I started listening to the excellent Battleship Pretension film podcast a few months ago. Hosts Tyler Smith and David Bax are really solid and go deep on movies in a way I rarely see elsewhere. They’ve now expanded their reach to videos as well over at Youtube. Nice discussion topics here averaging no more than ten minutes along with good production values.
I dig really small, specialized web tools that do one job well. Degreees, a new temperature app, nails that pretty much perfectly. Nice job by the Finely production team here. Just head over and allow the site to scan your location. You’ll get the forecast for your area rendered with lovely CSS3.
Keith Stuart at The Guardian writes on plot problems in Max Payne 3:
But here’s a problem. Throughout the game’s beautifully constructed narrative sequences, we see Payne going through agonies of recrimination and remorse…When the game begins he’s effectively drinking himself to death in his filthy New Jersey apartment. He desperately seeks some form of salvation.
…Yet he is also an accomplished killer, capable of gunning down a room full of “enemies” in a matter of seconds.
Much like an article I linked to several weeks ago, Stuart identifies an issue running through many modern games: You craft a complex, conflicted or “good” character in the main storyline cutscenes, but have no trouble murdering thousands of bad guys during the action. How do we reconcile these issues?
The Gameological Society, a new gaming spinoff of The A.V. Club, interviews game designers on the challenges of establishing setting. There’s analysis here of three different games, each with widely different aesthetic and mood: Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Yakuza and Final Fantasy XII.
I especially liked the breakdown of Deux Ex’s futuristic Detroit setting, on setting the right balance of freedom for the player character:
The goal, then, isn’t to make the city big, but to make it seem big. It’s all about how you wrestle out that illusion of urbanity. “The player must feel like he has freedom of exploration, that he can be creative with the environment,” Jacques-Belletête said. “At the same time, we need to set limits and boundaries in the world and these boundaries must feel ‘natural.’ We think a lot about what these boundaries will be.”
The boundaries can be superficial. A police barricade, a boarded up door, a chain link fence that’s just too high to jump. Those boundaries can be masked, though, by any number of perceptual means. “A great trick to make the city feel bigger and livelier than it actually is with the sound. Having dogs bark in the distance, the echoes of police sirens, and people talking and babies crying when you get near windows of apartment buildings. The streets of our game don’t have cars moving in them. But with each opportunity we had, you can see moving cars in the distance—on overpasses, on the other side of fences, and other such places.”
Designer Craig Mod:
This is an essay for book lovers and designers curious about where the cover has been, where it’s going, and what the ethos of covers means for digital book design. It’s for those of us dissatisfied with thoughtlessly transferring print assets to digital and closing our eyes.
The cover as we know it really is — gasp — ‘dead.’ But it’s dead because the way we touch digital books is different than the way we touch physical books. And once you acknowledge that, useful corollaries emerge.
Virtually all my reading these days is electronic but man, Craig has some amazing, gorgeous cover examples here.
(As an aside, can I just say how incredible FF Tisa looks on this page? Makes me start to question my own designs, in a good way.)
Film Crit Hulk over at Badass Digest wrote an extremely in depth breakdown of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive back in March. I finally caught up and read the whole thing last weekend, and it’s incredible. Mulholland Drive is one of those films that started out completely indecipherable on my first viewing. I’ve seen it at least twice since then, and it’s grown to be one of my favorite films of the past decade. As always, Hulk can be distracting with his ALL CAPS style, but he nails a lot of what makes this film so good. I love his break down of Naomi Watt’s audition scene:
HULK THINKS THIS ENTIRE SEQUENCE IS ONE OF THE GREATEST SCENES IN MOVIE HISTORY FOR A SHIT LOAD OF REASONS. THE FIRST IS THE WAY LYNCH ORCHESTRATES THE FUCKING THING. WE’RE SO READY FOR SOME SORT OF COMEDIC REHASHING OF BETTY’S HAM PERFORMANCE EARLIER, BUT THAT DOESN’T HAPPEN. WE JUST ENTER THEIR LITTLE SCENE SO BEAUTIFULLY THAT ALL THOSE THOUGHTS DROP FROM OUR MIND. WE JUST FALL INTO THE SCENE THEY’RE DOING. LYNCH NEVER CUTS AWAY, STAYING CLOSE ON THE TWO ACTORS’ HEADS, BUT LOOSE ENOUGH FOR IT TO FEEL EASY. LOOSE ENOUGH TO FEEL THEIR PASSION AND QUIET MOVEMENT. EMOTIONALLY WE SEEP RIGHT IN. BUT WE ALSO GET INVOLVED. WE KNOW THE SENSE OF THE STORY. WE FEEL THE CHARACTERS’ HISTORY.
WE FORGET EVERYTHING. WE FORGET WHO BETTY IS. WE FORGET WHO THIS GUY IS. WE EVEN FORGET WE’RE IN A FUCKING AUDITION ROOM. AND WHEN IT PULLS BACK WE REMEMBER WHERE WE ARE AND WE FEEL THE SAME EXACT WAY EVERYONE IN THE ROOM DOES… JUST THIS HOLY. FUCKING. SHIT.
… AND HULK THINKS IT’S PERFECT CINEMA.
What are the future elements or tags that best support responsive images? A List Apart tackles the debate between the Responsive Images Community Group (RICG) and a browser manufacturer proposed alternative. Essential reading for web developers.
Stephen Hackett:
It really seems like this bigger iPhone story is picking up steam, and that’s fine, I suppose. I’m just at the point where I don’t give a shit about this kind of thing…Even after it’s announced, I don’t think I’ll care about it being 3.99 or 4 inches across. Seriously, the numbers — and this story — aren’t important.
Bingo.
Gamespot writer Hilary Goldstein argues how Microsoft should shape the Xbox successor to remain competitive. I’m not so hot on her arguments for “Kinect integration for all games” (many games are better addressed with a standard controller) or to bundle an HD Kinect on every system (guaranteed to push system costs up by at least $50-100, which would hurt Microsoft against its competition). Still, many make a lot of sense: throw in Blu-ray, raise the bottom end system setup, and branch off into new first party gaming franchises.
Jeffrey Zeldman, talking about the (semi-controversial) redesign of his own personal site:
Even our best clients can sometimes push back, and even our most thrilling projects typically contain some element of compromise. A personal site is where you don’t have to compromise. Even if you lose some readers. Even if some people hate what you’ve done. Even if others wonder why you aren’t doing what everyone else who knows what’s what is doing.
Great points here. A lot of the work I did here on nickschaden.com was based on experimentation that I could only toy with on other paid jobs. Doing something for only yourself – a personal site, side project, something else fun on Github – is sometimes our best opportunity for growth.