Smartwombat Blog

Crayon Physics

Crayon Physics

Bloxorz, cool game to waste your time

A very nice flash game for relaxing. The aim is to put the bloc in the whole, but to not fall down at the edges. It gets quite challenging on the higher levels...

Play Bloxorz

HALO3 on MSN

Awesome! Ordered the game!

E3 2006 Coverage - Random links

Coverage of xbox360, PS3 and Nintendo Wii from E3, but I think the most important one is HALO3 :)

Out of the three, Nintendo Wii looks the most interesting, although I am not sure about the whole controller thing! There are some really interesting games coming for Wii: Warioware: Smooth Moves (I would expect this game to be fun to play with the new controller),  The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Super Mario Galaxy First Look,  Metroid Prime 3: Corruption Hands-On.

Mario Live!

Check this video. Live on stage.. .the first level of Mario! Pretty Cool!

DirectX SDK (April 2006) is out

With loads of new stuff but I could not bother to write them down. :)

Download:

• DirectX April 2006Full SDK
• DirectX April 2006 Symbol files
• DirectX April 2006 End-User runtime
• DirectX April 2006 WebSetup

Microsoft is buying Lionhead

Mech Commander 2 Shared Source

Microsoft released their Mech Commander 2 game's source code as part of their XNA stuff. I did not try to build it and never played it, but this is really cool way to get you started with XNA. The download is rather large (1069 MB).  The trial version of the game can be found here.

Download Mech Commander 2 source.

Rocket Commander

RocketCommander is a Managed DirectX game published on the German Coding4Fun site. It looks pretty awesome, check the screenshots. You can download the game and the source too from here. Pretty Cool!

Sony employee fired for commenting on PS3 development

Some fragment from the article:

Josh Robinson, a former Sony Online Entertainment employee, never imagined that his comments on PlayStation 3 development and comparisons with the Xbox 360 would get him kicked out of SOE.

Last month, Josh posted an article in Downinfront.tv, commenting on PS3 development. He revealed that at the time of his writing there was no final hardware development kits and that SOE got one of only five PS3 development kits delivered in the U.S. But probably what irritated his bosses the most was Robinson’s comments on the superiority of the Xbox 360:

I’ve also talked with people on the technical side of the XBOX 360. The consistent comment I am hearing from people on my end is, 'The XBOX 360 is better'.

Read the full article on teamxbox.com.

John Carmack says xbox360 will be id's primary platform ...

"The Xbox 360 will probably will be id's primary development platform. As it is right now, we would get the game up on the 360. When I would do major hack-and-slash architectural changes it was back on the PC, but it’s looking like the Xbox 360 will be our target. All of our tools are on the PC, and we’re maintaining the game running on the PC, but probably all of our gameplay development and testing will be done on the Xbox 360. It’s a really sweet development system."

from John Carmack Talks Graphics.

Xbox 360 to the Rescue

"I have not seen a hardware/software system as well thought out as the Xbox 360 for a decade or more."

John C. Dvorak - PC Magazine

He seems to like the new xbox360. Read the whole article
Xbox 360 to the Rescue

He is dead right with this :

"The commercial failure of the Media Center PC and other initiatives is generally because of their increasing complexity. Any hardware or software product will, over time, incorporate new features rather than improve old features. Inevitably, the learning curve becomes too steep for new users. Thus, the product is usable only by longtime users.

This is happening with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator and with some smartphones. It has also happened with many "hard-core" video games. The term hard-core reveals their market: people who have played the earlier versions to an extreme.

The temptation to add more and more features to a product—"creeping featurism"—seems irresistible. Adding this and that is a lot easier than fixing complicated or obscure features. This is the checklist approach to development: Once a feature is added and checked off the list, it is time to move to the next. It doesn't matter that the feature is incredibly difficult to use.—Continue reading

This is a problem with clones of Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. The clones have all the features on the checklist, but try to use them or even find them! The best Word clones should be either functionally identical to Word—keystroke for keystroke—or totally simplified. But making software easier is harder than simply adding features.

This brings me back to the Xbox 360, which has incorporated complex new features but seemingly has not overshot the user's abilities with hard-to-use features. In fact, I have not seen a hardware/software system this well thought out for a decade or more. But what's remarkable is the potential for the Xbox to open the market for the Media Center PC by becoming a middleman or coordinator."

