In my history of video game music series I sung the praises of LucasArts games in general and Monkey Island 2 in particular. I steered clear of the original Monkey Island, partly because I never played it, partly because I wanted to give it an entry all of its own.
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Responsive design. You can’t go anywhere on the internet without tripping over the term. And what a wonderful thing it is. Using modern CSS and Javascript techniques to let the same site reflow its content to fit different window sizes, growing and shrinking, showing and hiding as needed. It makes for some truly slick sites and, perhaps more importantly, reduces the maintenance effort by having less code and design to maintain since you no longer have to have separate sites for different sizes and devices – at least not to the same extent you’re used to.
But how does it work? That’s what I wanted to know, and this article is the fruits of my – admittedly lazy – research. A simple style sheet for a bare-bones responsive page.
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Icons and symbols surround us, digitally and physically, and we give the vast majority of them a vanishingly small amount of attention. By and large we know what they represent and what they mean. A recycle bin on your desktop. A stop sign on the road. They are ubiquitous to the point that we barely actually see them as actual visual images any more, simply a representation of a concept. We all know what a fire exit symbol looks like but could you actually draw one? Maybe, maybe not. Without looking could you describe the DVD-drive icon on your computer? Do you know what the colours each letter is in Google’s logo?
So, icons are everywhere and we barely see them on a conscious level. The argument then that common icons can actually colour our perceptions of what they represent might be met with scepticism. It’s an icon, it means what it means. Not necessarily. The Accessible Icon Project certainly don’t think so. They’ve been redesigning the ‘International Symbol of Access’ – the wheelchair symbol – with the explicit goal of altering people’s perception of it and those it represents.
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Since Kickstarter kicked off I’ve only backed a few projects – Sparki, Sui Generis and the Heroes of Video Game Music album – and now I’m about to add another one to the list, and you should too.
Universim. Kickstart Universim.
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This has been sitting in my “to post” bucket for a couple of months now, so better late than never I guess. Just watch this video of young musician Li-chin LI from the Taiwan Philharmonic playing the Super Mario Bros theme on a towering obsidian cathedral Chinese mouth organ.
Time has come to join the dark side. Take a trip to the other side of Teana, to the part of the world that has yet remained unseen to the royal bounty hunters.
One day we’ll get a sequel to King’s Bounty, but until then we can content ourselves with an endless stream of expandalones. To be fair, these do add significant new content and let me pour even more of my precious life-seconds into the game, but they aren’t sequels damnit.
Still… the latest not-a-sequel looks interesting. Due this summer King’s Bounty: Dark Side has you taking the part of the ‘bad guys’. Yes, in previous games you could load up your army with Orcs and lead a ravaging horde of greenskins leaving nothing but death in your wake, but now you can do it as a demon, orc or vampire.
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If you charted the current best time for speedruns of popular games over time I’m not sure you’d get an exponential decay but certainly there’d be something analogous to a half-life. In this case, the time for Half-Life has just decayed to 20 minutes and 41 seconds thanks to a monstrously feat of research, planning and bunny-hopping by a team of players. 317 segments, two-thirds of which are fewer than 5 seconds long.
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The problem with working under a post buffer at least a month long and being too lazy to reorder things to make them more sensible is that when I post the soundtrack to a game I’m playing it makes much more sense at the time. Hence Tower of Guns which came out over a month ago but is still wonderfully fresh and new at the time of writing – game and soundtrack both.
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With Skyrim and Oblivion taking the Elder Scrolls series to the masses, it’s common among longtime fans to declare that Morrowind was the high point of the series. Wrongly, obviously, Daggerfall being – for the time – a staggering game that made everything that followed look small and samey. But I won’t deny that Morrowind was one of the most imaginative and interesting game worlds yet created, and the music takes me instantly right there.
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Remember about a year ago I mentioned a speedrun of VVVVVV, where someone beat the game in under 14 minutes? And compared that to the tool-assisted run of under 13 minutes? And then I said something almost prescient…
Barring a disruptive new glitch or strategy, that run is an indication of the theoretical fastest possible time that can be achieved, by a computer or a human.
Well…
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