The following post was originally meant for Offworld, but, well, you know. It’s sad to see it end as a its own entity — it’s subsumed into the cluttered new Boing Boing design — and I’m not saying that as someone who occasionally contributed. I was a fan long before my first post there. That said, do follow Brandon’s weblog for any possible new, post-Offworld developments.

sadmb’s Cubie (embedded above) is a java powered music creation application that, by the author’s own admission, takes a great deal of influence from puzzle games. The above video, a demo of a recent touch-screen implementation, certainly shows this: blocks fall from above as if from Lumines; pieces, and the entire stage, are rotated off to the side as in a Rubik’s cube.

The aesthetic is also very game-like, so much so that I wish that it was an actual game that I could play and not an open-ended digital musical instrument. Designed with live performance in mind, it is, as the site claims, also of interest to those who like unidentifiable but curious thing. I certainly do.

Cubie [sadmb.com, freely downloadable version available]

I randomly* came across the above video from OMY (quaint, out of date website), “Oriental Magnetic Yellow”, yesterday. The mid 90s homage-band, if there is such a term, to YMO, “Yellow Magic Orchestra”, is interesting because it consisted entirely of Japanese videogame music veterans, all of whom worked at Namco: Nobuyoshi Sano, Hiroto Sasaki, Takayuki Aihara, and Shinji Hosoe. Most of these guys contributed to the music of Tekken and Ridge Racer.

After discovering the existence of this markedly obscure band, I thought back to my YMO related post on Offworld. Specifically, my little context adding paragraph at the bottom with the lazy researched (I just Googled for the most obvious cited “influences”.)

Knowing of YMO’s mid-70s electronic and computer game influences and their subsequent influences on videogame music composers like Hitoshi Sakimoto, there’s something genuinely fitting about seeing their classic tunes played on a Nintendo DS.

Here we have a very direct manifestation of that influence and, more to the point, Nobuyoshi Sano would later form, with Michio Okamiya and Yasunori Mitsuda (the Crono Trigger guy), a project called “Trio DS-10.” Here’s an interview with them on GameSetWatch and a video of their Nintendo DS-only live show.

Fitting was right.

Read the rest of this entry…

Right from the start, Reiner Kniza’s “Knights of Charlemagne” is in my good graces. It does something that all apps in the App Store should do: it doesn’t mute my music on start. I have an iPod Touch and an iPod is primarily, above all else, a music player. If it’s on, chances are it’s playing music. Any app that mutes it without my consent makes too many suppositions about its place and role on the device it’s on. “Knights of Charlemagne” isn’t so presumptuous.

Much like “Poison,” the game is mechanically simple. There are ten estates, 5 uncoloured ones numbered 1 to 5 and five unnumbered representing five colours, in the middle of the playing field that two players vie for. Each player is dealt eight knight tokens, each one representing a colour and a number. Every turn, the active player has to place one of his knight tokens on a matching estate (either colour or number.) A new knight is then drawn and the game continues until the last one has been placed.

At the end, players score one point for every estate in which they have a presence, no matter how many the opponent has there too. The real scoring benefits come from every estate in which you have more knights than your opponent. Each coloured estate is worth five points and each numbered estate is worth its value. Additionally, the first player to control two estates, counting up, gets a crown worth five points. It’s an important game balancer that makes ignoring the least valuable estates a perilous choice.

It’s always dangerous because the AI is competent enough to punish you. The easiest difficulty, squire, which acts as a tutorial, is a pushover, but the other two, knight and king, locked until you beat the preceding level, provide a heady challenge. It’s not much, but the limited progression towards beating the king level adds to the replayability of Knights of Charlemagne. Although equally portable, in the best of ways, as Poison, Knights feels more rewarding because of this design. When you don’t have human opponents to play against, or even physical cards, these little additions are essential to keep a game engaging.

Best of all, the level of strategic thought and planning that Knights of Charlemagne requires is engrossing enough to be fun but simple enough to never be frustrating during brain addled morning commutes on the train. For $2, it’s a great little strategy game to have in your pocket.

