There’s that one story or rumor (“stormor”?) about how Walt Disney came up with the look of Mickey Mouse.  Circles and ovals are the most visually-pleasing shapes, and their convexity reminds us of something that is wholesome, smooth, and friendly.

Ah, but you see, three ovals might read “mouse” but that’s really the entire extent of the shape’s message. For me, the design of the basic Mickey silhouette does not convey a sense of personality or action.

But aha! Japan gave us Pac-Man, who is a only mere fraction of a circle.  Bare-boned and simple, the Pac-Man shape speaks so much with so little; a yellow circle with a deprived sector as a mouth.  Freaking brilliant.  Pac-Man is just simply Pac-Man, neither human nor animal…but somehow, just by its design, we can get a glimpse of his personality without the context of the game.

It’s really no wonder that so many designers use Pac-Man as a source of inspiration.  Here’s a good list of awesome Pac-Man inspired design-y items.  Read it and weep (and maybe buy).

Pac-Man Potholder:

Goddammit, why did I never think of this before?  I’m not too crazy about the eyes but I love how the maze pattern inside also acts as friction grip.

from Vat 19 [$14.95]

Pac-Man Leather iPod Case:

Cute to use the Pac-Man body over the iPod controls… though I wonder if his mouth poses scrolling problems.

from Videogame Central  [$29.99]

Pac-Man Candy Tin:

So simple, so sleek.  Funnier if the candy inside were shaped like fruits from the game.

from Anime Castle  [$2.99]

Pac-Man Power Pellet Ring:

Okay, so the design doesn’t feature a whole Pac-Man but it definitely captured the feel of the hungry little guy.  I’ve seen a lot of this type of “tension setting” jewelry on etsy but never this clever!

from Etsy [$55]

My husband got his first Capcom-unity dating spam today.

He feels very validated.

Read, then guffaw:

Hello Dear
I’m just browsing now in the Internet and found your profile on
www.capcom-unity.com and it captured my interest i decided to drop few words to you.
I’m miss linna by name,please i will like us to hold a good
relationship with a real love,I’m happy to look at your profile today,you
sound so gentle to me that was  why i fell very much interested in writing
you,contact me through my  personal box (linnadokie@yahoo.com) for more
introduction,also i will send my pictures to you so we can know more about each
other,i will be happy to see your response my dear,age or colour even distance
can’t deny any genuine love,so please lets give our self a trial,thanks till
i hear from you
misslinna

Not that I’m religious or anything but saying “Happy Easter” to people does put a nice bounce to my step. The best Easter surprise so far (aside from dozen flutes of mimosas) came from my email inbox. Ania from Warsaw, a fellow talented artsy gamer girl, sent me a photo of this:

I am floored.

Painstakingly beautiful stain-glass versions of WoW character with a complete Warcraft map draped behind it.  I don’t think I even have that much patience to do something exquisite like that.  Ania on the process:

Well, fist i drew on the egg with a graphic pen, the kind that can write on any surface. I drew the continents
and simple character outlines. Than I busted out my acrylic paint and painted the surface.
And last i retouched the contours with the pen again.

So i think the whole thing took about an hour a half maybe more, I was really into it so I’m not sure
I realised a more “realistic” or illustrative style wouldn’t work, or really fit on to the egg.

Also, I love that the Outlands whirl Maelstrom looks like a giant meteorological typhoon.  Reminds me of home a lot.

Thanks so much Ania! You’ve brightened up my Easter Sunday!

The 20×2 event features 20 people from all walks of life who have only 2 minutes to answer an extremely open-ended question. The ninth 20×2 event was held in Austin at SXSW this past Monday at The Parish Room. I still feel so fortunate and honored to be one of 20 presenters!

“What’s it gonna take?”

I gave a little intro before this video. I talked about how I was a very weak kid and got severely sick all the time. And when you’re a bedridden 6 year-old in the 1980’s, there was only one place you can find comfort, companionship, and answers to your life questions: The NES.

