I am a Tetsuya Mizuguchi fanboy. It’s true. Not just due to the superb game that is Rez either. It’s clear from reading the odd interview that he views games as potentially becoming so much more than they currently are. I love devs who make polished action games as much as the next gamer, but developers who are really looking to progress and rethink gaming have even more of my respect.

To quote: "games will become a media of expression." Honestly, that’s a beautiful phrase. Will Wright seems to hold a similar view, that gaming should be explored as a fantastic tool for encouraging creative expression. Oh, and just to prove he’s no a one trick pony, apparently Tetsuya’s next-gen Xbox game won’t be music focused. Here’s an interesting video interview with the guy (his English can make it slightly hard to follow but stick with it). Amusingly, joystiq seem to have ripped the Kikizo graphic for their news icon. Tsk tsk.

Um, gosh. Sign me up. Certainly one of those ideas that’s so obvious once you hear about it. I almost wish they came up with this idea for the next Xbox joypad too.

Very interesting piece here that claims the PSP is underclocked in software. Hardly too surprising - Sony really did try to jump a generation here when it comes to handheld 3D graphics and had to sacrifice battery life accordingly. The DS is much closer to where you’d expect things to be at this stage i.e. N64 graphics. It’s already pretty crazy that the PSP has twice as high a battery capacity as the DS yet well over half the battery life. I also can’t see battery technology taking THAT big a jump in the next few years, but who knows what Sony are planning? (Via Kotaku)

The hard drives in new ThinkPads and Power Books have a motion sensor so they can park the drive heads if it thinks it’s being kicked around or something. Now, someone has written software that lets you use the motion sensor as a game controller, tilting the laptop in midair. Brilliant.

It also makes me want WarioWare Twisted even more. Having said that, my experiences a while back with a Microsoft tilt joypad were fairly unimpressive though there weren’t exactly games around at the time to take advantage of it.

Very clever stuff here - bits on hard drives currently lay magnetic pole to magnetic pole. This silly but brilliant Flash sequence from Hitachi shows how they’re turning the bits so they stand up. The platters have to be thicker but they can fit a LOT more data.

The funny thing is, it turns out Toshiba and Seagate have similar technology in the works. Interesting how technology developments like this can occasionally turn up at the same time from different sources. Or maybe it’s just corporate spying.

Utterly, utterly pointless, but so very cool nonetheless. Scan finger print, wander round a digital 3D maze generated from said scan.

I like to think that in time the DS will see neat ideas like this with games that use the mike and touch screen in ways previously unheard of. Obviously, that’s where Nintendo were already going with it though. I’ll shut up now. Via Waxy.org.

It’s official - Tim Schafer gives a god damn great interview. Really must get round to pre-ordering Psychonauts, and I do hope it gets the sales it deserves unlike some of his previous games.

Via the wonders of del.icio.us - Elite for the GBA. It’s a homebrew port of the BBC version, widely considered the best. I guess this is where I shamefully admit to never even trying this oft-revered game, time to fix that!

Awesome. Was reminded of this by a post on Wonderland, so might as well link that too - gaming related singing. Crazy, in a good way. Great to see games sneak into all kinds of new areas.

Digital trigger above each analogue one, wings to grip ala the Dreamcast pad but wider, no cord… looks good to me. Plus the leaked images match up with ones officially released on ourcolony.net. I’m sold already, though it’d better be rechargable or have bloody long battery life.

Co-Founder of Westwood, still working there (well, the RTS studio of EA LA, as they’ve now become). Interesting read which reveals his thoughts on game design and management methods as well as other things.

Alice got me thinking again. The otherwise superb Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is currently desperate to get me trying Air Waves chewing gum. It’s been prominent in every cutscene so far which frankly annoys. Fisher using a Nokia? Fine. AMD sticker on the load screen and in-game PCs? Fine. Sticking AirWaves front and centre for the first few seconds of a cutscene, having already pointlessly shown Fisher popping some in his mouth during the last cutscene ? Practically insulting and likely to make me never buy their damn gum on principle.

Yes, this is a bit ranty, but my point is advertising in games can be fine, it just has to be sensibly done rather than shoved in your face. It’s like banner ads versus popups really, I just hope game publishers catch onto the difference sooner than online ad agencies did. Funcom seem to going about it in the right way so far, though it must be a bit odd seeing modern ads in a futuristic game.