14. April 2008 by the author.

N’Gai Croal opened his gob to talk about the Resident Evil 5 trailer recently. He spoke at length about how Africa is portrayed as a dark and dangerous place, how the trailer is reminiscient of racist imagery from the past, and how blowing holes in shambling, infected, murderous black Africans is different from blowing holes in shambling, infected, murderous white Spaniards. This may have been a specific dig at Yahtzee Croshaw of Zero Punctuation fame, as he (the Aussie) pointed out several months ago that little has actually changed since the fourth numbered installment of the series. Arrive in country X, pick up the inane but roller-coaster plot as you go, and blow away an astonishing number of zombified locals en route to whatever MacGuffin you’re dealing with this time. Read the rest of this entry »

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3. December 2007 by the author.

I always love seeing what old and low-end hardware is capable of. Tech demos, demoscene releases, homebrew games, and end-of-lifecycle titles are my favorite brain candy. 2D fun like the ill-fated Grand Theftendo and odd ports like Big Mutha Truckers for GBA tweak the same neurons. I followed GBAdev.org from somewhere near its beginnings to its sidelining when the DS came out, so I’d seen and even jerkily emulated some basic 3D engines on the Game Boy Advance. All smoke, no fire, I thought, since the only worthwhile commercial 3D games at the time were Doom-style shooters (including a mediocre port of Doom and eventually an impressive port of Doom II). When I heard rumors of Quake for the GBA, I was intrigued, but not exactly floored by the videos. Apparently a company named Pocketeers had developed a polygonal engine and merely used the opening map of Quake as a demonstration. They had actual game ideas: two GTA III wannabes, named Zero Tolerance and The World Of Crime. Read the rest of this entry »

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3. October 2007 by the author.

In the spring of 2007 I took a class on signal processing, and the hardware simplicity of seemingly complex goals left me dumbfounded. Three components gets you a band-pass filter, it turns out, and that’s the key to decades-old radio technology. It was here that an old hobby came up - downsampling technology to move it backward in time. You’ve probably seen this in the form of Steampunk, where everything from airplanes to operating systems is projected onto a romanticized Victorian era. I tend to work less conspicuously, fitting good ideas back into the past where they might have truly existed, only to be forgotten as yet another half-baked failure. This story is proof that truth is almost always stranger than fiction, and often more interesting. Read the rest of this entry »

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