This was my first real video project!  I used NEStopia (free!), and Camtasia (free too!) to capture the footage.  I couldn’t get Fraps to work with emulators, so I used a free trial of Camtasia.  Thanks to Vinny Sciabica for his wonderful arrangement of the Mario star theme.

All in all, I had oodles of fun at the event.  Thanks to the good peeps at 20×2 and all the rockin’ people there.  Even Mark Zupan talked to me! Not too shabby, eh?

This:

And here’s what I said about it:

Global Star’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory could have been a real trip to an amazing place — a melding of jaw-dropping artistic style and license success that would have been a journey with nothing to be directly compared to. There was a real chance for this game to be more then just another licensed game, a real chance for gamers to get a behind-the-scenes tour of the magic of Mr. Wonka’s factory were candy flows endlessly and wild imagination runs amuck.

Well…it’s not.

For anyone who knows that “licensed game” is a derogatory term, this review isn’t going to tell you anything you don’t already know. For parents looking for a game for your children, this isn’t it. Your children have better games already, and will resent you for making them “enjoy” the choppy graphics, nausea-inducing cameras, and lackluster gameplay. For everyone who is still interested in the tour, follow me as we go into Charlie and the Ridiculously Miserable Game.

The magic of Wonka’s factory was left in the chocolate waterfalls of Tim Burton’s movie and the pages of Roald Dahl’s book. What has been presented to the public isn’t a private trip through the Chocolate Factory; it’s a tour of duty as downtrodden, Oompa-Loompa slave labor. Hi, you play Charlie, and now you have to clean up everybody’s mess by ordering the questionably dark-skinned Oompa-Loompas to work while your bratty, malicious, fellow ticket-winners continue on with the fun and the tour.

Then I go ranting on for a couple of paragraphs, and ended with this:

The most depressing aspect of this below-average game is that it involved two personal childhood cult heroes: Tim Burton and Roald Dahl. I wanted to enjoy this game and was secretly hoping this would follow the licensed-sleeper successes of Riddick and GoldenEye 007. As I painfully maneuvered my Charlie from room to room, I grew more and more desperate in my attempt to find redeeming qualities in the game. So desperate that my “pro list” consisted of bullet points like “Charlie’s voice is done by the same actor from the movie,” “the controls are okay at best,” “the music is jaunty,” “this game is in color,” and finally, “at least this game doesn’t punch me in the face.”

Whole review is here, you know, if you feel like punishing yourself one day.

I’m not scared of the woodshop- I just don’t trust myself.  I’ve belt-sanded my knuckles twice and accidentally melted a plastic bucket while spot welding.  So of course, I’m impressed by people who just dive right into woodworking and come out with awesome projects and healthy knuckles.

My guildie friend Zander has been working on replicating some of the coolest videogame weapons.  And this is a photo of his recent project:

Holy crap!  It’s a life-like model of the sentry from Team Fortress II!  Look at that candy apple red!  Now this is what it looks like in the game:

If I had attempted to make that, I’m sure I would’ve lost a limb by now.

At the 2007 GDC Sony Keynote, Phil Harrison yapped about “the 3.0 phenomenon” that the PS3 is going to bring into the gaming and online landscapes.  He supported this argument by demoing LittleBigPlanet, and the crowd went wild.  Now, I’m no media expert so I have no idea whether or not LittleBigPlanet fulfilled Sony’s often overly ambitious prophecies.  This whole 3.0 thing could be made up marketing jargon for all I know.  But I do know this- LBP brought a fresh visual aesthetic to the world of design.  The craftsy texture look can go wrong in so many ways.  But backed by the concept of small worlds and planets, MM was able to make the most stylish digital solar system diorama ever made.  The calm emptiness of outer space,  and the bright, loud “handmade” system of planets sing beautiful and quirky songs together.

So ever since LBP’s debut, I’ve been anticipating a LBP copycat design explosion- websites, T-shirts, games, printed material, the whole enchilada.  I’ve been keeping an eye out for things like white with hot pink, burlap, cardboard, and knitted textures, iconography, sticker treatments, clay objects, and so forth.  So far, I haven’t seen anything that really has that signature LBP feel.  This is both bad and good; on one hand, I’m glad no one’s trying to rip off of that style, but then again, this might indicate that LBP didn’t make much of a mainstream design splash.

