rotational

I got a bit obsessed with this showcase of 125 animated fighting game backgrounds today. Just the backdrops from different stages (as far as I can tell all by SNK, dating from the mid to late 90s, and probably ripped from SNK Wiki), stripped of player sprites and health bars, they’re gorgeous flowerings of visual design.

Truth be told, I’m a bit tired of pixel art, but work like this aspired to transcend mere pixels. And I think that’s why it still packs a punch for me today. It’s evidently not content with the paltry colour depth and resolution it’s forced to use. It’s not about celebrating its form, unlike today’s pixel art, which is all about the form and evoking aesthetics of the past without quite nailing their fundamental nature. Instead, these backgrounds are all about what they depict – little scenes, ripe with little stories and humour, and inflected with travel pornography.

Real Bout Fatal Fury 2: The Newcomers (1998), Xiangfei’s Stage

There are the guys stealing boxes out of the blue van; the guy straining to get the pig out of the tomatoes in the back of the red pickup; the woman tugging the guy’s trouser leg for attention on top of the truck; the dog and its excited owner. This fight is staged in a place with its own history and populated by people who have nothing to do with your dumb fight.

The King of Fighters ’96, Korea Team’s Stage

There’s quiet genius in many apparently simple ideas. Puddles reflecting the sky and the flow of water into them at the back here is a fantastic way of making the flagstones dynamic and interesting.

The Last Blade (1997)

Lots of them, like that The King of Fighters stage and this one, take you to exotic and romanticised east Asia. Here, the gentle movement only emphasises the sense of silence, ready for the contrast of the bout itself.

Garou: Mark of the Wolves (1999), The Lillien Knights’ incursion on Blue Wave Harbor stage

And then there’s this one, which is all movement.

Samurai Shodown II (1994), Galford’s stage

I spent a few minutes mesmerised by that revolving shark. I suppose the constant repetition also taps into the reason why gifs (and latterly Vine) are so compulsive.

Garou: Mark of the Wolves, Free Field, Second South’s slums stage

Some totally reference film, instantly evoking a specific milieu.

Anyway, for me, these backgrounds’ beauty lies in their navigation of technical constraints. They push through the problems of low resolution with sharply outlined elements or subtle gradations. They’re incredibly careful with the number of animations they show and how many frames of animation from which they’re made. Some look like living scenes, even if the effect’s set by a surprisingly small number of moving components.

To me, that stuff is lovely. The techniques they used are something to really celebrate, even if technology has moved games far beyond them now. I’m happy to leave that artistry in the past, though, and besides, today’s games use new techniques that are just as worthy of celebration. But perhaps it takes a decade or two to allow us to fully appreciate them.

The first time I heard ‘experience’ used in earnest as a marketing term was during a trip to Microsoft’s Redmond HQ in 2008. Very much in earnest, in fact – I was there to see New Xbox Experience, which is what Microsoft was calling its new Xbox 360 dashboard design.

New Xbox Experience. This was no mere update. Microsoft was fashioning something that would touch every user and shape their entire conception of the Xbox 360. Which is kind of true, in the sense that Microsoft put out a redesign that’s between mildly and seriously annoyed everyone who’s ever used it since. That’s because NXE was not really focused on improving the experience of its users. It was actually mostly about pushing Xbox Live Marketplace content and advertising at them.

This is the modern interpretation of ‘experience’: throwing stuff at people, whether they like it or not. And it’s a term that has now propagated throughout the game industry, used to describe entire games or parts of them.

There’s that time 2K Sports extended the “NBA® 2K13 Experience with NBA 2K Everywhere”. The Battlefield Premium Edition is “the ultimate Battlefield 3 experience”. WWE ’12 was “the WWE experience you’ve been demanding”.

Experience is also readily applied to gaming paraphernalia. Origin for Mac offers “the same Origin experience and features that define our PC app”. Nvidia GeForce Experience is a program that applies optimal graphics settings in games to suit your PC’s specifications. That’s if by ‘optimal’ Nvidia means ‘a bit janky’. And there’s Sony’s Xperia PLAY Experience Pack, which is a charging dock, USB cable and three Android games. Experience that slight convenience, punters.

