Day: July 9, 2003

Having Slaves Make Your Movies

looky

From an article at Stomp Tokyo:

Pulgasari: The Legendary Monster (1985)

The story behind this film may be more interesting than the film itself. Unlike the other films on this website, this film was produced in North Korea, not South Korea. According to news reports, current North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il (son of former leader Kim Il-Sung) is a big movie fan, and in 1978 he had his agents abduct two South Korean movie personalities, director Shin Sang-Ok and his wife, actress Choe Un-Hee.

These two made at least two movies in North Korea. As near as I can tell, Pulgasari: The Legendary Monster (1985) was the last one. Shortly after it was completed, Shin and Choe fled to America. For this reason, or perhaps for reasons of content, the movie was shelved for years. In 1998 the film was championed by a Japanese film critic, and was released in Japan, apparetly to some sucess.

Phone games & Wario Ware

looky

A few weeks ago a random motorcycle ape got a bee in his bonnet:

M A:  Brian, what do you know about J2ME? ("Java 2 Micro Edition")
BRIAN:  A little.  MIDP, that stuff.  Why?
M A:  We have to make cell phone games!
BRIAN:  We do?
M A:  A bunch of companies are all releasing
               phones with microJava.
BRIAN:  Whoa.  Okay...

So he looked at the development kit Sun put out, and all was quiet…

Wario Ware, Inc.

A week later to celebrate getting a new job I bought the Gameboy Advance SP,
the slick new flip-top gameboy- I previously only had a Gameboy Color and one of the giant original GameBoys with the pea-green monochrome screen, so I couldn’t play any of the new games.
With it I bought Wario Ware, Inc. (Mega Microgame$).

This game is so perfect. It’s basically a bunch of very simple games
(“microgames”) that you play for about 3 seconds each. A single word instruction
will show up like “PICK!”


Pick!
Pick the Nose!
Eat!
Eat the Banana!
Brush!
Brush the Teeth!

and you have to figure out what the object of the microgame is
and how to play it. In the case of many of them it’s a matter of pressing
a single button at the right time, or pressing a single button fast enough.

Suddenly Motorcycle Ape’s obsession makes total sense.
He saw this game and got hooked, and being a game developer
thought “I can do this!”
And it’s true. The games are so simple you could
easily write one in a single day, even if you’re not a game programmer.
They are all based on hobbyist games which people made at home.

Some of the games are so Japanese
( = “random” or “pointless” or “nonsensical” )
you can tell the impetus was indeed tiny cell phone applets.



The next question: making a tiny game and showing it to your friends is
simple. But:

  • How would one use the network connectivity to make multi-player games?
    What would gameplay be like?
  • How would one get huge numbers of people to play it?


Barcode Mania

looky

Here’s something interesting: 2D Barcoding.

You’ve probably seen a weird pattern on your UPS package
which looks like a target with a bunch of tiny hexagonal dots around it-
that’s called Maxicode. It was developed by UPS.

All of this is a step up from “Code 39”, which is the thing we’ve all seen,
and which UPC is based on-
the scannable squares on groceries and other products. Code 39 is
really “code 3 of 9” (sounds like a Borg name) in which every character is 9
stripes, alternating black and white, and three of them are “fat”.
To see an illustration of this, check out my
Code 39 Converter