But today, I finally found something that definitely looked LBPy to me: a commercial for British Gas.  It’s part LBP, part Mario Galaxy, and part Coraline.  It makes sense that British Gas would want to send a message distinguishing themselves as a more intimate entity.

I’m a giant Bubble Bobble nut, and although I never finished the whole game on the Famicom, I did spent a lot of years back in 8th grade perfecting my Bubble Bobble skills when I discovered NES emulators.  I used to take notes on certain levels; crafting nice cocktail matrix of timing specifics, special bonus items, warp umbrellas, and foe moving patterns.  Also, it helped that I didn’t really have a life in 8th grade.

So Japan gaming magazine/bible Famitsu has a screenshot-heavy article about the upcoming Bubble Bobble Wii.  My burning questions are: is it going to still have the same 8-bit charm as the original?  Will the new gameplay be worth it?  Will this game be so awesome that I will resort back to the obsessive hermit ways of my 8th grade self?  Or will this revitalized version shatter my treasured childhood memories (I’m looking at you, Galaga: Legions)?

Observation #1:

First off, I’m sorry, the new Bubble Bobble dinosaurs are fug.  I dare say they’re even panda-dogs.  My main complaint is that the top-most dinosaur spike/saggital crest is way too prominent so it looks like a giant spike.  Head spikes are for lowly henchman foes in 8-bit video games.  They’re like the Red Shirts of the monster squad.  Bubble Bobble dinos are heroes, goddammit, and they deserve to be cute and likeable.

Observation #2:

HOLY CRAP, SLOPES!  This is probably the biggest new change in the game, in my opinion.  It’d be interesting to see if gravity has an effect on the sloped surfaces.  Will you automatically slide down, or do you need to press down to slide down?  Will the BB dinos move slower when walking uphill?  Since the dinosaurs in the screenshot above all are standing on flat surfaces, my guess is that there is automatic slide, and you can only escape from sloped trapped spaces by bubble-jumping yourself out.  Makes sense, since Famitsu is hyping about the difficulty of the new game.

Observation #3:

So there’s up to 4P multiplayer in Bubble Bobble Wii.  BUT, from the screen above, it seems like some of the attack item bubbles are color coded according to the player colors.  This might mean that the bubble attacks like lightning and fire are player-specific.  I have no idea whether or not this will hurt or enhance multiplayer.  I guess in theory, in a co-op game, players have to work together and delegate bubble duty; and in a versus game, someone can sabotage others by bursting and wasting their attack bubbles.

Observation #4:

Wow, these are some of the worst textures I’ve ever seen.  These look like they were made from an illegal copy Photoshop 3 Elements.

Mystery #5:

THESE LETTERS ON THE LEFT ARE KILLING ME!  I’ve always liked the E-X-T-E-N-D 1UP bubble collecting mini-game but what could the letters on the left be spelling?

H_RO_ _ _

_V_R

Help!

More photos here!

When I first heard that Ryan Scott’s personal site is called “Geekbox,” I thought it was one of those niche alt-porn sites where boyfriends post half-naked pictures of the girlfriends covering their nether regions with game controllers. Mind in the gutter, I know.

But Geekbox is not superficially-geek or lip-service-geek.  “Geek” is so fashionably in right now, mired in Napoleon Dynamite schwag from Hot Topic and online photos of girls in “Achievement Unlocked” panties.  But standing in the fiery core of true geekdom are people like Ryan Scott.  A hero, defender, and keeper of the silicon-lined gates of nerddom.  And guess what?  He has a podcast!

Geekbox Podcast Episode 1

Clocking in over two hours, the Ryan Scott and Co. talk about their personal games of the year, comic book picks, LOST theories, Star Trek fan fic, childhood rivalries, Burn Notice, and offbeat dating.  The best part?  It was recorded in a comic book store.  How many podcasts can boast about that?