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Working Calculator Created in LittleBigPlanet
jamie pointed out a really impressive creation from the LittleBigPlanet beta. The game allows the creation of puzzles from a collection of simple objects and tools. A player called upsilandre used 610 magnetic switches, 500 wires, 430 pistons, and a variety of other objects to create a functioning calculator that will do decimal/binary conversions as well as addition and subtraction. The creation does well to illustrate the potential for amazing creativity in level design. Another user recently designed a level to play the Final Fantasy X theme song. LittleBigPlanet is almost finished and set to be released later this month, though the controls may be refined in a future patch. We recently discussed a student level-design event at the Parsons New School for Design and Technology.
Fuckin'. Awesome.
I knew a low-level understanding of computing must be useful for something! ;)
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Someone has spelled out "BOOBLESS" on said virtual calculator. This comes 3 seconds after the level went public.
This reminds me of the way you can combine the various elements in Dwarf Fortress to be able to perform computations. The graphics are at a wee bit of a different level, though. :D
http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Mechanical_logic
Tell me - might you like Guitar Hero or an FPS if they weren't mainstream?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
As they say, there's no problem which cannot be solved by adding a level of abstraction.
1. There was a world full of physical objects, with all the interactions between them exactly as they should be.
2. Someone built an amazingly powerful calculator out of these parts.
3. Someone else built an amazingly complicated program which could be run by said calculator. The amazingly complicated program would simulate a very small subset of the physical world as described in 1. on the machine.
4. Someone else built a calculator out of the parts available in the world available in the program running on the powerful calculator. This second calculator was much more simple and less powerful than the first calculator.
In light of this newly discovered piece of illicit content, the ESRB has fined Media Molecule and slapped the game with an M rating.
Jack Thompson was quoted as saying "Oh, what cruel irony is this!? At a time when Sony has unleashed this family destroying game murder-simulating calculator on our children, I am no longer a lawyer!!"
I owned my first calculator 30 years ago and implemented my first one in BASIC not long after. If it's only just reached the capability of a machine with just a few K of RAM and a BASIC interpreter then it can't be very impressive. What is LittleBigPlanet anyway? The codename for the latest OS from Microsoft? Trust the /. editors not to provide any context.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I've, from time to time, mused about the possibility of trying to create a game with a 'programming' mini-game. This might not obviously be programming to most users - maybe it would use some sort of icon-based programming (which it sounds like LittleBigPlanet sort of has with this parts system). Maybe this could be a system to let users create their own spells in a magic game, or used as a 'hacking' mini-game in a sci-fi game (something like Bioshock or Mass Effect, but replace the simplistic GUI puzzle 'hacking' mini-game with a slightly more robust mini-game which actually encourages people to learn real programming techniques), or maybe the ability to give a ship or other piece of equipment new abilities in a sci-fi game.
Anyone know to what extent this idea has been tried in the past by any other games? The only thing that comes to my mind is a game I saw a few years ago (can't remember what it was called now), where the player was in some sort of base on Mars or one of the moons of Jupiter or something, and the player created these autonomous vehicles by combining parts (chasis, engine, wheels, breaks, batteries, and various 'logic components') using a wiring system (which is sort of like programming). Then the vehicles would be pitted against each other in a sort of arena. Sometimes you would be racing an obstacle course, other times the vehicles were fighting each other (you could get weapons which you could wire up to the vehicle).
I imagine that, for the game to gain any popularity, this should be a fairly optional part of the game, since most users might get a little overwhelmed by it, if it were complex enough to be fairly powerful.
Universal Turing Machine. Implemented using Conway's Game of Life.
Just amazing. If you know what those words mean, you HAVE to check that pattern out. I could watch in run for days. Just mind blowing.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
Reminds me of Marathon 2/Marathon Infinity--back before Aleph One and the addition of a scripting language, some people liked to use only standard game elements to create logic effects. One guy designed a half-adder cell using two monsters, a platform, and a switch, and used a bunch to make a ripple-carry adder that triggered as you ran down a hallway, displaying its results on a bank of lights at the end. Another guy won a Bungie contest by reimplementing most of Myst Island's puzzles in Marathon.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Little Big Planet - To Zanarkand Theme
Little Big Computer
Some of the most creative games on the PS3 are only available for download from the Playstation Network.
Have a look into the following:
Pixeljunk Eden
flOw
Everyday Shooter
Echochrome
They're my favourites, anyway. I'm also looking forward to Flower, made by the same group as flOw.
