Meet you back here in half an hour.
What are you going to do?
What I always do - stay out of trouble... Badly.
What are you going to do?
What I always do - stay out of trouble... Badly.
Friday, March 08
Top Ten TV Shows That Should Be Turned Into Kairosoft Games
Actually, I haven't come up with 10 yet, so suggestions are welcome.
Actually, I haven't come up with 10 yet, so suggestions are welcome.
- Barney Miller
- Life on Mars / Ashes to Ashes
- Buffy
- Torchwood
- Stargate SG1
- House
- WKRP in Cincinnati (thanks Wonderduck!)
- Get Smart
- Thunderbirds
- Murphy Brown
Wonderduck's suggestion brings to mind Lou Grant and Murphy Brown as possibilities as well.
If you haven't encountered Kairosoft, they're the creators of a line of little management sims on Android and iOS that are just insanely addictive. They actually started out back in 1996 writing games for PC and DoCoMo phones - at a time when a 320x200 phone display was pretty much state of the art. They've had something of a rebirth since porting their first game, Game Dev Story, to Android and iOS in 2010, where it became a bestseller.
Since then they've released 18 more games (plus two or three more that are on Android or iOS but still Japanese only), and have a catalog of 36 titles across all platforms.
And yes, I have every game they've released on Android; they're no more than $5, and good for at least 10-15 hours of play each. Some of them more; I did two full play-throughs of Grand Prix Story to unlock everything, which probably totalled 20 hours over a couple of weeks.
The general pattern set with Game Dev Story is that you run a small company, organisation, or group of some sort, and you have to hire and train staff and research technology to make better and better... Something.
Game Dev Story is almost entirely menu-driven; you can watch your people working in the office, but while this display reflects the actual progress of your game projects, it's not interactive.
Later games like Mega Mall Story, Dungeon Village, Epic Astro Story, and the recent Pocket Stables have an interactive map (or for Mega Mall Story, a cross-section view of your building).
Pocket Stables, Grand Prix Story, and Pocket Leage Story also have non-interactive contests - races and football (soccer) games; you train your players/drivers/horses as applicable and set a strategy, but once the contest starts you can't directly influence the outcome.
The games aren't hugely complex, but they are brilliantly crafted little artworks. The pixel art is just perfect, retro-stylish, adorable, and full of amazing details. I had dozens of screenshots to show this off, but I lost them all when my Nexus 7 bricked itself. Here's one, showing two of my horses leading the pack as they round the first corner:*
Anyway, back to the meme: It would need to be some sort of ensemble cast, albeit with a clear leader, working toward a common goal. And the less sense it would make as a management sim, the better, given Kairosoft's already quirky take on the genre.
* Why, yes, that horse is wearing sunglasses.
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Phone Home?
My cheapie featurephone (a Huawei G6600D) that I've been using for years has developed a teensy problem: It turns itself off if it gets jolted, say, for example, if you pick it up to answer a call. I'm thinking it's finally time to get myself an Android phone.
My cheapie featurephone (a Huawei G6600D) that I've been using for years has developed a teensy problem: It turns itself off if it gets jolted, say, for example, if you pick it up to answer a call. I'm thinking it's finally time to get myself an Android phone.
I've never actually used an Android phone - or any smart phone - but I use my Nexus 7 tablet constantly, so I'm familiar with Android and mostly like it. I'm open to suggestions, particularly from anyone who's used any of the phones on my shortlist.
- Nexus 4? Goes nicely with my Nexus 7 and the Nexus 10 I ordered yesterday, 720p, 3G, only 16GB and no SD card, but on the other hand, half the price of any of the others on the list.
- Galaxy Note 2? Big screen, easy on my ageing eyes, stylus.
- Grey-market HTC Butterfly a.ka. Droid DNA? Looks like a very nice phone, 1080p, but not officially sold in Australia and probably won't do 4G on our networks.
- Sony Xperia Z? Announced here in Oz, 1080p, but not shipping here yet.
- Wait for Galaxy S4? Due to launch in about a week, expected to be 1080p, but no telling how long it will take for it to ship.
- Other?
Update: Decided to go with the Nexus 4. It's almost half the price of the other phones, while still giving me everything I want except for expandable storage. And it's currently in stock, where the Xperia Z isn't shipping yet and the S4 isn't even announced yet. Plus, I know I won't be waiting 6-12 months for an update when Android 5.0 is released.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
11:34 AM
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Thursday, March 07
Coincidence
The Nexus 10 is in stock and I can afford it this week. Those two circumstances have never previously coincided.
The Nexus 10 is in stock and I can afford it this week. Those two circumstances have never previously coincided.
Now I'll be able to play my Kairosoft games scaled up 8x instead of just 4x!*
* As near as I can tell, the pixel art for all Kairosoft games is done at a basic resolution of 320x200. The Nexus 7 is 1280x800, precisely 4x that; the Nexus 10 is 2560x1600, so exactly 8x Kairo-res. The text, menus and so on are all rendered at device resolution, so the games are eminently playable, just retro-stylish.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
05:15 PM
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Games That Are Not Out, And Therefore Retain The Potential Not To Suck
What do you get when you merge Planescape: Torment and Numenera?
What do you get when you merge Planescape: Torment and Numenera?
Numenera itself was extremely successful; asking for $20k to get his pet project off the ground, veteran game designer Monte Cook ended up with, well, this:
Now, even before the game rules are complete, he's got a computer game tie-in. They're asking for an ambitious $900,000. How are they going on that? This is how:
You’ve got to be freaking kidding me!! We just funded in six hours!?!?!Sometimes people aren't as dumb as other times.
