Blogging Ultima

This guy is blogging what it's like to go through the entire Ultima series. He's up to VII.

Cats That Look Like Hitler!

"Does your cat look like Adolf Hitler? Do you wake up in a cold sweat every night wondering if he's going to up and invade Poland? Does he keep putting his right paw in the air while making a noise that sounds suspiciously like 'Sieg Miaow'? If so, this is the website for you."

Do Not Want

When green screens go bad.

iCat

Carnival of Video Game Bloggers

"Good evening and welcome to the very first edition of the Carnival of Video Game Bloggers! Tonight we pay tribute to the brightest stars in the world of game blogging and honour their achievements in categories such as Best Soapbox Post, Most Thought-Provoking Post and Best Post by a Sibling or Blood Relative."

Examining the Puzzle Game sample application

"Originally part of the samples that shipped with Flash Professional 8 under the Bitmap data feature, the Puzzle Game sample application has been updated from ActionScript 2.0 to use the latest features in ActionScript 3.0. This article details the code used in both versions so you can understand how the sample application was migrated from ActionScript 2.0 to ActionScript 3.0."

25 Code Snippets for Web Designers

Nice collection of code snippets for web designers.

GAMEAVISION

I don't know if this company is for real, but I'd play the games that are in "development". Check out the trailer for crosswalk.

Designing Usable and Accessible Games with Interaction Design Patterns

"What separates games from other forms of entertainment is that they provide interaction, however providing interaction it in the wrong way e.g. different from how the player would expect it or how the player requires it, means that people get frustrated playing your game --or worse-- cannot play your game at all."

SCUMM of the Earth

"April 26, 2007 - This year marks the 20th anniversary of the SCUMM engine, the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, which powered most of the classic LucasArts graphic adventures. SCUMM streamlined the process for coding these intensive, epic games and greatly decreased their development times. IGN recently caught up with the man behind SCUMM, the Grumpy Gamer himself, Ron Gilbert."

Understanding Apollo

"In this post, I summarize that meeting - but also I aim to give a kind of 'Apollo for Dummies' overview (because until that meeting I was one of those dummies!). Much of the media and blog coverage of Apollo so far has been focused on what it means for developers, but I have yet to see a cogent explanation of Apollo for end users. So this post is an attempt at that."

Prince of Persia Classic for XBLA

The Rarest Atari 2600 Games...

"Finally, of course, there's Pepsi Invaders - the first ever anti-advergame! 'Coca-Cola commissioned a game from Atari to give to their Atlanta employees. In this case, Atari redesigned Space Invaders so that you shoot the letters 'P E P S I' instead of space creatures. There were 125 copies of this game made. There is no real box for this one, just a flimsy Styrofoam shell. So it isn’t really a prototype, but it wasn’t a commercially available game either. And no, Coca-Cola does not have any copies left."

New Order Splits

"'I suppose it was the interview with clint boon that started it all off hed asked me for a few words on perry farrells satellite party single dogstar [which he thought was great] so i went on and lo and behold mentioned the New Order split so i suppose because it was me sayin it it was out at last. im relieved really hated carryin on as normal with an awful secret so lets move on shall we?'"

Guess it's official now. New Order officially splits. Bummer.

Titan Missile Museum - Arizona Aerospace Foundation

"The Titan Missile Museum is the only publicly accessible Titan II missile site in the nation. When you visit the Titan Missile Museum, you travel through time to stand on the front line of the Cold War."

Why do geeks have lust for ZFS?

"In the recent builds of Apple’s new operating system, Mac OS X Leopard, developers have started noticing that there is an option to format a partition using ZFS (Zettabyte file system). There is still no mention from Apple whether this will remain in the final builds, but the file system matches exactly Apple’s plans for Leopard. This article will explain you everything that you need to know about ZFS aswell as why I’m so exciting about its inclusion."

TERMINATOR VS ROBOCOP.EPISODE 1.AMDSFILMS

Animated Soviet Propaganda - Kino on Video

"A landmark four disc Box Set

Unearthed from Moscow's legendary Soyuzmultfilm Studios (est. 1935), the 41 films in ANIMATED SOVIET PROPAGANDA span sixty years of Soviet history (1924 - 1984), and have never been available before in the U.S.

The set is divided thematically into four discs, all dealing with different subjects of the Soviet propaganda machine."

OEDIPUS (with vegetables)

Log On, Shoot at an Iraqi

"Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal has locked himself into a studio with live webcams for the month of May.

