MX981

After noticing one picture on ffffound I learn about the book Core Memory, A Visual Survey Of Vintage Computers, a book full of pictures from old computers. I bought it, received it and now I am in love with it. The pictures are just fantastic, with incredible design and surprising interfaces. You can also read an interview from the authors on PingMag.

#  Posted The 4th of May around 8 o'clock in the morning  - No Comments

I’m not finished with Justice. Ok they have one track in GTA4 but they also have a new music video. I don’t post it here because it’s a bit Stressful. So I just put an old one, more fun.

#  Posted The 3rd of May at half past 3 in the afternoon  - 2 Comments

Hot on the heels of last week’s report from ABI Research noting that many consumers may not see the picture quality difference between Blu-ray and standard DVDs comes the latest Blu-ray sales figures from NPD Group. And they’re not pretty.

from the NYT blogs

Oh really?!!!
Sorry, I’m just trying to be sacarstic. No surprise here, people know about HD but are not really aware of what it is. They still plug crappy cables even on the new consoles. They just want to have a picture, they don’t care about having a great picture. In fact for most people size matter, so they prefer a big TV with crapppy image than a medium size TV with a really nice picture quality. If you buy expenssive cables and tunes the contrast of your TV, you can be considered as a minority.
To replace a standard format by an other one, the technology is not your best choice. ogg will not replace the mp3 soon because it doesn’t bring a pratical advantage for the user. The DVD succeeded because the picture quality was better but also because you didn’t had to rewind your movies after watching them. You could even skip quickly to different chapters.
For the movie format, I think the future is more in the VOD, not a physical format. And for the file format in fact you don’t care because the user will not chose depending on the file format, he will chose because of the catalog and the price.

#  Posted The 3rd of May around 8 fifteen in the morning  - No Comments

Just WOW! The power of vector graphics in action. An amazing demo from Neuro and Farbrausch.

#  Posted The 29th of April around 12 fifteen in the afternoon  - 4 Comments

The N-Gage will be probably not the next big thing, but at least Nokia has created a really nice website.

#  Posted The 28th of April around 7 o'clock in the evening  - No Comments

Immersion. Lots of developers are after it and from time to time one come and announce that to have a really immersive game you have to remove the interface of the game. To have an immersive book, do you remove the page number in your book or do you just write a good story?

I illustrate this post with screenshots from two games without HUDs, one do it right, the other wrong.
The getaway try to hide the information in the game world; there is no map but the turn signal of your car show you were to turn, no health bar but bloody clothes. The producer probably didn’t explain how immerive is it to have a character that regenerate himself by not walking during 10 seconds.
No one will be surprise that ICO do it right; there is no health bar because there is no health, no map because you don’t need it and no ammo counter because .. well you get it. If a developer want a game without HUD, it should simply do a game that don’t need these information. Trying to merge too much the information into the world is simply creating unreadable and unreliable information.

There is nothing wrong to not have a HUD, but it shouldn’t be a goal at all cost. A HUD is useful, it brings clear and readable information to the player; information that he probably needs.

#  Posted The 28th of April around 7 o'clock in the evening  - 3 Comments

You have no excuse, you have to listen the podcast of Radiolab. This is not a real podcast in fact, but a radio show, the best I ever heard.
During 1 hour the two hosts discuss on a theme (Why we laugh, The opera The ring, The war of the world etc…)
Passion, Science and great stories are the bone of the show, but the muscles and flesh is the editing which is outstanding, it will literally move you. At the end of each episode you realized you learned and lived an experience.

#  Posted The 27th of April around 8 fifteen in the morning  - 1 Comment

It’s always too easy to point out the mistakes of others. But when the mistake are huge is still worth pointing out. This video is the perfect example of what you shouldn’t do. How can you design such user experience? 1min 30 to quit a game with 2 loading in between.
It doesn’t require so much experience in interface design, juste common sense.
Promised, next time I will not point out an easy mistake, but I will show you a good example of interface design.

#  Posted The 27th of April at nearly 7 forty five in the morning  - 2 Comments

A really nice mix of our 16bits memories. My main complaint is it’s too short, only 4 tracks.

#  Posted The 26th of April at half past 8 in the morning  - No Comments

How did I miss that? Last year Daft Punk did a special mix(tape) for Louis Vuitton fashion show. It’s short but really good. Some track from Daft Punk of course, but also Sebastien Tellier, Busta Rhymes, 
Ratatat and Kanye West. You can download the mix on zShare, but you can also watch the video of the fashion show (quite hypnotic by the way)

#  Posted The 20th of April slightly after 8 in the morning  - 2 Comments

I never been a big fan of Sebastien Tellier. I kind of liked some of the track of “L’incroyable vérité” but nothing catched my hears. But his latest Album “Sexuality” totally got me. Tracks like “Divine”, “Roche”, “Sexual Sportswear“, “L’amour et la violence” are just stuck in my head. The sounds are round, a bit 70’s old fashion and of course sexy. By the way, I write this post naked; RRrrrrrrr!

#  Posted The 20th of April at half past 7 in the morning  - 1 Comment

Biosphere 2, I don’t know if you remember about this experiment. Biosphere 1 was the earth itself; the goal of the Biosphere 2 was to recreate the ecosystem of the earth in a close environment and to put a team of scientists to see if they can live inside for long period of time. In theory, no food or air was imported from the outside, everything was produce inside. The goal was to get data for eventual space colonization which will certainly use this kind of self contained environment.
When I was a kid I was fascinated by this experiment. Not everything went well but at the end the first team stay 2 years inside. Pretty impressive.

#  Posted The 19th of April around 4 o'clock in the afternoon  - No Comments

I totally forget to tell you that the season of The Office restarted after this loooong strike break. The new episode is absolutely fabulous, full of akward moment offered by Michael Scott. But the best was the wine joke that totally get me:

#  Posted The 17th of April at quarter to 10 in the evening  - No Comments

Ricky Gervais performs a three-minute stand-up routine in a GTA IV comedy club. The track wasn’t just audio recorded but motion captured for 100% authenticity. Well…almost 100%. Gervais admits: “…I look slightly tougher.”

Ricky Gervais in GTA4? Will he talk about Gay Animals? Seriously it’s like they compiled everything I love into one single disc. If it continues like this, they will annouce next week that Daft Punk is on the Soundtrack.

#  Posted The 17th of April at nearly 9 forty five in the evening  - No Comments

Ars Technica have a good article about Color-blindness and video game. This is an issue that most of the developer ignore and is part of how to create good user interface (which i’m quite interested in these days).

Developers should always use color as secondary information (the same for sounds for handled games but for other reasons) because this is not a reliable information for some people. We can say this is a comfort information.
The form and position should be used as primary information.

From my experience, the worst is that developers already know about this issue, color blind or not. So why games still have this problem? Because there is no reminder during the production, because there is no guidelines and mainly no time to care.

#  Posted The 13th of April slightly after 1 in the afternoon  - 1 Comment