I’ve never tried this game, but these neat interpretations of classic games make this bizarre physics-based sandbox game seem pretty cool. Lots more here.

Thanks Tanya!

Splitter is a fun little physics-based game. Draw lines to cut things apart in order to get the ball to the finish. Simple and fun.

It’s the Software, Not You

David Pogues little rant about usability is short, sweet, and hits a few marks well. I particularly liked the anecdote from the days when Palm was doing great usability:

Years ago, I read about a software designer at Palm named Rob Haitani. In designing the address-book program for the PalmPilot, he favored placing the “Add” button (to input a new person’s contact information) at the bottom of the tiny 160-pixel-square screen, but relegating the “Delete” command to a pull-down menu.

His fellow designers argued that those commands are equivalent, and should therefore be displayed with equal prominence. Haitani, however, disagreed. You add people to your address book all the time. But you delete people only rarely–when the die, move away or break up with you. So Add should be prominent, and Delete should be hidden to save screen space.

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Demake

Kokoromi’s Phil Fish coins the term “Demake” to denote a videogame sequel or spin-off which purposefully takes a step backwards on the evolutionary ladder, such as going from 3D to 2D. Includes some pretty great examples.

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GraphJam

There aren’t many things nerdier than looking at graphs for fun and entertainment. Via Flink.

OpenMoko Cellphone Interface Critique

The OpenMoko project is seen as a sort of open-source competitor to the iPhone. Unfortunately, however, it sounds as though the initial software is not at the high-level of design that the iPhone has reached. This is a video critique of some of the flaws, which I certainly hope they’ll fix.

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Too Weird for the Wire

An extremely bizarre story of african-american defendants in court cases calling for acquittal based on what they claim is the illegitimacy of the American Federal Government, a concept first put forward (unsuccessfully) by white supremacists.

“I am not a defendant,” Mitchell declared. “I do not have attorneys.” The court “lacks territorial jurisdiction over me,” he argued, to the amazement of his lawyers. To support these contentions, he cited decades-old acts of Congress involving the abandonment of the gold standard and the creation of the Federal Reserve.

Via Said the Gramophone

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New Mega Man 9 Cover

The cover for the upcoming Mega Man game is retro in the coolest way.

Fez’s Phil Fish on the Indie Games Industry

His comments on the “boiling ocean of shit” that is the mainstream games industry, given at the recent Interfaces Montréal summit. The designer of Indie-game Fez compares the cookie-cutter first-person shooters with great lower-fi fare like Rez, Katamari Damacy, and Ico. Via JiPé.

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6 Retarded Gas Saving Schemes

This is more for comedy than anything else. It’s amazing to see what people are actually trying to sell, and the lies they are willing to spout in order to do so.

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Seven Things You Need to Know About Ed Tufte

Anyone not familiar with Tufte’s work, and need a quick introduction, can read this to start. If you are interested in design you need to read his books, period.

I once read someone compare the experience of playing classic videogame Adventure to reading a book. The game was graphical, but only barely. The images were so rudimentary that one had to fill in the rest of the world with their imagination as they played. Your character in Adventure was literally a square, so you could imagine it as anything you want - a fully armoured knight, or a maiden, or as yourself. Or so went the argument.

 Passage is a recent game which evokes some of the same ideas, though in a much more deliberate way, and to great effect. It is a very simple, and more emotionally moving than just about any other game I’ve played in recent memory. The emotional effect is helped, not hindered, by the primitive style.In the movies, where we’re more scared by the monster we don’t see than by the one we do. The most important part of music is the space between the notes rather than the notes themselves. This game is a good reminder that this can also apply to games.I don’t want to say anything more than that, so I suggest you play the game to see what I mean.

I recently attended an event run by Microsoft where I won an xBox 360. Well, to be more precise, I won the console, but wasn’t there to collect it, and so another winner was drawn. The draw happened at the end of the day, and I had decided to leave long before it even took place.

One of my co-workers laughed about it the next day. He said I had made a bad choice by going home. While would have enjoyed having the new xBox, or at least would have enjoyed giving it as an amazing gift. This comment made me realized that I did not make a bad choice. I made a good choice that had a bad outcome, which is entirely different. Could I have expected to have been drawn out of the thousand or so people in attendance? Of course not. While this is glaringly obvious on many levels, it helped cement the
idea that the outcome of a choice is not necessarily an indicator of how good it was. A good choice that leads to bad results is still a good choice, and perhaps more importantly a bad choice that has good results is still a bad choice.

It brings to mind stories of office workers who drop out of their company lottery pools the week before they win. All things considered, dropping out of a lottery pool makes sense - the chances of winning are so small that buying a ticket is statistically a waste of money. The decision on the part of the worker is sound, and the choice is good. Unfortunately, the result is catastrophically bad, or at least is perceived to be (really though, nothing was lost at all). There is probably no way to completely console
the drop-out, no matter how sound his logic may have been.

An extremely unintuitive example of unintuitive choice making is the famous Monty Hall Problem. For those unfamiliar with it, it is summed-up as such:

Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

The “right” choice is to switch. It’s extremely unintuitive at first (or at least was to me), but I quickly realized that it is definitely the right choice. Basically, the host is eliminating one choice, and the end result is that switching should win 2/3 of the time. I don’t want to get too far into why, as many other sites have descriptions and solutions which
already tackle the issue. If you haven’t already read up on the problem, I suggest you visit these links and read up, it’s fascinating stuff. Someone has even made an online version of the problem you can play.

Even iif you choose to switch, you may still end up with a goat. The lesson is that even if you do end up with a goat, you can still be happy that you made the best choice. While this is really quite blindingly obvious, it is perhaps rather unintuitive. Humans are excellent at discerning patterns, and I would argue that a rather large portion of our intuition goes against logic. The better we understand what makes a decision good or bad, the better we will be at making decisions in the future.

xBlocks is an exploration into what can happen when imaginative play is paired with a system that allows video games to cross over into real space.

An interesting concept - a videogame that combines physical space with virtual space. Part of the playing experience involves walking around the structure to follow your avatar.

Hasbro is coming out with a new version of monopoly, which they’ve “modernized”.

The die-cast token terriers, wheelbarrows and race cars have been replaced with a Toyota Prius, a New Balance shoe and a Motorola mobile handset.

Voters chose to replace the Scottish terrier token with the Labradoodle, a mix between a Labrador retriever and a poodle.

Internet service is one of the utilities offered on the new board and airports have bumped the board’s railroads.

I saw no mention of whether they’ve replaced the rules with ones that are actually fun.

CBC has more

My friend Alice has brought to my attention the fact that someone has made a movie based entirely on Dance Dance Revolution. Watch the trailer. Via Sillytech