GROW Ornament

The guys at eyezmaze have made a special holiday version of their awesome line of GROW games.

If you haven't played the GROW games, you're in for a real treat; these deceptively simple games are beautifully animated in Flash with surprisingly compelling gameplay. Be sure to check out the other GROW games while you're there.

Dancemat-enabled version of Santa vs. the Snow Monsters

Due to popular request, I've put up a dancemat-enabled version of Santa vs. the Snow Monsters game we did for this year's office holiday party. It's only been tested under Safari for Mac OS X, using a RedOctane USB dance mat, and there are no configuration options whatsoever (being a one-off we slapped together in a few days), so I hope it works for you. If not, well, I probably won't get a chance to hack on it until after the holidays, but send any issue descriptions to me anyway.

Happy holidays!

Pirates Water Test v2.0

I've updated the cartoon-style 3D water test that I put up a few days ago to a new version that includes a quick pirate ship that I threw together. This one isn't interactive, but it does show off some more cool stuff like how the wake of a ship might look, and how actual 3D geometry with cartoony textures might look in play.

Guitar Hero

Well, it's official. I'll never be a rock star. I know this because I start to choke even on the easy level of Guitar Hero, the new gimmick-controller game for the PS2. But this is irrelevant, because the game is a blast, and is up there with Shadow of the Colossus in sheer genius of game design. The controller (your "axe") is really well suited to the gameplay, and combined with the music score and play mechanics, really makes you feel like you're playing the music of some of the rock legends. All this is wrapped up in a polished and fun rock-themed interface and graphic style that makes you feel like you're clubbing it in your own living room.

The music ranges from Pantera to Boston, and the guitar hero avatars you can select range from angry teen girls (think Avril Levine) to aging rocksters (think John Lennon), so there should be something for everyone who likes rock music here. Best of all, each avatar has his or her own signature style for firing up the audience, which can be triggered by filling up a gauge by playing well, and then doing a rock pose with your guitar to activate it (serious!).

It really is a great game. Steep at $70 (or $140 for two!), but worth it - the tactile pleasure of holding a guitar in your hand and feeling like you are actually playing Symphony of Destruction or You Got Another Thing Comin' for a crowd of adoring fans is an experience you just don't get with the normal controllers. I give it two thumbs up...or rather, two fingers up: the index finger and the pinky.

Rock on, dudes.

Pirates water test

Today, I've been working on creating some water effects for the pirate-themed educational game we're building. Because we're going with a cartoony feel, and because we're modeling ocean water and not, say, a pool, I didn't think a full-blown simulation with refraction and reflection was appropriate (and would probably be too expensive processor-wise anyway), so I experimented with a particle-like system that draws cartoony waves and ripples across the surface of the water. The result, I think, looks pretty good and is fairly flexible and extensible for particular effects. It could, of course, get even more sophisticated with animated waves, splashes, and other effects, but for now, I think we have a proof of concept for how water can work in the game, which was one of the areas that I was most concerned about.

Judge cuts through the ID BS

Some good news for a change. A judge in Dover Pensylvania has ruled that "Intelligent Design" cannot be taught in public schools there. Score one for reason. It's refreshing to see the judge come out with a clear, unequivocal statement that ID is not science, but is merely an unethical wink-and-a-nudge attempt to "dress up" supernatural creationism in the mantle of science so that it can be taught in the public schools. He said:

We find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom...It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

Cue: outraged right-wingers decrying "activist judges."

Xyle Scope

Just stumbled upon a great little Mac app for web developers called Xyle Scope. It's a web browser (that uses the Safari engine) that allows you to interactively view all the style sheet and XHTML information of the page or any element you click on in the page. You can interactively experiment with the CSS (and save the changes if the files are local), see at a glance what rules in which files are being applied to elements (including the cascading precedence), see padding and margins, browse the hierarchical structure of the XHTML, and even browse the DTD. Well worth checking out if you use a Mac to do your web development.

Shameful acts

According to CNN, Bush is attacking people who want judicial oversight over citizen surveillance by saying:

My personal opinion is it was a shameful act, for someone to disclose this very important program in time of war. The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy.

It is in no way shameful. The New York Times sat on the story for an entire year waiting for the President to either come clean or get judicial oversight back into the process, but he just kept doing it.

The shameful act was instituting covert citizen surveillance when it has explicitly been outlawed by Congress. The shameful act was not respecting the basic principle of judicial oversight over the ability of law enforcement to pry into our lives. The shameful act was to try to smear people looking to stop some of our most fundamental freedoms from being bartered away in the name of a neverending war on terror.

Think about it. Ten years ago, what country would you think someone would be describing if they told you their leader instituted illegal secret surveillance of its citizens, held people offshore indefinitely in a network of secret prisons without access to counsel, and violated the Geneva Convention by using torture to extract information from prisoners? Would you even remotely have thought about America? These are the sorts of things that enemies of freedom, not defenders of freedom, engage in. The war on terror is no justification for waging a secret war on our civil liberties. Like Benjamin Franklin said:

They who can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Santa versus the Snow Monsters

Well, I've finally gotten around to releasing the web version of Santa versus the Snow Monsters.

It's a fun little diversion, but it's also a proof-of-concept for how we're planning on doing our environments and graphics for the pirates-themed educational game we're working on, and I think it turned out rather well, so if you like this look, you're liable to see more of it later.

The Good News and the Bad News

The good news is that today, I got carded. The bad news is that it was for trying to buy Nyquil.