As Andy Baio has announced, Kickstarter has launched. It’s a cool little venture. Basically, it lets a creator set a funding goal for a potential project and crowd-sources the investment for it by offering rewards to backers that pledge certain amounts. In a way, it’s kind of like PBS pledge drives, mixed with Dropcash, mixed with Threadless. The concept is rock solid, but fuzzy enough to allow for a lot of creative leeway in how Kickstarter is used. It will be interesting to see what people come up with.

Since I always think about videogames, I thought about how Kickstarter could be a useful tool for the indie videogame community. Say you have a cool game that you made in Unity and you want to get it onto the iPhone, but you don’t have the $200 you need to license Unity’s iPhone support. You can create a project in Kickstarter, announce it, offer free copies of your future game to anyone that pledges $5, offer custom postcards to those that offer $10, or whatever, and wait to see if there’s any interest for it. If there is, you have that initial cash you need to get started; if not, you lose nothing, all your backers lose nothing, and you move on. It didn’t hurt to try.

It’s really early (one day old, really), but if a good enough community forms around it there’s a lot of potential there. I was going to create a project over the weekend and thought that this could be a good way to not only cover hosting costs but to incentivize its actual creation. Seeing that people are interested in your project and seeing them pledge cold, hard cash to get it done would be, I imagine, a strong motivator.

Unfortunately, it uses Amazon Payments and as a non-US citizen it seems as though I’m shit out of luck (unless there’s some hidden Canadian version with Canadian bank support somewhere.) I have to find that motivation the old fashioned way, but if this is something that can work for you I have a bunch of creator invites to give out if you want any.

Back in 2000, if you wanted to create rich media for the internet you had two choices: Macromedia’s Flash and Macromedia’s Director. Director, which produced Shockwave files, was the more powerful of the two: far faster, capable of pixel level manipulation, and with a proper (if weird) scripting language in Lingo. Proper Actionscript, which showed up in Flash 5, was still months away. But Shockwave was a heavy format (broadband wasn’t so widespread back then) that sometimes had problems running properly in-browser. Its roots were in the CD-ROM authoring days of yore and it felt like a relic because of it. Flash was small, quick, and sexy. It soon came installed with browsers. It became ubiquitous. It took over.

With Quake Live (just got an invite, but haven’t played it yet) and Battlefield Heroes on the horizon, and all the content from Flashbang Studios, amongst others, getting a lot of attention, many are back on the in-browser bandwagon. Browser based games, ones more powerful than Flash, are seen as a growing and more commercially viable trend. Even Google is jumping in with a browser-based Native Client.

While Flash has grown a lot since those early ActionScript 1.0 days, matching what Director could once do, and while it’s still growing in possibility (Doom in Flash; NES emulator in Flash, Nintendo’s going to love that one), it’s also starting to feel old and tired. It’s everywhere and there’s a large pool of designers and developers for it, so it’s not going away any time soon, but when it comes to more specialized high-level content — games — it’s limiting. That’s where Google’s Native Client, EA’s and iDs custom engines, and Unity 3D come into play. These are browser plugins designed, in this decade, from the ground up for speed, 3D, and/or gaming applications. They are quickly filling the niche that Director once held, but Macromedia (now Adobe) abandoned. Especially Unity.

If 2009 is going to see the emergence of high-quality browser-based games, then 2009 is going to be the year of Unity. It has: lots of powerful features; iPhone support (I see the Unity logo in a half of the iPhone games that I’m interested in), which is a space that Adobe has consistently failed to enter (it’s trying though); Wii publishing; a developing community (which was essential in spurring Flash’s early spread); quality developers using it; and an upcoming PC version. In short, it is about to make a major splash. I feel compelled to jump in with it — the indie license is cheaper than the Flash IDE.

It won’t take over Flash, that’s too much of a hurdle to overcome, but it will fill that void that Director’s absence created. If it achieves even that, it will be a success. It will generate a little bit of something that Adobe desperately needs: competition. The whole of the rich-media space will be better off for it. Flash needs an alternative, because Silverlight sure as hell ain’t it.

