sangsara.net

Month: June 2010

  • ➟ Wired hands-on with the 3DS

    Wired’s Chris Kohler gets a little time with the newly-announced Nintendo 3DS. It’s only the most promising handheld gaming device since the original DS! Does everything an iPhone can do and more, now that it has 1) a more powerful graphics processor, 2) an accelerometer and gyroscope built into each one for six-axis motion sensing, 3) a touchscreen + analog joystick + D-pad, 4) a download store. Of course, there’s also the 3D screen that gives the illusion of depth without the need for special glasses.
    The games announced for it so far include a really epic-looking Kid Icarus title, a remake of Ocarina of Time (widely considered the best game of all time), Paper Mario, Pilotwings Resort, Super Street Fighter IV, and all-new entries in the Saints Row, DJ Hero, Resident Evil and Metal Gear Solid franchises. No pricing info or release date yet, which leads me to believe they’re trying to bring costs down, but we should expect a higher than usual number. Say around USD$200-220.
    The graphics, which are much more advanced than you’d expect from Nintendo, left me pretty much in disbelief. They’re on a level with Sony’s PSP, probably even a little better than that. But the eye-popping 3-D effect makes everything that much richer.
    You can only see the 3-D effect if you’re looking at the 3DS screen straight on, although there’s a good amount of fudge factor there — you can move the unit around quite a bit and still get the effect.

    Link

    Here are some DS games I’ve been playing lately:

  • ➟ Time magazine’s new tablet app

    A huge improvement on their first try at an app for tablets like the iPad. There’s significantly more content in this version than in the print, which goes a long way towards justifying price parity – $4.99 in this case. It’s not a real product yet, just a demo I hope they’ll make real. Interesting points to note: the demo device has a 16:9 screen, so this wouldn’t actually work on an iPad the way it’s currently designed. But it looks really right when used in landscape mode. Also, a lot of non-standard interaction widgets like the copy/paste selector, which might not be in compliance with Apple’s approval process.

    Link

  • ➟ Virtual Shackles explains science

    Virtual Shackles is a webcomic about games by two guys that’s fast surpassing the original two-gamers webcomic, Penny Arcade. In today’s strip, they combine two games I’ve been playing a lot lately: Bit.Trip Runner (Nintendo WiiWare) and Robot Unicorn Attack (Flash, free & iPhone, $2.99).
    Both games are variations of the winning formula that Canabalt (Flash, free) defined – a character constantly runs forward, and the player is in charge of making sure it jumps at the right time. Bit.Trip Runner throws dodging, leaping, and kicking into the mix, making for an insanely hard but hugely satisfying reflex tester. It also happens to be rendered as an homage to blocky-pixeled retro games. Robot Unicorn Attack is pure madness from Adult Swim: a metal unicorn (double)jumps amongst the clouds to Erasure’s “Always”. Do well, and sky dolphins leap with you. It’s the epic bombast of Peggle’s Ode to Joy sequence meets the wacky, more forgiving Japanese run-jumper, Tomena Sanner (WiiWare & iPhone, $1.99).

    Link

  • ➟ Steve Jobs at D1

    From 2003, Steve Jobs at the first All Things Digital conference. At this point, Apple had only sold 700,000 iPods after two years on the market, and the question of whether Apple would build PDAs and tablets was in the air. Steve said no, but his replies were conditional and it’s clear that the iPhone/iPad were brought to market only after satisfying all the shortcomings that these concepts had in 2003.

    On everything else they talked about, he was dead right. Microsoft’s just-announced tablets did fail, and handwriting technology is now irrelevant because everyone prefers the speed of typing. And yet Bill Gates just repeated the other day on Larry King that he still doesn’t believe in the iPad because it lacks pen support.

    Update: 27 minutes in, Walt Mossberg gives him a few minutes to demonstrate the newly-launched iTunes Music Store. It’s a real masterclass in sales pitch delivery: passionate, concise, human.

    Link [45min video at allthingsd.com]

  • ➟ Luther Opening Titles

    Luther raises the bar for British television serials, granted that’s not usually saying much, but it raises said bar to the rafters. Starring the incomparable Idris Elba (who played Stringer Bell in The Wire) as detective John Luther, this six-part crime show will knock the wind out of you by episode five, I guarantee it.

    Luther – Opening Title Sequence – BBC One

  • ➟ Deus Ex: Human Revolution trailer

    Apropos of all the William Gibson reading I’m doing, this trailer for the third Deus Ex game looks incredible (thanks to Square-Enix). It’s actually a prequel to the first game released in 2000, but will still feature all the bionic augmentation you’d expect.

    I remember playing Deus Ex ten years ago and feeling the kind of thrill you get when a game lets you do something new. In this case, it was having advanced technology and a fleshed-out SF world in a first-person RPG. Instead of the usual spells and enchanted armor, it was cybernetic implants and nanobots in your bloodstream.

    Link [Joystiq]

  • ➟ Smokescreen

    If I hadn’t just seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed this was possible. Smokescreen is a soon to be open-sourced technology that converts Adobe Flash content to HTML5/Javascript, in real time. It’s essentially Flash without a plugin, and it works with animation and sound just fine in my desktop Safari.

    The company behind it describes itself as “an ad network” that wanted to see the richness of Flash ads come to devices like the iPad, without the need to rewrite code. It’ll be released soon, but have a look at the demos they’ve got up now with your Flash blocker on.

    Link [smokescreen.us]

  • ➟ DoCoMo Summer Collection 2010

    Great compositing work in this 30sec TVC for NTT DoCoMo’s new range of mobile phones. Insufferably chirpy yet irresistible, as you might expect from a musical Japanese sales pitch.

    I think the girl is Kimura Kaela, a British-Japanese musician/idol.

    Link [YouTube]