Inside Xbox 360...

A fresh look at the Xbox 360 from the inside...

Inside Microsoft's Xbox 360 from anandtech.

Nintendo becomes the Apple of the console market

I like this pundit style title I just came up with for this post. But seriously, looking at the recent games released for the xbox, ps2 platforms and the games coming out for Nintendo DS. And also looking at the recent development's of the game industry such as the big names (game studios) are going to release mainly for xbox and sony's playstation only and that they sticking to the genres what are working because of the higher and higher cost of producing games will limit this market to be the big boy's playground only. This kind of environment is not going to help the smaller studios to compete with the big studios on those platforms, nor helping to bring out the kind of games that never been done or seen before. I think Nintendo will have small market share and a very different experience in games compared to the other platforms. Nintendo's platform will be dominated by Nintendo and other smaller names and the company is well known about their revolutionary games and that they have the guts to come up with something never done before.
Looking at the coming generation of consoles it looks like that the other two consoles are going to be much more powerful and sexy than Nintendo's Revoultion, making lot of people to dismiss the company as it is going to have the same fate as SEGA. I think this is going to be different with them, somehow they always managed to come up with something sexy to make it a must buy. At least for me.

Think of the Reviolution for example. If they really going to make most of their previously released games downloadable for free, or for a small fee it is going to be a very appelling choice for many gamers. For example I bought GameCube just to play Zelda. I should confess that I never played with my GameCube ever since, but I did not regret that decision to buy it. And I just saw WarioWare for the Nintendo DS, there is something really cool in that game and I see myself in the near future buying it... and I already told you about Revolution. But wait a minute, the game catalogue is something else as well. It is a really great start of doing online gaming for the Revolution, at least it is significantly more than I saw from Sony. But back to the Apple-Nintendo connection. Nintendo seem to be a marginal player in this arena, but they also seem to have a better grip on how to magical and never before seen stuff for people, just like Apple. So at the moment things are not looking too rosy for them, but if they manage to differentiate themselves enough form xbox and ps then they can suspend some of the most critical rules of the market - think about the mandatory loss on console hardware - and survive. So I think I made the decision already about my next gen console purchase. One xbox360 for my conservative half and one Nintendo console for the other half who believes in the REVOLUTION ;-)

You may also interested to read this interview with Shigeru Miyamoto from Wired:
The Man Who Keeps Nintendo Cool. 

Half Life 2 Domino

Using the physics of Half-Life 2 to set up an amazing domino routine.

Click here to watch the video.

Isnide the Xbox 360 (from arstechinca)

Inside the Xbox 360, part I: procedural synthesis and dynamic worlds
Inside the Xbox 360, Part II: the Xenon CPU

Xbox vs Ps3 from majornelson.com

Xbox 360 faceplates start trading on eBay

"The "E3" faceplate, made for the Xbox 360's unveiling at the annual Electronics Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles this week, was being bid as high at $165 on eBay, despite the fact that it will be at least five months before users get their hands on the successor to the first Xbox. "

form Reuters.

Sony presents the playstation3

I beleive that the grill function is made possible because of their ultra powerfull CELL cpu.  

Picture taken from http://www.grandviper.com/

Why is the design of xbox360 like it is?

"Microsoft's Xbox team was sure of one thing when it set out to design a new console: If the system won the approval of Japanese consumers, then others would love it as well.
The goal sounded simple enough, but it was something Microsoft had failed at before. The company has sold only 1.7 million original Xbox consoles in Japan, where gamers deplored the system as too brash and bulky.
"You couldn't get it through the door of apartments in a lot of places," joked Peter Moore, a corporate vice president in the Xbox division. "

Each design firm Microsoft had approached initially tried to mimic the aggressive feel of the original Xbox. The Xbox team had to steer the firms in the opposite direction, using phrases like, "Less Hulk, more Bruce Lee."
Jonathan Hayes has had the biggest hand in designing the next Xbox machine. He works at Microsoft and has spent the past two years shepherding the design process for Xbox 360. 
"They'd say, 'OK, Xbox was this much testosterone and this much raw brute force last generation, so it's going to be even angrier and have more machismo in the next,' " Hayes said. "It took us a little while in every case to instruct the partner that no, we were going to go somewhere different."

from The story behind new Xbox design