No, I never did go to the DigiPen Institute of Technology, but I had considered it. I remember reading an article about the school back in the mid 1990s, not long after it opened, in either Nintendo Power or EGM. It was mind-blowing for me at the time: I can do post-secondary education at a school specifically doing game design on Nintendo hardware? Best of all, the school was located in Canada? Sign me up.

I had thought about trying to break into the games industry in those youthful days, but up to that point it was this weird, nebulous goal that I had no idea how to get to. After reading that article, though, it felt tangible and close. I was a junior in high school and for the first time I was considering what to do after graduation.

It was around this time when I started fiddling around with my family’s old Tandy 286, an old shitbox that was already obsolete by about four years. The technology didn’t matter. My interests weren’t with the advanced PC games of the day, Doom or Quake but were focused on QBasic. I spent a summer hacking the language (my first) with only its built in documentation and two examples, Gorillas and Nibbles, as reference.

It was a slow and tedious process but within a few months I managed to make a sort of text-only adventure game (I had never played interactive fiction at the time; I was mostly emulating Shadowgate and Deja Vu.) It wasn’t very good but it was a start. A short while later I learned how to do graphics — all of it via code, there were no external editors — and made a, perhaps unsurprisingly, “Metroidvania“-esque side-scrolling platformer (the “Metroidvania” label was still years away from being penned.) They weren’t very good but they were the first videogames I ever made and they hold a nostalgic place in my heart. I just wish I still had the floppies holding them (and a floppy drive to access them.) sigh.

As I approached my final year in high school I sent for an information package from Digipen and that’s when I learned the disappointing news: Digipen had, that same year, relocated from Vancouver to Redmond, Washington. They were now international and, because they weren’t accredited at the time, they weren’t accepting international students. I might not have been able to afford it either way, but not having the option at all gutted me. The next year I went to the University of Toronto for Computer Science, got bored of the “discrete math” and the theoretical shit, and eventually, in my second year, quit. It’s been a long and convoluted road since then.

Anyway, I realized that I have a ton of old EGMs and Nintendo Powers stashed around here so I made an attempt to find this one article. I found a lot of great content from those days — ads, news, previews, reviews: the mid-90s were weird as it had reviews for SNES and Genesis games right next to 3DO, CD-i, and Amiga CD32 titles. Man, I completely forgot about that one — but not the article in question. Google seems to suggest that it might be in Nintendo Power #75, but I can only find Virtual Boy related scans from that issue.

Further searches yielded a couple of extra interesting tid-bits: a Wired article from December 1995, and a copy of the 1995 DigiPen Applied Computer Graphics School Student Handbook, focusing on The Art and Science of 2D and 3D Video Game Programming, A Super Nintendo Entertainment System® Game Programming Course.

I think about “what could have been”, but then I realize I’m still in my twenties and all those dreams continue to exist as “what can be.”

As I mentioned in my two reports (part one, part two), Essen Spiel had more than just boardgames and LARP gear: it had some videogame content too. These came in the form of retailers selling their games or the occasional licensed products based on boardgames. There was one exception: an entire, new videogame console! The Yuraku Yur-Gaming V-MAX32.

A couple extra photos can be found in my Flickr stream

There’s not much to say about products like this. Like the ePhone, these kinds of clones exist not to compete against the products they are mimicking, but to confuse befuddled consumers who don’t know any better.

I even took a (crappy) video of it in action. WATCH! As a clueless mom gets the sales pitch. SEE! Players haplessly swing their arms as if expecting their motions to be properly captured by the device. They aren’t. I tried to make sense of it and I think it has an accelerometer, maybe, but I couldn’t really get it do what I wanted so I don’t know. It was registering something, but it wasn’t mapping my movements spatially like the Wii does.

Click for larger

There isn’t much to say about this system except to acknowledge that when you’re being so blatantly (and poorly) copied, like the above mentioned ePhone, then you must be doing well. The Wii is doing well.

I’m not sure what the origin story is for the Flickr explore Panda thing, it seems to start over here, but it’s another thing on the list of “Reasons Why I Keep Paying For Flickr.” It reminds me of the ancient (by web standards) classic: Prime Number Shitting Bear. A creation born in those goofy and weird no-more-money post dot-boom days, before everything needed to have a weblog, required to have ad words, and had to be social.

