Original Post
So I'm not much of a proponent of blogs. In fact, I consider them mostly vapid wastes of time, though there are obvious exceptions: well-researched informal publications by people with legitimate credentials. In the spirit of the latter, I would like to share Clive Thompson's blog with anyone who has never heard of it. collision detection A lot of his blog entries simply announce or archive his technology writings for Wired, The New York Times or Slate. I consider it particularly relevant to GameDev members because of his frequent writings about games. Excerpts:
Quote:
The Glory of the Shooter Let us now praise insanely violent first-person-shooters. Let us praise the joys of double-wielding a pair of Uzis with unlimited ammo; let us delight in the gorgeous fractal carnage of a rocket launcher as it slams into your target. Let us talk openly about how just totally awesome it is to grab a fully loaded railgun in Quake 4 and wade into a mass of gibbering Strogg aliens and kill and kill and kill again, until there are guts on, like, the ceiling. While we're at it, let us meditate on the subtle joys of deciding, while playing Far Cry, that this sneaking-around "stealth" stuff is for the birds, and it's way more excellent to just barge out into the open with fully loaded machine guns and slice through waves of oncoming mercenaries with the crimson fury of the angel of death himself, blasting and blasting until your trigger finger is aching and you are basically tripping over the corpses, and the battlefield is silent but for the distant plaintive cawing of seagulls on a far-off beach. ...
Quote:In recognition of his good work articulating gaming to the masses - and without apology, or kow-towing to the pansying preferences of protesters of perversely puerile play - Clive Thompson and his blog get the Oluseyi Office Stamp of Approval. That's Fresh! Enjoy.
Tunnel Vision ... This, as it turns out, is a new revolution in games: the anti-HUD movement. Recently, several new games have renounced the HUD. In Doom 3, the ammo count for your chain gun is displayed not in a floating bar, but on the headstock of the gun. Peter Jackson's King Kong doesn't offer a scrap of onscreen artificial data: Adrien Brody's voice calls out the ammo count each time you reload, and low health is denoted by shaky, blurry vision. In a column called "Off With Their HUDs!" for the game-design site Gamasutra, Greg Wilson argues that losing the HUD helps increase the sense of immersion. "Nothing screams 'this is just a game' louder than an old-fashioned HUD," he writes. The fewer HUDs we see, the more we'll feel we're inside a holodeckian piece of cinema. But me, I'm not so sure. I actually think our HUDs are a deeply impressive achievement -- gaming's contribution to the art of information delivery. The gaming HUD is not merely some ugly, artificial kluge. It's a triumph of data engineering. After all, a good HUD allows you to juggle a ridiculously huge amount of information. Consider one of my favorite action-games, Ninja Gaiden. The HUD lets me monitor how much health I've got left, how relatively long my health bar is, how much ninja power I have left and how much health my boss-fight enemy has -- all while I'm frantically bouncing backward off the heads of my enemies. ...