Sadly, you're missing the point that the gazillion people who are playing Guitar Hero like games legitimately find them to be fun, and are willing to spend money on them. You may dislike them and think they suck. But, seriously, look at the sales figures for these games. This isn't "just a popular fad".
For a lot of people, games like this are fun, and games like FPS are annoying and tedious. These games appeal to "non-gamers". I'm one of them. You're welcome to your FPS on your PC, but you're being shockingly arrogant to think that a game like GH3 which sold 1.4 million copies in October of last year and which seem to drive actual music sales is just a fad.
Like it or not, GH3 and that kind of game are not going to go away anytime soon. I know a ton of people who fall well outside of any realm of what you can call gamers who are absolutely into the instrument rhythm games.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
L2Play guitar oh yeah that would actually involve talent.
Actually, it wouldn't. But most people think it would. That they won't be able to learn it because you need to be a special person with some special talent. Which is part of the reason why guitar hero sells so good, I believe.
To learn how to play guitar, you'd need a guitar, and play. Play more. Learn chords. Play more. Learn patterns. Play more. Learn picking. Play more. Learn barres. Play more. Listen to what you play. Play more. Polish it by moving your fingers differently. Play more.....
The more you play *and* try to improve what you can, if possible in logical small steps, the better you'll learn it. I've taught myself to play drums and play guitar. People seem to like what I play, and how I play it.
However, I seriously don't recognize this "talent" thing at all. Unless it's created by learning and playing.
The bad thing about the "talent" idea is also that it's a self-fullfilling prophecy. If you'd believe you'd need a special talent to learn something and believe you don't have the talent, you believe you won't be able to learn it, and never seriously take the first step towards learning it.
And then you can say, see, I can't do that, I don't have that talent.
But if you'd seriously give yourself a chance to learn 2 chords (easiest is A minor and E minor to start with, real simple on the fingers) and a simple strumming pattern, I think you'd quickly discover it's something that *you* can learn as well.
I think taking out the PS2 compatibility was a bad idea, that said there's plenty of 80GB MGS4 models out there and plenty of compatible models in the used market. But one of the biggest selling points, besides the PS3 games, the PS2 games, the multimedia stuff, the PSP integration, was this:
I can dual boot between Linux and GameOS functions as I desire.
Seconded, provided it's a Universal Turing Machine that they then use to re-implement Little Big Planet.
When you watch the start of the clip you think big deal, there's probably a script doing the addition or something. Then it starts panning up and you just see hundreds of ropes, pulleys and levers which are all wired together. A simple interface hides a horribly complex set of mechanics. Even more impressive that all this is modelled in a game using a level edito. The accuracy of the physics and the sheer number of interactions is deeply impressive. The sheer quality and variety of levels in the beta phase shows how awesome this game is going to be. Two weeks to go.
On a Blue Ray player and taking the ability to play Little Big Planet as a bonus... Now if I can just get my wife to see it that way.
I got my PS3 originally for the BlueRay ... and the fact that it had be eons since I had had a game console (that SuperNintendo is currently gathering dust in a closet right now). My first two games were "Ratchet and Clank Future" and "Resistance: Fall of Man".
... the "maps" were very linear in order to make sure you went the right way). FPSs are so much better with a keyboard and mouse.
... something about the feel that just wasn't right.
I liked the "story" of Resistance, but hated the gameplay (and FPS style, since it was story driven
"R&CF:ToD" was very fun. But the real fun began with "Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga". There's just something to be said for being able to run around with a lightsaber and slashing Storm Troopers. And the puzzles were okay.
"Lego Indiana Jones" was kinda cool. The puzzles were a little more involved, but there was something lacking in the game
"Lego Batman" has been great so far. I like the fact that you play both Batman through "Story"s as well as the "Villans".
My biggest issue with all of the "Lego" games has been the "Story" and "Free Play" options. You really can't do all of the "Free Play" stuff until you've gone through enough of the "Story"s to unlock key characters (or in the case of Batman, special Batsuits) (IE, in "Star Wars", there are things you just can't do in the first three movies - six stories each - until you've come across Tie Fighters in "A New Hope). It's kind of a "forced delayed replayability" thing. But once you have those extra characters, it's very cool.
All PS3 games so far have been able to play 720P. However, the game animation quality of "The Simpsons" just flat out sucked (cutscenes were cool, but there was some "blockiness" to the edges of characters during the game). There are reviews on my MySpace blog for most of the games I've played.
I talk about stuff.