So even though Flickr was early to embrace tagging, social feature, “web 2.0″ features before they were known as “web 2.0″, and even if they were bought out by a large corporation and all the problems that brought with it, and even if they’ve reached a size and scale far, far past the likes of Prime Number Shitting Bears, they still have a charm and character that screams “early 2000s”.

It is, apart from my web-hosting and domain registration, the only web-based service that I pay for. The Explore Photo Vomiting Rainbow Pandas are one of the many reasons why.

One of the things that has kept me super busy over the last month has just launched: Quatchi’s Shootout Shutout. A small flash game for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics’ “Meet the Mascots” page. I’ve liked the Meomi designed characters ever since they were revealed last winter, so it was a joy and privilege to be able to work with them.

The game was produced by zinc Roe Design, who recently launched their own weblog. All Flash coding by me. PS. try to break 3000 points.

It’s puerile and ridiculous and excessive and I couldn’t sit through all ten minutes of it, but I love this Star Trek: The Next Generation montage on YouTube:

Basically, it condenses all 8275 minutes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, from all seven seasons and all the movies, into a ten minute long clip of out-of-context sexual euphemisms. All of which is presented in a linear, story-like fashion. It is quite… preposterous. I can not imagine how much work it took to compile this but I can guess at how devoid that time was of the activity it mentions.

or, “The V in FLV Means ‘Video’”

The good thing about Flash becoming such a ubiquitous audio player online is that it has, essentially, killed off proprietary formats like ASX and Realmedia. Nearly every browser has Flash installed so it makes it easy for site operators to allow mp3 playback without having to worry about what players the user has installed or what the default download options are or whatever. You put up a simple Flash audio player and it works without any of the overhead that might scare away less computer savvy users. Additionally, Flash’s extensibility allows site operators to create players with the features and appearance that they want. They can’t do that with third party players unless they’re of the size of Microsoft or Apple.

Of course, these content providers want to have their cake and eat it too. They desire the ubiquity of flash and mp3 but they also want to restrict and contain the music, so that it’s not easily downloadable (Flash loads mp3s through the browser and if it can load them, the browser and the user can grab them too. Quite easily.) This has resulted in some overly complex mechanisms using tokens and sessions and other sorts of obfuscations, as seen in the above image. None of which work. These measures do nothing but add inconvenient speed bumps akin to the annoying “spaceball.gif” image overlays on Flickr and the old-school “do not right click” javascript popups. None of which ever worked.

Lately I’ve noticed a new trend, as seen in the imeem Player. Certain sites are now encoding all their audio as .flv, Flash Video, format. There’s no video, of course, since the format is being used as a wrapper for the mp3 audio. I understand why they do it. Their logic is that flv files can’t be as easily and freely distributed as mp3 files can (a lot of people wouldn’t know how to play an .flv file), but come on. Stop trying to ram a square peg into a round hole. There’s already a perfectly fine file format for playing back audio: mp3. Wrapping it up in some camouflage won’t work because it can easily be unwrapped.

Here’s a word of advice: if I can listen to your file in my browser it’s because it was already downloaded and it’s on my hard drive. This is how browsers work. Stop trying to put ineffectual roadblocks around this. If you are going to share it then share it. You’ll get more sales and promotion out of it. It worked for Nine Inch Nails and it’s hopefully working for Flashbulb. “Soundtrack To A Vacant Life” is a pretty solid album. Buy it.

Popular Weblogs As Seen By NoScript

Javascript has been on my mind. I had a fairly large sized javascript project a month ago and I currently have something smaller going and I’ve been using NoScript plugin for Firefox for a couple of months now. Funny enough, I installed a javascript blocking extension mere weeks before getting a javascript-exclusive contract job. It always seems to work that way.

It’s NoScript, though, that has made me more aware of javascript usage. Seeing it in action is enlightening because it’s a very good visualization of just how much cross-domain javascript is being executed on any given website. Using javascript to give your site some specific functionality is perfectly fine. I’ll often temporarily allow that (sometimes I have to because there are no javascript disabled alternatives) but I will never allow all those cross-domain scripts to run. Most of those are for pointless little widgets that do nothing but clutter a site and user tracking and cross-site embed of third party content (often ads.) I do not need these things. They are prone to be abused. I block them.