Sometimes, the word leaks unbidden into journalists’ lexicons. To pick a couple at random, “EA reveals ‘single identity’ cross-platform gaming experience”, trumpeted Mike Schramm of Origin’s triumphal completion. “Crytek CEO Says Graphics Are 60% of Crysis Experience” reasoned Jonathan “JohnnyBigBoss” Leack. In neither case did the story’s source reference the word.

Experience is also everywhere else in tech. Here’s Daring Fireball’s John Gruber on (what else?) Apple:

What is Apple at heart: a software company, or hardware company? This is a perennial question. The truth, of course, is that Apple is neither. Apple is an experience company. That they create both hardware and software is part of creating the entire product experience.

Back to Microsoft, Windows Vista’s transparency-based Aero theme introduced the Windows Experience, which gives a technical rating for your PC that showed whether it would run Vista nicely (probably not: this is ‘experience’ in the sense of whether you’d feel constant rage or not).

And it’s in film, especially in the marketing flapping around 3D and hi-def formats. Get a load of Jake Hamilton of Fox TV’s critique of the Titanic 3D re-release: “Experience one of the greatest films of all time like you’ve never seen it before!” And you don’t watch IMAX films, you have The IMAX Experience.

Sometimes you get to smoosh Microsoft and film marketing together and experience the lurching chimera of the “The Dark Knight Rises experience on Xbox SmartGlass”. Which is mostly quotes and trivia you could Google.

Is all this really about our actual experience? Hang on, what on Earth is experience, anyway? Something formlessly personal? A sort of emotional engagement? I suspect marketing people would hungrily contend that it absolutely is. Can you package an experience up and boot it into someone’s life with a £10 price tag?

‘Experience’ is being cheapened through its association with stuff you don’t really want or need, but there’s another problem with the term. It’s really hard to think of an alternative way of describing what someone goes through while playing a game, using a device or watching a film. Just look at the number of times Gabe Newell says ‘experience’ to the BBC here. Gabe’s no stranger to crappy buzzwords, but he’s not grasping at marketing half-truths.

I suspect something as fundamental as our emotional response to what we perceive around us is getting debased in all this. All apparently because companies can’t figure out how better to sell stuff that has no definitive value. Bit of a shame, that.

With mobile app deep-linking, users will be able to tap a link to either view content directly in your app, or download your app, depending on whether or not they have your app installed.
→ dev.twitter.com

Tweets that directly download games or point to specific features in them, then. Could initiate multiplayer games, show highscores or -shudder- in-app purchases.

Suddenly Twitter becomes about the most flexible and open game network around. Let’s not think about the volume of spam it’ll generate, eh.

It’s not art, but I like it.

For a linear shooter, anyway. The rush of Important Complicated Explanation at the end was rather too much, there were too many guns, a few of the Vigors lacked sharp enough differentiation, and I spent too much time rooting in bins and desks for coins. But all that was easily made by up its often breathtaking art design, detailing and set-pieces, plus its fluid action.

Also, I like this quote from Ken Levine:

Look, I can’t say I’m a man of high taste. I’m a man of low taste. I like action movies and comic books — not that all comic books are of low taste. Not that all action movies are of low taste. I like things exploding. I like candy and cookies.
→ Grantland

Which speaks to Infinite, through and through. Makes all the rubbish about the game being either profoundly meaningful or profanely violent melt away.

Sorry, I don’t get the drama around having an ‘always on’ console. Every device is now ‘always on.’ That’s the world we live in. #dealwithit

…said Microsoft creative director (ex-PopCap senior designer and LucasArts creative lead) Adam Orth on Twitter yesterday.

…his personal views do not reflect the customer centric approach we take to our products or how we would communicate directly with our loyal consumers.

…said Microsoft.

File Microsoft’s failure to deny or confirm the next Xbox will be always-on under ‘we do not comment on rumour and speculation’. File Orth’s comments under ‘loudmouth’. File the enormous stink they raised on the internet under ‘big problem that won’t go away soon’.

