress yet?
It’s a cross-platform, roguelike and city-building game with ASCII graphics that the New York Times hails as brilliant in a massive six-page article.
What’s more, it’s been around for a while:
Dwarf Fortress is too willfully noncommercial to have any discernible influence on gaming at large, but it is widely admired by game designers. Programmers behind The Sims 3 reportedly played Dwarf Fortress when they were making their game, and several homages to Dwarf Fortress appear in the blockbuster fantasy game World of Warcraft. Richard Garfield, who created the hit card game Magic: The Gathering, once attended a Dwarf Fortress fan meet in Seattle to introduce himself to Tarn. “I told him there’s nothing out there quite like it,” Garfield recalled. He suggested ways of broadening the game’s appeal, but “that stuff didn’t matter to Tarn. The charm of it is that he’s making exactly the game he wants to make.”
Seriously…why have I not heard of this game before?
…Dungeons of Dredmor sounds pretty neat, as well. And unforgivingly difficult and brutal, as well.
Someone made a basically to-scale copy of Middle Earth in (of course) Minecraft.
It’s about as epic as it sounds.
Meet Prague’s new RPG studio: Warhorse!
I’m going to call this an “ensemble studio”, because it is staffed by a pretty powerful cast of well-known European game-makers:
Four eminent 2K Czech and Bohemia Interactive employees have split to form Warhorse, a new development studio in Prague, and are now working on a previously unannounced RPG. Mafia and Mafia II creator Dan Vávra is heading the team at Warhorse, co-founded with Martin Klíma, author of Dragon’s Lair. Viktor Bocan, designer of Operation Flashpoint, and Mafia animator Zbynek Trávnivký complete the fearsome foursome.
Their jobs page contains what I submit is the best opening sentence ever written on a job postings website.
Remember that California violent games law that the Supreme Court struck down?
The legal battles related to it aren’t over just yet. Now the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has filed a motion to be reimbursed — by the state of California — for the $1.1 million in legal fees it spent fighting the silly Californian law.
California hardly has the money to pay such fees, of course…but sooner or later, one shot in the wallet or another will hopefully convince them that passing borderline-unconstitutional laws is just not kosher.
Most of you probably don’t care about Gears of War 3…
…but the latest video (a “behind the scenes” feature) promoting Epic’s next release is still rather entertaining.
Can you believe it? Some people still associate the term “gamer” with being a social outcast.
Yeah, I know, I was shocked too.
Exit question: what does “social outcast” even mean, in the age of Twitter and other social networks?
EA expects to break its $1 billion target for digital revenues.
That includes revenues from both mobile gaming sales and digital retail of mainline console and PC games. Naturally, the acquisution of PopCap earlier this month is going to bring in a bunch of those dollars, as will the rumoured October launch of The Old Republic.
Ultima Online is old, but worth it.
That, as UO Journal explains, is the conclusion of the first article in a new series at MMORPG.com.
Tonight’s post brought to you by Chemistry Cat:
This will be even funnier to fans of The Big Bang Theory.
Bonus:
The longest video on YouTube!
Note that I did not say it was a video with any point or quality...
It was achieved by stringing together many countless thousands of photos, horribly and excessively compressed so as to squeeze the entire 23-day length of it into about half of a gigabyte. And yes, it looks as awful as you are probably thinking it should, given that information.
I totally recommend DS9; easily the best of Trek. But you need to let it mature; the first two seasons are in the “meh” range…and then they hit their stride and it’s a tour de force all the way to the series finale in the seventh season.
It engages on numerous levels, and touches in philosophical, moral, racial, and political conundrums in a way that TNG never did. TNG…I can’t even watch it now; it feels so philosophically and spiritually dead to me. Not so DS9.
I’m not convinced that absolute good and evil would be easier. I’d actually say it would be harder, in fact, since it leaves us no wiggle room at all to mess around in. It means we are a genuinely ugly people for the most part, not to mention utterly helpless against our own ugliness.
Absent that absolute, how ugly we look depends on which mirror we look in…and since the mirrors are also of our own design, we can exercise some control over just how ugly each one makes us look.
DS9 is about to run a marathon of nerdlike proportions should it even be close to a worthy sequel of TNG.
If it’s highly shitty and offensive it will get shift-deleted after seeding fully, whether it’s the first episode or some other random episode selection.
