Video Game Sprites

Sock Master’s Video Game Controller Family Tree

Now this is a sexy looking console. Give me this over the Xbox 360 and PS3 any day.

This guy is making a port of Grand Theft Auto for the NES, yes the NES. He is one dedicated guy, considering he had to make: an assembler, graphics editor, map editor and a host of other tools all from scratch just to make this game!

This guy has constructed his own comics using screen shots from Half-Life 2 for all of the artwork. It is very, very well done. This guy has some skills! http://www.phwcomics.com/

In August the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival has loads of free (I think) screenings of upcoming game footage and talks by industry types. I missed it last year for some reason but heard good things about it. More info here.

A while ago in my role as “webmonkey” for GameSoc I thought that we were due a re-design. The site design had been unchanged for atleast a year and was starting to look rather dated. It was based around a horrendous table layout with a huge banner graphic. Really old-skool stuff. So, I’ve updated the colour scheme and stripped out some of the table layouts. A lot of the table stuff is still there but I really don’t fancy digging around in 30+ files changing <td>s and <tr></tr>s to <div>s and <span>s. The original site back-end code was written before CSS layouts were vogue. I think I’ll phase out the tables gradually.

I’ve also managed to crowbar in some nifty png image trickery. The shadows on the sides of the page content are actually pngs with variable transparency. This means the background image can change and the shadow will still ‘make sense’. Neato stuff, except that is totally breaks in IE (surprise). One hack later and IE is atleast displaying the image properly. But now you can’t click on any of the page! Slight flaw there microsoft… Another google later and I find this life-saving page. Apparently your image has to be really small in one of it’s dimensions. That’s one nasty bug.

Anyway, I like the new look and I’ll continue squashing those nasty tables. What do you think?

I finally got to have a game of the super-new version of Natural Selection last night. I haven’t gamed online for ages. With my non-student working lifestyle it’s often hard to find the time. There have been some nice improvements and it is looking more polished than ever. It is probably the most professionally done mod I’ve played in a while. You completely forget that you’re playing a community-built free add-on for a game seven years old. Cracking stuff.

Looks like Half-Life 2 totally cleaned up at the BAFTAs.

BAFTA Results : Guardian Unlimited Gamesblog

It’s amazing what you can do in your lunch break.