Today I took receipt of a new passport. I will get my next one in ten years. I’ll be 47.

Ten years ago, I had yet to get my first writing job. I had just finished a six-month postgraduate course in periodical journalism at the London College Of Printing, during which I stood in front of my class and said I wanted to write for Edge.

I spent that January on a work placement at the RIBA Journal, a magazine for members of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Its office then was in a newly built office complex in the hinterlands of London’s Docklands, a bland island of marble and glass in a post-industrial concrete sea. The wind seemed bitterly cold there, but maybe that was down to my fears for finding a proper job.

A month later, though, I’d find myself on another placement and subsequent job, at a new architecture and design magazine on which I was the first officially active editorial person. Icon’s done pretty well ever since.

In January six years ago, I walked out of the Channel 4 offices for the last time. I felt relieved. I hadn’t enjoyed the year I’d spent working on its website much, and I fancied the chance to spread my wings. But again, I was also worried about my chances of finding work. This time I had a child to help support. I couldn’t know then that it’d end up with me working at Edge and us moving to Bath from London.

Two years ago, I was on a trip to Valve’s office in Seattle to see Portal 2. If there’s any developer that all game journalists would want to visit, it’d be Valve. And like pretty much any other game journalist, I can’t deny that I fantasised that I’d be offered a job there, as crazy as that’d be. In reality, I spent most of the time holed up in my hotel room with a stomach bug and a deadline.

Ten years, it turns out, is a long time. In that period, I’ve had two children, gotten married, bought two homes, developed a career and moved between cities. I don’t know where my family and I will be when I’m 47, or what I’ll be doing. In the context of all I’ve done in the past ten years, I suppose that’s exciting. But I’m also a little scared.

Source: The Planetary Society

This is Bradbury Landing in Gale crater, where Curiosity touched down.

Isn’t it one of the most incredible pictures you’ve ever seen? Tracks that start out of nowhere; something fully formed simply landing here, having had no connection with this place – this planet – in any sense ever before. Something extraterrestrial, and made by us.

And it’s just fantastic that Curiosity’s landing site is named after Ray Bradbury. It takes imagination like his to make things like this happen.

One morning last September, my dad found my grandma lying semi-conscious in a pool of her blood in the downstairs hallway of her home. She’d fallen the previous night, perhaps having tripped over her elderly dog, and hit her head on a door frame. For my parents, it was the final straw. She’d been living alone with dementia – fiercely independently – for nearly ten years. Clearly, she couldn’t any more.

It was time to find her a care home, a quiet, newly built place nearby where she still lives today in a state of constant muddle.

With her move came the huge job for my parents of clearing her home. She lived in a large house that was filled with 50 years of accumulated clutter. It’s fair to say that my grandma and grandpa were hoarders of a sort. They didn’t keep rubbish and their home was always tidy, if dusty, but every space was filled with archives of one sort and another.

On and under tables in the living room were piles of magazines and newspapers – National Geographic, Which, Reader’s Digest, The Grower, Telegraph and Radio Times. There was a room filled with programmes from the many plays and concerts they used to attend. My grandpa diligently kept journals with notes of the weather and the briefest of notes of what happened each day.

Grandma was never quite so systematic as grandpa. Rather than an archivist, I suppose she’s a collector. She’d have every new first day cover sent to her, though she didn’t actually collect stamps per se. She’d buy the official BBC book for any TV series she watched, especially those on nature. Both she and grandpa would habitually record hours of radio plays, TV programmes and concerts on the technology of the time: reel-to-reel tapes, cassettes and VHS.

I don’t know if anything they’d collected was ever thrown away, not even when they moved from the house in which they’d lived for decades, shortly before grandpa died. They stacked still-filled drawers on the lorry for the journey from Sussex to Suffolk, transplanting their lives from one house to another. It certainly worked: their final house felt exactly the same as the one I’d always known them to live in.

All that stuff. Going through her house when grandma moved to her home, it all seemed a terrible waste. Apparently undisturbed for years, there wasn’t much evidence she ever went back to these accumulated collections, though I guess she took satisfaction in knowing they were there.

