Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Looks like its all true now – Google To Acquire YouTube for $1.65 Billion in Stock. Everyone's eating it up but to be honest, does it really matter that much? I've yet to be convinced about the importance of this deal except Google now on top of Fox with there MySpace.
Trust me this game is nuts. On Monday I went to the games you should have played event at zero one in soho. I filmed most of it and it came up with very interesting games including Vib Ribbon which I've never ever heard of till that day. Remind me to look for a decent PSX emulator for my PC or Xbox one day soon. I'm glad these emulators exist and there mature enough to run these games. Otherwise such games would sink into the sands of time forever. What I find amazing about Vib Ribbon is the load into ram feature, hence the cut back on graphics I guess
Vib-Ribbon is a rhythm video game in the style of PaRappa the Rapper and Amplitude. The game was unique in that the software loaded into RAM, letting the player use any music CD to play against — the game could generate a unique level from any track. The graphics for Vib-Ribbon are simple, consisting of straight, white vector lines forming crude, angular drawings of the level and the character, a female rabbit named Vibri
Other games worth mentioning include my favorate IQ or as I prefer Kuruchi. Then Rez for having one of the best levels in gaming history. Oh and this moroccas game which needs no real introduction.
I just got back from the Digital Well Being store in Fulham. I saw so many good things, I'm not even going to try and talk about them here. Instead you can see a load of pictures here on Flickr. But the most interesting thing about Digital well being is the whole concept of digital products being out and available to use and play with. Its not sterile like the apple store and certainly nothing like the dodgy pc world setups. The only stores which comes close is Ikea and Habitat. Anyway to only way to experience the store is to get your ass down there before they move somewhere else and change it around. You can also keep a track of whats going on with the blog they have setup, which needs to be updated.
On Thursday night I went along to the Hallam Foe screener which was opened to London bloggers. According to imdb.com the film is in post production and the summary goes something like this…
Hallam, a confused and sweetly old-fashioned teenager, has chosen an unusual way of following life on his father's estate – voyeurism. He convinced that his stepmother is responsible for his mother's suicide. His voyeurism becomes dangerous, but Hallam is eventually redeemed by love.
Anyway, I thought the film was excellent and really suprised me. When this hits the cinemas or picture houses I urge you all to see it. Good work Hugh.
So those talented guys at Backstage.bbc.co.uk just launched a Widget competition. The prizes include a Origami PC and Nokia Internet Tablet but the other interesting thing is there will a meetup event where the winners will be announced.
I'm still new to widget creation so, I'm also going to try making a couple and link to any resources which I find useful. Like we talked about internally this is not simply a competition where we put it out there and expect submissions back. This is a conversation, and we will be listening and learning during the month. So good luck and subscribe to the mailing list for more information.
I'm watching a video about the Microsoft Zune. Its quite interesting but there's not enough to make it much better than a ipod. The sharing has been talked about a lot but the thing which I think Microsoft missed is the loud speaker. Yes sure it would be very ignoying but its what the kids are doing with there phones now. And if the Zune is all about sharing, it would make sense to have a loud speaker too, imho.
Cracker is back for one more special episode. Hopefully to sort out that terriable mess of a special episode which they called White Ghost. The story line goes something like this.
Fitz returns to Manchester for his daughter's wedding, but is soon involved in another murder investigation when an American comedian is killed, apparently without motive.
Just incase you don't know what Cracker is, from Wikipedia
Fitz is a classic antihero, unfaithful to his wife, alcoholic, a chain smoker, overweight, addicted to gambling, manic, foulmouthed and sarcastic; and yet cerebral and excellent at his speciality: getting into the heads of violent criminals. As Fitz confesses in “Brotherly Love”: “I drink too much, I smoke too much, I gamble too much. I am too much.”
I just upgraded my xboxes to the latest version. Xbmc keeps growing from strength to strength.
Team-XBMC and The XBMC Project is proud to announce the release of XboxMediaCenter 2.0.0. XBox Media Center (XBMC) is an award winning, free and open source media player for the Xbox™ game-console. The XboxMediaCenter 2.0.0 point-release source code has now been set in our CVS. We consider that the current code in the XBMC CVS is as stable as a point-release should be. All XBMC users are highly encouraged to upgrade to this stable Xbox Media Center 2.0.0 point-release. Remember, the XBMC source code needs to be compiled with the XDK, and requires a modded Xbox to run. Our thanks goes out to everyone who has tested, reported bugs, and helped fix them in order to make this release possible.
There are many new features and functions that have been introduced since the 1.1.0 point-release, that we cannot list them all here. A few that are especially worth mentioning are; the enhanced GUI/skin-engine, the Project Mayhem III skin, DVD-Video menu/navigation support (with ISO/IMG image parsing), RAR/ZIP archive parsing, a new audio/music-player (PAPlayer) with crossfade, gapless playback and ReplayGain support, Karaoke CDG-file display, Xored Trainer Engine (gaming-cheats), XLink Kai (online-gaming) front-end, iTunes 6.x DAAP and UPnP-clients, and two surprise features; read-only support for FAT12/16/32 formatted USB Mass Storage Devices up to 4GB in size, and a brand new “skinnable” 3D visualizer.