The public can watch him 24/7 over a live webcam; and if they choose, visitors to his website can shoot him with a remote controlled paintball gun."

Plugins for Macromedia Flash character animation

Great collection of plugins for Flash animation.

A History of Matching Tile Games

"This article aims to write the history of a video game genre. The genre is that of matching tile games, video games where the object of the player is to manipulate tiles on a grid in order to create matches. For a few years, the best known and best selling matching tile games have been the Bejeweled series from PopCap games. Figure 1 shows Bejeweled 2 Deluxe (PopCap games 2005)."

Carnegie Mellon Preserves History of Gaming 'Firsts'

"Was “Pong” really the first video game? Did jumping first appear in “Donkey Kong?” To answer these questions and more about video and computer games, a team of master’s degree students at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) has created a new and improved Game Innovation Database. "

Comparing 5 Ways To Tag Videos

"There’s a crazy number of videos flying around online these days and both the sheer number and impact of those videos are only going to increase with time. How’s a person watching videos supposed to keep track of their favorites, share with friends and do all of the other things we’re used to doing in the online-text world with social bookmarking tools? Well, now you can tag videos - and there are a variety of different options."

Watch What You Post!

Sun Targets Silverlight

"Sun will detail a plan Tuesday that could make Java a formidable player in the scripting language space.

At the JavaOne conference in San Francisco, Sun will roll out a Java-based product family called JavaFX, which covers Java development from the desktop to the Web to mobile devices. It features a new scripting variant of the Java, called JavaFX Script. JavaFX is a line of products focused on opportunities in the consumer communications market, including desktops, mobile clients, and TVs. The first product release is JavaFX Mobile, a software system for mobile devices."

Late Night at ILM

Luminara

Great take on the Asteroids concept. Notice the chunky particle effects.

Crazy Dance Dance Revolution Skills

'Real life' Nintendogs & Mario Kart DS

GAMER THEORY 2.0

Interesting web companion to the book Gamer Theory.

Text Message Breakup

Contains explicit language.

The Machine is Us/ing Us

As detailed in the May 2007 issue of Wired magazine, Michael Wesche summed up the "power and potential" of Web 2.0 in a 271 second video.

Atari Email

"Jed Margolis got his hands on something precious: a decade of internal mail from the now-defunct Atari Games corporation, makers of some of the more beloved arcade games in history and one of the more amazing stories in computer history. Buried among these large collections of e-mails from the Atari Corp. VAX are discussions of programming, trivia, jokes, and some real insights into the day-to-day concerns of this company."

Wii Code Required For Each Online Game

"It certainly appears now, that the Wii code is for nothing other than sending messages to your buddies and swapping Mii's. This means that you will STILL need to swap codes for each game you play online. "

Yahoo!’s Web Messenger built with Flex 2

"Seeing as Flash Player 9 is at 84% penetration, it’s time for the big guns to start releasing content that targets this awesome new version. Obviously, a bunch of Flex 2 applications are already in the wild, but I imagine that the next several months will bring an explosion of great new additions. Today, Yahoo! announced the beta version of a Yahoo! Messenger client for the web. Even more exciting, its built with Flex 2! Cross-platform goodness for everyone."

Adobe Media Player (Philo)

Nice video demo of the new Apollo based, Adobe Media Player (code-named Philo).

Mastering Mario By Memory

What has Silverlight got on Flash

"Silverlight will now include a mini-CLR (Common Language Runtime) from .NET. What this means is that a subset of the full .NET platform that runs on desktops can be accessed from within the browser. As with the usual .NET runtime, with Silverlight you can code in a number of supported programming languages. At this time the languages supported are C#, Javascript (ECMA 3.0), VB, Python and Ruby. The Python and Ruby interpreters were built by Microsoft and have been released under their shared source license meaning that developers can get access to the code and are able to make contributions to it."

Shape-based Hit Detection in 8

"A while back I posted a demo of shape-based hit detection in Flash 8. At the time, I wasn't allowed to post the source code, but promised I would later. So here it is.

The com.gskinner.sprites.CollisionDetection class is really simple to work with, there is a single static method called checkForCollision with four parameters:"

Recursive Dimensional Clustering

"Collision detection can be done in many ways. The most straightforward and simplest way is to just test every object against all other objects. Because every object has to test only for others after it in the list of objects, and testing an object with itself is useless, we arrive at the well known brute force comparison algorithm:"