Seeing the blocked content lists in NoScript inspired me to make a simple visualization of (mostly cross-domain) javascript usage amongst popular weblogs (as is seen in the image above). Seeing TechCrunch in there still makes me laugh.

Anyway, keeping in line with that I removed my del.icio.us network status embed code, removed the legacy javascript I was linking to and removed Objecty. Objecty was a script that I used to embed flash content dynamically but it worked half the time, often produced weird errors in my access logs and added a considerable bloat (well over 100kb). It’s gone now. Things should run smoother as a result of it.

But I’m not getting rid of Google Analytics. I need my vanity, even if I block it myself.

It’s not a new development, but it is one that seems to resurface every few months. The US is, of course, trying to export US-style copyright reform to Canada. This is happening all around the world. Many new treaties and trade pacts between the United States and foreign countries include copyright stipulations. The US is exceedingly aggressive in this regard and, often times, very one sided. They complain when other nations don’t respect copyrights as strictly as they do, citing international treaties and agreements, but they turn a blind eye to their own anti-competitive practices. Sometimes even rewriting WTO treaties for their own gain at the expense of other nations: In May, the United States said it was rewriting its trade rules to remove gambling from the jurisdiction of the W.T.O.. It’s easy to understand why the United States does this: culture is the only major exportable resource it has left.

This is why, in this age of globalization and bitTorrent and cheap DVD copies, those of us outside of the United States get this bullshit:

There’s a lot to be said about how region locking is anti-competitive and how a lot of these major IP holders are in favour of globalization if it gets them into new markets but against it if it benefits the consumer. Essays have been written. Books are likely to be published. But the biggest problem with it, from a personal perspective, is that it requires local IP holders to be as “on the ball” as its major American owners. Online region locking wouldn’t be such a problem if there were local alternatives and competition. There isn’t. Canadian media companies aren’t exactly at the forefront of such progress, which is a shame because this is a very internet and tech savvy country. Hell, we’re just now getting on the iPhone bandwagon — a year late to the party.

But there’s hope…

Quite a bit of it. Hopefully, Canadian media companies will soon get their heads out of their asses and realize that, yes, Canadians use the internet too.

FITC Toronto was in full swing over the last weekend and it struck me with a severe case of deja vu. Annual conferences like this, if you attend them frequently enough, are strange beasts. Forgotten names are brought up, faces that are seen once a year show up and all the lunch time (in)decisions and presentations feel awfully familiar. There are always interesting bits and pieces and insights to take away from some of the talks, though it’s often a bunch of stuff that can be seen on the presenters’ website anyway.

But it’s a great place to network and find work and, with my upcoming ronin lifestyle, it couldn’t have come at a better time.

One of the main presentations at FITC, every year, is the Adobe keynote. It is often the same predictable thing. They show some weird, little side tools (this year it was kuler), some new Adobe Labs stuff, they boast about the adoption rate for the latest version of Flash player (video traffic this year) and they show new features from the perpetual next version of the Flash authoring application. This year they focused mostly on improved animation tweening controls, a modified timeline and some native rigging and 3D tools. Nice features, but they should have been in the previous version of Flash. Or, more accurately, they should have been there before they alienated their animator (read: non-programmer) demographic.

A preview of some of the motion tween features in Flash 10. See the rest of my FITC 08 pictures here.

But it’s all part of the Madden philosophy: getting people to pay for a constant stream of incremental updates and fucking over those that don’t by restricting the compatibility between the new versions. Fuck you Adobe. Everyone would be perfectly happy if you released upgrades half as often with twice as many features, but you couldn’t milk that now, could you?

Even those files that are saved as “Flash 8″ documents don’t work for me because I have the audacity to have “Flash 8 Basic“. Unable to open document with this version of Flash because it contains screens? Seriously? Screens? Who uses “screens”? No one. The file has no screens. You’re just trying to fuck me. Damnit. I’m sick of it. You win. I give up. Take my money. I am upgrading today.

But this better be the last time.