Just an FYI, for all the businesses out there that are now trying to get on the "social media" bandwagon: spamming people on to your follow list is going to get you blocked. At least by me.
I got followed by some car repair place this morning. Obviously a new account, they had one tweet and were following 800 people. What value are you going to bring to me again? Oh, that's right, none. At least send a mention saying something about your services... it might make me think that you care enough to at least spend 5 seconds thinking about each person you want to have follow you.
Sooo, I've been trying my hand at music makin' recently, in an effort to make my iPhone game a bit more fleshed out. Fortunately, Macs come with GarageBand, which is (seems to be) a pretty powerful music program. The downside is that 1.) I don't know anything about composition and 2.) I don't know how to use sequencing programs. Put those together and you've got yourself a nice frustrating time. However, I'd like to think that what I lack in talent I make up for in irrational perseverance, so there may be some hope yet.
While messing around, I made my own version of Totaka's Song, and am putting it online so that you can listen and say to yourself, "Yep, that's Totaka's Song alright." If you've played Nintendo games with any frequency in your life, you've probably heard this ditty... check out this excellent YouTube seriesTotaka's Song for all the dirt.
Reggie Fils-Aime sez that the iPhone platform isn't a serious competitor to Nintendo's handhelds. As far as depth of games goes, I'd be inclined to agree with him. Nintendo does have 20 years of handheld console experience, and even the most basic Game Boy game usually has a lot more depth than the average iPhone OS title.
However, I think there's a reason why gaming has exploded on iPhone: it allows casual game makers to easily develop and publish games on a handheld pseudo-console. Nintendo has DSiWare, which is a digital content distribution system similar to the App Store, but the speed bumps to publishing on each platform are remarkably different.
To develop for the DSi, you have to fill out an application which states why your company has the experience necessary to develop DS titles (a side note: your company has to have actual offices... can't be a home office). Once you get approved, you can purchase your DS development kit (no idea how much it costs, but probably a substantial amount). Then you can actually make your game. After that, you have to get your game approved to be distributed as DSiWare.
To develop for iPhone OS, all you need is a Macintosh computer and an iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad. All the programming tools are free. To test your game on your actual hardware and distribute via the App Store, you pay $100/year to be an official developer.
The difference is astounding. I will probably never make a game on a Nintendo platform (although I'd love to some day), but publishing for iPhone OS is easily within my reach. All I'm saying, Nintendo, is that you might want to take a page from Apple's playbook here.
I've been following the progress of a company known as Q Games for a while. Right now they're most well known for producing the "PixelJunk" series of games for the Playstation 3. Even though my Playstation 3 mostly serves as a giant paperweight these days, I've downloaded a few of their demos and been generally impressed. Q Games was founded by Dylan Cuthbert, who worked at Argonaut Software (developer of Star Fox for SNES) back in the day. It's cool to see someone aside from Shigeru Miyamoto stay relevant to the games industry for so long.
Anyway, like I said, Q Games is known for their PixelJunk brand, a collection of four (so far) inexpensive, downloadable titles for the PS3. Aside from the common PixelJunk name (great use of branding, by the way), these games have nothing in common. The first was a slot car racing game, the second was tower defense, and the third was a stylized platformer. The fourth, and most recent (not to mention my own most recent purchase) was PixelJunk Shooter.
As you can guess from the title, Shooter is, at its core, a shooting game. The player is tasked with rescuing miners and scientists who have been working to uncover resources under the surface of an unexplored planet. As you fly deeper and deeper underground, you encounter new and different obstacles. At first, these obstacles consist mostly of lava pits, which can be quenched by shooting through weak cave walls and finding water sources (getting too close to lava raises the heat level of your ship, which can be cooled by a dunk in some water). Further in, however, you come across ice, explosive gas, and a strange magnetic liquid that is attracted to your ship. The fluid dynamics are modeled in a very realistic fashion, and it's fun to watch the different materials interact. In addition, you can find various modifications for your ship: to allow it to shoot lava or water, or an "inverter" which allows your ship to enter lava, but water causes it to overheat. These different gameplay ideas inject a bit of puzzling into what would otherwise be a straightforward action game, and elevate it from being merely "good" to "great."
PixelJunk Shooter's length is just right. The game consists of three episodes that contain 5-6 stages. Each stage contains about four "sub-stages," smaller areas where you need to rescue all the survivors in order to proceed to the next. A stage will probably take you about 15 minutes to complete the first time. So, extrapolating, you'll get about 4 hours of unique gameplay for your $10. Each stage introduces new game concepts, and you barely get used to one you just learned before it's taken away and you have something entirely new to learn. The upshot is that the game feels very content-dense, yet each game concept is under-used so that you don't get tired of it. As far as bang for your buck goes, I can wholeheartedly recommend PixelJunk Shooter; the price is just about the same as going to a movie (my local theater charges $9), but it's twice as long and has much better content than any movie I've seen recently.
After playing PixelJunk Shooter (as well as a few other PixelJunk demos), I'm a Q Games convert. When I next have an afternoon or evening to kill, instead of plunking out cash for a movie, I'll be checking out a different entry into the PixelJunk series.
Seems like the last two projects I've done have had kind of lackluster ends. I've been sitting on this "mostly complete" project for a while, and while I'm still unsatisfied about certain areas (i.e. there's no music), if I don't push it out the door pretty soon it'll just sit and stagnate. So, here we go: Nonogram Madness.
(If anyone cares, let me know what you think in the comments. The puzzles kinda progress in difficulty, but they haven't been balanced at all, and some of them are pretty bad. There, you've been warned.)