The release of Band Aid’s revamped version of the appalling Do They Know It’s Christmas
has put many charitable souls in a bit of a quandary. The fact is, you want to help the Sudanese refugees by supporting this excellent cause, but the single is, well, crap. Technically, this is known as the Band Aid Dilemma — a disturbing condition in which the natural instinct to help those less fortunate than yourself battles the primordial desire to avoid dreadful pop like the plague. There is a solution. Buy as many copies as you can afford. Destroy them in amusing ways, on camera. Send the pictures of to the Band Aid Dilemma
Why is a TV executive so agitated about online pirates? Because he, like most media honchos, has seen the scary numbers indicating that the next big craze in illegal file-sharing is not music, not movies, but television. Frankly I’m amazed that movies caught on before TV since there’s so much more TV, and they tend to be smaller files than movies — via Slashdot
Lee Harvey Oswald-wannabes will be able to simulate the assassination of President John F Kennedy when Traffic Games releases the $9.99 JFK Reloaded to coincide with the 41st anniversary of Kennedy’s murder in Dallas. It is despicable
, said a spokesman for Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, the late president’s brother
Instead of screaming Jump
, David Lee Roth will be yelling clear!
The former Van Halen frontman is taking up a new trade — paramedic [BugMeNot]. Roth, 50, has been riding for several weeks with a New York ambulance crew in training to become a paramedic. I have been on over 200 individual rides now,
said Roth. “Not once has anyone recognised me, which is perfect for me
There’s a chainsaw-shaped controller for the Nintendo GameCube, intended for use with the new Resident Evil game. It’s spattered with fake blood and emits chainsaw noises, but it also has all the buttons it needs to sub in for your regular GameCube controller — via boingboing
Electron Luv is the culmination of years of dreaming and listening.
The heart and soul behind Electron Luv is Josh Stippich, who brings his unique vision to audio. They’re shiny, they’re chromey, they’re lovingly hand-built creations. Prepare to drool.
The UK’s Office of Communications is publicly toying with the idea of funding a public service publisher (PSP) to complement the BBC’s role as a public service broadcaster. The idea of a PSP is to publicly fund an entity that publishes books, games, interactive material and other published
items that are commissioned from British creators and that reflect and deliver British values. It’s a brilliant idea, and one that’s ripe for Creative Commons licences — the specs say that Content distributed by the PSP must be widely available throughout the UK, with at least near-universal availability
Both Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis have been renewed for another season, ninth and second respectively. All of the key cast members are coming back for Atlantis, where as SG-1 stars are in negotiations, with Amanda Tapping expecting a baby in March right as filming begins. Also Richard Dean Anderson might look for an even further reduced role in the show
Pikmin 2 was released here on Friday, and being an enormous fan of anything vaguely resembling Lemmings, I bought a copy. Actually, the word ‘bought’ oversimplifies the transaction somewhat… it went more like this:
SPOTTY TEENAGE SALES ASSISTANT1: “Would you like to buy that? It’s $100.”
(STSA1 takes the video game, and swipes it to disarm the security tag thingy.)
ME: (offering STSA1 a pair of fifties) “Here you go.”
STSA1: “Oh, I can’t serve you right now… the register is occupied.”
(At this juncture I wait half an hour while a second teenager — STSA2 — tries to stuff a giant Warcraft Battle Chest into a teeny bag clearly intended for PSX games. Eventually he goes for a larger bag and all is well.)
STSA2: “Can I help you?”
ME: (offering STSA2 the pair of fifties) “I’d like to buy Pikmin 2. The other guy has already swiped it. Here’s money.”
STSA2: “You’re a gold club member, right?”
ME: “Nope.”
STSA2: “Let me tell you about our great gold club!”
ME: “No thanks. I just want to buy the game.”
STSA2: “Okay, sure. What’s your name and phone number?”
ME: “I AM WILLING TO PAY YOU ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS FOR A 3 INCH PLASTIC DISC WITH A GAME ABOUT CARROTS ON IT! TAKE THE FUCKING MONEY!”
Anyway, I eventually got the game home and took a look at it. The manual is comphrensive (as one would expect from a first party Nintendo game), and the artwork is all photographs of modelling clay scenes (including one of the various pikmin walking across a rusty piece of barbed wire, and a great one of a wonky clay controller on the which-button-does-what page).
When you first fire up the game, you’re greeted by a little prompt that asks you whether your TV can can handle 60Hz or whether you’d like to use the default 50Hz (oddly, the game doesn’t remember your choice, and asks you every time at startup). After that, you’re through to the main menu, where you can play through the story mode, the challenge mode (when unlocked), or the 2P split screen ‘capture the marble‘ mode. There’s also an options screen where, in addition to the usual guff, you can choose between sharp high-contrast graphics or washed-out Ico style graphics (which look very cool indeed).
