random links: march 16, 2009

David Carlton — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 05:17:59 +0000

More links (and older links) than normal this time: Reader has developed a nasty habit of not showing me all the items with a given tag, so I didn’t realize that I hadn’t posted some of these already.

My favorite new blog: Dear Planetary Astronomer Mike. Learn about the history of the earth, or Pluto’s status as a planet.
An excellent Rock Band story. (I agree with the post that the comment is attached to as well, of course.)
A cool multimedia take on Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths”.
A particularly good optical illusion, from a blog full of them.
I’ve been meaning to do a longer response to this video by Shamus Young on why the difficult level in the new Prince of Persia game is so important, but I don’t seem to be getting around to it, so I’ll at least link to it here.
I am now convinced that I have to play Mother 3.
The Princess Rescuing Application: how game design might teach us to design better applications.
The latest Brainy Gamer podcast had a very interesting interview with a couple of the people behind Flower.(And yes, though it feels ridiculous, it seems increasingly likely that I’ll be buying a four-hundred dollar game console primarily to play a couple of downloadable five/ten buck games.)
I don’t generally have any interest in the “games as art” discussion (largely because many of the answers are so obvious; see the Rock Band post linked to above for another example of a discussion that I’m similarly bored with), but this post was worth reading.
A dot-matrix printer in Conway’s game of Life:
Ben Abraham just finished an excellent interview series with Marty O’Donnell on video game music: here’s the first part, and here’s a search for all the parts.
A soothing, meditative game.
Right vs. effective.
A pair of thoughts on choices in games.

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random links: march 16, 2009