Who knows what it did to wrench her away away from it all? Perhaps it anchored her to her past. Living in her constant present, cut through with great dislocated shards of her past, she certainly can’t say. As far as she’s concerned, sitting in her care home, she’s in transit: on her way home, or away from it, often to Canada where two of her daughters live. Her husband is simultaneously alive and has only just died. Her childhood in Wimbledon is far closer to her grasp than last Christmas is.

For my parents, dealing with all those papers and things – china sets and Tupperware, children’s games and ornaments – was suffocating. And whether mouldering or still crisply usable, it’s all gone now. To charity shops, landfills, recycling stations and to her children and grandchildren’s homes. Two lives dissolved.

We took a few items, including a copy of Winnie The Pooh and Space: The Story of Man’s Greatest Feat of Exploration, by Patrick Moore, for our kids. Though yellowing, their dust jackets brittle, they were in fine condition; neither had been read for years. But they had been opened. When we got them home, newspaper cuttings fluttered out of their pages.

Winnie The Pooh contained a May 1979 story across several different cuttings of the bridge that inspired A.A. Milne’s story about the Pooh sticks game. Having been in danger of falling down, the bridge had been saved.

Then, from out of the Space book came a more recent one, charting the 2009 discovery of water on the Moon. She was evidently still taking these cuttings recently.

Who were these cuttings for? Her? Grandpa? Whomever the books would pass to? Did she personally know the Winnie The Pooh bridge? Why, of all astronomical discoveries over the 44 years since Space was published, did water on the moon in particular deserve memorialising?

Now part of our kids’ burgeoning, messy, constantly in flux book collection, the cuttings were never going to last long. They don’t make much sense alone, of course. But they also didn’t make much sense in the books, remnants of thought processes that were lost as soon as grandpa died and grandma’s memory went.

I thought about saving them, but they’d be a weird, secondhand sort of memorial. So I threw them away. But not before I scanned them.

Baskerville seems to be the king of fonts.

Last month, documentary-making colossus Errol Morris wrote a piece on the New York Times site called Are You an Optimist or a Pessimist. About the idea of a meteor hitting Earth, it featured at its end a questionnaire which seemed to ask readers whether they think it’s true that “we live in an era of unprecedented safety”. I responded, too, faintly hoping, I suppose, that I might end up on an Errol Morris documentary about meteors and paranoia. Because I love meteors and paranoia.

But it turns out that he wasn’t looking for answers to that question at all. He, with Cornell psychology professor David Dunning, was actually looking for statistical evidence of whether responses changed depending on the font in which the question was set, a project that set out to discover: “Can we separate the form of the writing from its content?” It was inspired, in part, by CERN’s use of Comic Sans in its official announcement of the Higgs boson.

He even has the answer as to why CERN used it:

Gianotti, the coordinator of the CERN program to find the Higgs boson, provided a compelling rationale for why she had used Comic Sans. When asked, she said, “Because I like it.”

Anyway, the answers are in. And what do you know? There were (very) small differences in the types of responses. And it seems that Baskerville is the most commanding font there is.

Me, I really like Univers. In fact, I’m tempted to start a company just to have house stationery, a logo and a business card using it. No nonsense and yet gently distinctive (it is NOT simply Helvetica, in case you were wondering), I don’t think you can ignore a company that uses Univers.

I’ve always really liked Baskerville, too. For reading, at least. It’s a fantastically elegant and implacable font.

But what about Comic Sans? I’m tired of all the snobby whining about it, to be honest. Sure it’s rubbishy and cheap-looking, and yeah, Morris’ study confirms my assumptions that things written in it aren’t taken as seriously as those written in obviously AWESOME fonts like Univers, which, if he had used it, would clearly have beaten Baskerville. And I used to get as snortingly up tight about dumbos using Comic Sans, too.

But what the hell, I was just being a snotty design-prig. If Morris proves anything new, it’s that the statistical difference, while definitely there, is so tiny that use of Comic Sans really is just a matter of taste. Heck, Gianotti, if you like it, go right ahead.

By @moleitau