Archive for February 15th, 2010
A short Bayonetta review
Posted by Alex in Reviews and Recommendations, Video Games on February 15, 2010
Roughly a month ago I decided to do something crazy and buy myself an XBox 360. This turned out to be a horrible mistake financially, but such is the curse of hindsight. Or the lack of being able to tell the future, one of those. There isn’t much I can do about it though, so no reason whining. So I have a 360 now, and this is the first console I’ve ever purchased for myself. I was rather spoiled on consoles as a kid, they were always my big gifts around the holidays. I’ve had an NES, the old brick Game Boy, a Sega Genesis (as well as a 32x and a Nomad), a SNES, a Sega Saturn, a Playstation, a Playstation 2, and that was the end of my console legacy. I got my first computer during the PS2 era, and that killed any drive I may have had to buy other consoles. I think StarCraft singlehandedly made me a PC gamer.
So why did I slip back into my console gaming ways for a 360? One word: Bayonetta. I was slowly coming to realize there was a void in my heart that the PC couldn’t sufficiently fill. I needed to play an action game and I needed to play one bad. Back when my PS2 was still my favorite toy, I put countless hours into the Devil May Cry series and the God of War games, not to mention Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors of various flavors. I could play shooters and RTSes and RPGs all I wanted on the PC, but I couldn’t play the really badass high-impact action games I used to love so much. There was something missing from my life, and I just happened to realize it just before Bayonetta‘s release date. It had to be mine. So it was!
TED 2010 and seeing the world through others’ eyes
Posted by Alex in Alex's Thoughts on February 15, 2010
TED 2010 took place this past weekend, February 10th through the 13th. Very few of the talks are online right now, but a number of them have already sparked conversation around the ‘net regardless. While the mosquito death laser was cool and has some awesome potential when it comes to dealing with the spread of malaria, the talk I’ve embedded above held me in its grasp much more firmly.
It’s a talk given by Blaise Aguera y Arcas (creator of Seadragon) on behalf of Microsoft. The topic is augmented reality maps. In particular, he talks about it in the context of what Bing Maps are capable of, but the topic can really be applied to any sort of virtual map. Our level of technology has reached the point where we can not only map the entire world completely with 3D rendering with enough time and effort, but we can use those maps together with still images, streaming video, and all of that sort of thing to give the big picture, so to speak. I’m sure most of us are familiar with the ‘street view’ feature on the big popular virtual maps, Bing and Google. This goes a step farther.