constellations
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Weekly Webcomic Wrapup looks up at the stars
Have you ever just looked up at the stars, trying to make your own constellations ... and suddenly everything becomes a star cluster of Pac-Man-related shapes? (Imave via The Librarianist) Here are our picks for the week's best game-related webcomics; voting after the break. Real Life Application (Sharcbate) Battle Fighter III: Hyper Edition (Truck Bearing Kibble) Starcraft Blues (Extra Life) p=mv (Digital Unrest) The Expected Result (Penny Arcade) Oh, you're choosing fire? (Super Effective) Options (CAD) Grand Theft Dinosaur (Dino Comics) Define Addiction (2P Start) It's DYN-O-MITE (Dueling Analogs) "I'd be less nervous" (A Softer World)
Former Hitman devs creating 'high end' casual games
Casual games are not everyone's cup of tea, as evidenced by our controversial inclusion of PopCap puzzler Peggle among Joystiq's top ten titles of 2007. There's no denying, however, that these often bite-sized diversions are as popular as they are addictive, reason enough why many startup studios -- such as newly formed The Game Equation -- swing that way. The Denmark-based studio, established by a pair of programmers who worked on the Hitman franchise in a previous life, aims to develop for the "high end of the casual games industry" with titles that remind them of what it was like playing games when they were youngsters. That's sweet, but what exactly does that mean?The company has pair of puzzle games available already named Deep Blue Sea and Constellations, though at first glance there certainly doesn't appear to be anything particularly evolved about either of these efforts, entertaining as they may be. What is interesting is that in creating the match-3 puzzler Deep Blue Sea, the studio brought on an honest to goodness film and theatre composer, Rasmus Hartvig, to create the game's music, though given the dev's experience with Hitman, a series known for its dramatic scores, The Game Equation's aural emphasis is not wholly unexpected. That's all well and good, and we like good music as much as anyone, but the studio will need to pull out some considerably bigger tricks before we buy into its incongruous idea of high end casual games.
Explore the heavens with your handheld
Still in the alpha stage of development, Constellations DS already looks like a useful tool for amateur astronomers. The homebrew application combines the portability of a star chart with the lighted display and interactivity of a notebook computer. Users will be able to zoom in and out of clusters, panning the night sky with their styli. Tapping a particular star displays its name, position, and other relevant information. Only thirteen constellations have been mapped so far, but developer Nameless plans to add 75 more. Future builds of the program will also use the date and your location to lay out an approximation of how the night sky should look. If anything, Constellations DS serves as a great excuse to escape the light-congested city limits and spend a warm evening outside.[Via Drunken Coders]
Quicksilver constellations
Every time we mention Quicksilver (and we mention it frequently) we get comments wondering what all the fuss is about. Check out what Giles Turnbull has to say about one of the flashier, and less stable, features of Quicksilver: constellations.Constellations are basically radial menus that give you access to a number of different actions that can be performed on the currently selected file or application. While this isn't one of the main feature of Quicksilver it gives you a good idea of the kind of value you can expect from Quicksilver.