TNG sounds like the more respectable show so far, with DS9 seeming ever more sensationalist with its serialized nature and soap-opera like cliffhangers. I prefer logical dilemma to bombastic drama, but I’ll see soon enough, I guess.
Our mirrors always make us look better, unless you’re a defendant in court. They manufacture at least those two kinds.
Also, the wiggle room is what kills us.
The first couple seasons lack focus, so like I say: bear with. From the third season on, the plot really coalesces and gets on with things. Lots of politics, intrigue, philosophy…good stuff. They explore races like the Klingons and Ferengi in extreme detail…and introduce the singular best Trek villain of all time.
I remember my high school biology teacher throwing a stat at us about population. All the people of the world can fit in Jacksonville Florida standing side by side. He was also a creationist who believed the world was 6,000 years old.
Regardless, whenever I heard stats like that, I always questioned them. Depending on your math of what an average human takes up in surface area, I’ll let you have it but here’s my own stats.
If the world’s land area is 238,304,000 mi squared, then we also have 1,258,245,120,000 ft squared. That’s A LOT! We have roughly 6 billion people, I’ve heard it’s closer to 7, and I’m inclined to believe it. But put that into perspective, if everyone lived in a 1000 sq foot home, which is pretty modest. Then we would take up every single sq foot on earth with houses stacked 6 high! That’s how crowded the planet really is. But hey, at least we have skyscrapers, maybe Yahweh changed his mind about man building tall buildings
.
On a happier note, the world produces about 589 million tonnes of rice each year. Break the numbers down yourself if you want, 2204 pounds in a tonne, divided by 6 billion= 216 pounds of rice per person each year.
It really makes you wonder why we have world hunger with that much rice. Humans can easily survive off of 1 pound of rice per day. Half a pound, you’ll might be a little hungry, but you won’t starve to death from it.
The problem likely is, rice isn’t just cooked and eaten, it has uses in livestock feed and many alcohols.
So if we wanted to, we could feed the entire world, the problem is the developed world is too greedy. As far as water goes, it’s the most abundant resource on the planet, I’m not too worried about that.
I offer no real solutions on changing to world. I’ve given up. At this point, I’ve been informed the planet will be enveloped by the Sun one day. And even if we leave Earth, all the stars in the sky will burn out. And even if we learn to be self sufficient without the aide of stars, in a billion years if technology continues to develop and develop, will anyone remember Eli Whitney? Will anyone remember George Washington? Probably not.
Personally, I like to believe(against popular scientific theory) that the universe is closed and time begins and ends and we live our lives over and over and over again.
That’s why I don’t worry about being remembered! I just try and take as much joy as I can out of life while I’m here and now!
Micro: Your math is off.
Texas has a land area of 268820 square miles.
That’s 7494271487926.11 square feet.
Which, divided by 7 billion, comes out to 1070.61021 square feet per person. And that’s all on a single level.
And since Texas has less land area than the globe…I question your numbers.
For the record, my family (2 adults, 2 kids) lives comfortably enough in our 1100 square foot half-duplex. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t know what we’d do with 4282 square feet if we had it! Heck, the “big” homes we’ve been looking at (thinking of buying next year) barely crest 2200 square feet…and they offer more space than we’d ever use.
Just did the math. If Texas is 268,820 square miles then it’s roughly 518 x 518 miles (square root of 268,820). One mile is 5,280 feet, so if Texas were a square it would be 2,735,040 x 2,735,040 feet. Multiplying those two numbers to obtain square feet produces WtF’s figure of approximately 7,494,271,488,000. So it’s about 7.5 trillion square feet.
Maybe the confusion comes between the difference between square feet and feet squared? I had then problem dealing with Sanctimonia’s square mileage. It’s 12 miles squared, or 144 square miles.
One of the problems of course is that people aren’t collectibles in a glass case. They like to move, which would require roads, and then there’s the question of how food would be grown, what would be done with waste products of production and the people themselves, etc. If we could use similar tech as the astronauts we’d have a chance. Recycle everything, waste nothing.
On a different subject, DS9 has just about been obtained. I started watching the first episode and so far so good. I like the darker feeling already, and appreciate that it looks very much like TNG. I think I may have been confusing it with Babylon 5 in the past, which looked like a cheese fest. The only cheese I’ll ever accept in sci fi is self deprecating, like in Galaxy Quest which was awesome.