Which means that we, the rabid fans of good quality stuffs everywhere, in just a few months have successfully Kickstartled both a spiritual successor and an actual successor to one of the best games of all time.
If anyone needs me, I'll be in my happy place.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
02:38 PM
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Wednesday, March 06
SimCity Launch A Natural Disaster
SimCity 5 - or as Electronic Arts likes to call it, "SimCity" is out. In that you can buy it; it's far less certain that you'll be able to play it, or even that you'll want to.
SimCity 5 - or as Electronic Arts likes to call it, "SimCity" is out. In that you can buy it; it's far less certain that you'll be able to play it, or even that you'll want to.
All of which was predicted by everyone, and was entirely avoidable. And happened anyway, because people are dumb.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Monday, March 04
Fifty Years, Seven Minutes
Previously:
Onwards!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
12:47 PM
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Spam?
I said earlier that I thought there was a bug in the spam filter, such that it was identifying spam but then failing to block it.
I said earlier that I thought there was a bug in the spam filter, such that it was identifying spam but then failing to block it.
I was right. Think it's fixed now. We should see a marked decrease in spam going forward - about the only thing that is likely to still get through is those lunatics who manually sign up and post comments like real human beings.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
01:07 AM
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Sunday, March 03
Slowly They Catch On
About 18 months ago I wrote a piece about AMD's Fusion range, Llano and particularly Bobcat, and how in my opinion they were some of the most significant chips in the entire history of chipping.
About 18 months ago I wrote a piece about AMD's Fusion range, Llano and particularly Bobcat, and how in my opinion they were some of the most significant chips in the entire history of chipping.
It took them a while, but Sony have just announced the PlayStation 4 - and it's based on AMD's latest low-power Fusion architecture, the Jaguar core. Jaguar features both minor improvements - a longer pipeline to allow higher clock speeds, a larger, shared level 2 cache, and instruction improvements for higher IPC - and major ones - four cores, up from two, and a 128-bit floating point unit to replace the 64-bit unit in Bobcat, for at least twice the integer performance and four times the floating point performance. Jaguar (in the form of the Kabini family of chips) is built at 28nm, a full node advance on the 40nm process used for the Bobcat-based Brazos chips, so it does all that while using less power than its predecessor.
Microsoft haven't officially announced their Nextbox yet, but the information that's leaked out says that they're basing their next system on the Jaguar too. Meaning that of the three big game consoles in this generation, AMD are supplying CPUs for two and graphics for all three.*
And here it gets interesting. AMD's fastest existing Fusion processors have 4 CPU cores and 384 graphics shaders. Jaguar too is designed as a module with 4 CPU cores. But the PlayStation 4 will have 8 cores - two quad-core modules - probably running at around 2GHz, and 1152 shaders - three times the current largest Fusion chip - at 800MHz. Plus it will ship with 8GB of 5.5GHz GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit bus, avoiding the major pitfall of integrated graphics, lack of memory bandwidth. It should run faster than a Radeon 7850.
The Xbox 720 (if that's what it's to be called) has a slightly different configuration: Again 8 CPU cores, 768 shaders (so two thirds of the PS4), and 8GB of standard DDR3 memory, but with 32MB of embedded memory for the graphics frame buffer. That's similar to the Xbox 360 which has 10MB of embedded RAM and the PlayStation 2, which had 2MB.
Both approaches are entirely workable. The PS4 has faster access to general memory; the 720 will probably have faster access to the frame buffer, while keeping costs down for main memory. For a general-purpose system the 720 chip would allow 32GB (or maybe more) of cheap RAM coupled with integrated graphics at least twice as fast as anything available today.
Where it gets interesting is comparing the development process for this generation of consoles to the previous generation. Sony, with Toshiba and IBM, spent about $2 billion developing the Cell chip that powers the PlayStation 3. For the PlayStation 4, they just called up AMD and asked for an a-la-carte chip based entirely on existing designs.
And AMD has said they're open to providing the same service to other customers. While there's still huge barriers to entry for new consoles - first and foremost, getting attention from developers - 95% of the NRE (non-recoverable engineering) expenses have just evaporated, and the market is wide open for innovation.
* The previous generation was all PowerPC; now two out of three will be x86, or rather, x64.
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10:31 PM
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Down The Rathole
Touch looks like it's made the Tru Calling mistake - introduce a bad guy and simultaneously try to explain the basic premise.
Touch looks like it's made the Tru Calling mistake - introduce a bad guy and simultaneously try to explain the basic premise.
There's a rule of thumb in speculative fiction, that for each story you're given one wild card. You can also pick and choose from the standard tropes, even if they're impossible - if you need FTL to make your space opera work, you get that for free as long as it's not the key to the entire plot. Same for dragons in a fantasy adventure; so long as their mere existence isn't the beginning and end of the story, they're a standard enough element that you can just borrow them into your world.
In Tru Calling (and this isn't much of a spoiler) the wild card is time travel, of a specific and limited sort: What if you could reset your day and start again? And it worked really well as a plot hook, and allowed them to tell spin out some pretty complex hypotheticals. And then they started to lay out an explanation for how it works, and at the same introduce an adversary, and the show went down the drain and got cancelled.
In Touch it's magical savants. The idea is that some people on the autistic spectrum (just a handlful, not all of them) aren't just wired differently, but instead (and possibly literally) god-touched, able to see patterns in mathematics and in the world to such a degree that they can predict the future - of people they have never even met, and then change that future. And the way the stories are told, and the fact that in reality people are more interconnected than you might think, makes the whole thing work.
So in the second season they've introduced a bad guy and started to explain the underlying mechanism of it all.
Also it lacks a young Eliza Dushku, so that's two strikes, maybe three depending on how you're counting.
Bet it's not back for a third season.
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