The main game plays as per the original Pikmin, i.e. like the three-dimensional bastard child of Lemmings and Command & Conquer. There are a few notable differences, however, and these are chiefly to do with the game’s multitasking aspect. Firstly, you are given a extra little guy to control (name of Louie, perhaps in a nod to Luigi), and secondly, the 30-day time limit has been eliminated from the game. While these seem like good things initially, I am concerned that, taken together, they unbalance the game. In the original Pikmin, the time limit encouraged multitasking; if you didn’t collect multiple pieces in a single day, you had no hope of getting all the pieces before your time ran out. This meant that it wasn’t enough to merely complete a level — you had to complete the level using an optimal solution. Anyway, I haven’t played a huge amount of Pikmin 2 yet, so I’m hopeful that later levels will use the daylight timer to encourage more frantic multitasking.
Other new additions include a hand-holding tutorial (annoying, but exhaustive), and lots of nifty underground cave levels. The cave levels (thus far) are quite unlike the spacious watery caves of the original, and are cramped multi-level dungeons evocative of Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance as much as anything. The cool thing about the caves is that they contain lots of weird new species of flora and fauna. Purple and white pikmin can be obtained via colour-changing candypop flowers (which now wilt after you’ve changed five pikmin), berries can be harvested to make the pikmin equivalents of cocaine and tear gas, and exciting new monsters can beat the tar out of you. It’s all good downstairs, except that the time pressure is slackened ever further by the daylight timer pausing while you go spelunking.
So, first impressions versus the orginal: there’s more of it, it looks better, and it’s not as hard. If you’re a westerner with a Game Cube it’s not like you have a huge variety of games to choose from anyway, so purchasing Pikmin 2 is pretty much mandatory. While doing so, you may wish to join our great gold club.
The BBC is on the point of releasing an Internet video viewer for its content, and its CIO has told other companies to stop making excuses and use the bandwidth available to deliver better services online. Media companies must now keep their side of the bargain and deliver content which justifies consumers’ switch to broadband, according to Keith Little, head of IT at the BBC
Queen have decided to tackle musical piracy by offering fans the chance to legally download up to 100 pirate recordings currently in circulation. Using expert advice, the band has selected the best illegal Queen recordings and will make them available to download on their official web site. The downloads will be available at the rate of three tracks each month, at a fixed cost of £5 per recording. All proceeds will be donated to the Mercury Phoenix Trust, to combat Aids — via meta-roj blog
Amazing anaecdote from Peter Briggs, the author of the screenplay for Alien Versus Predator — via Wired
I wrote
A vs Poriginally — oh, God… did you hear that? I actually saidA vs P. I hate that thing… it’s likeT2orLXG! Anyway, I wrote it on an Amstrad computer, which was about one step above a Univac Room Filler. In ’92 I swapped to an Apple Mac, which I’ve used ever since. And I ended up losing the Amstrad disk, which was some weird, unreadable proprietary brand anyway. It wasn’t until whoever it was transcribed it and pirated it onto the web years later, that I was able to cut-and-paste it into Final Draft and have an electronic copy again. So, thank-you, Internet Leaker, wherever you were!
The morons at Warner Bros (the same people who canned Angel and now want it back) have passed on Warren Ellis‘ Global Frequency, a wonderfully twisted modern-day SF TV series which may yet air, but the company that owns the series will now have to shop it around to other networks
This £16.95 kit was developed at Middlesex University — it’s a collection of materials and DIY instructions for building a mechanical gramophone. It even comes bundled with a pair of old 78 RPM discs to test it with — via The Red Ferret Journal
Notes from someone who bought and assembled the kit — via boingboing
Bob Cringley was a great write up on Ken Schaffer‘s TV2ME, an amazing piece of technology that has managed to pull off streaming television via the internet where so many have failed
In the 1940s, Frances Glessner Lee constructed incredibly detailed and spooky crime scenes in dollhouses to teach forensics to a homicide investigation seminar. The founder of Harvard’s Department of Legal Medicine, Lee was named an honorary captain of the New Hampshire state police. The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death is a book collecting Corrine May Botz’s fantastic photographs of Lee’s macabre miniatures — via boingboing
Why?
Because the United States currently has, as Jack Womack so succinctly puts it, a president who makes Richard Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln.
And because, as the Spanish philosopher Unamuno said,
At times, to be silent is to lie.
The British Library is creating an archive to store the e-mails of the nation’s top authors and scientists, as the written word is replaced by electronic messages. A spokeswoman says it welcomes e-mails from prominent people in all walks of life
The British High Court has ordered ISPs to hand over the names and addresses of 28 alleged music pirates to Britain’s trade body for the recording industry
Ten Kenyan prisoners broke out of a police cell by singing hymns and chanting prayers to drown the sound of their escape. The singing prisoners sawed through the iron bars of the cell window before scrambling to freedom in Machakos, a town south of Kenyan capital Nairobi
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