Simple but nice games

Working in a GPU company doesn't mean that you have to only like the big engines that use big GPU features. Of course this is good and some big titles are amazing. But there is still some room for independent games or small budget games. This is why independent game festival is interesting. In fact, I feel like this is one of the best ways to give some fresh air to a game world that became so standardized.

Simple games can still take advantage of GPU capabilities, so it is important that we support them and help them as much as we do for blockbuster games...

Few titles that I still like, although some of them are very old. Beware that some of these titles are really old fashion... sorry for that.

Cortex Command

http://www.datarealms.com/games.php

Although it looks like an old-fashion 2D game (no DirectX or OpenGL involved, here !), everything can be destroyed (or you can dig…). Like in Worms World Party…

I am not so good at this kind of game but it looks like it is possible to try lots of sorts of strategies and lots of things that the creators even didn’t think about… just for $20…

Lots of videos are available on youtube, btw…

Love

http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/index.html

This game is under construction. The style looks interesting.

Braid

Interesting ideas and nice Art. Ignacio Castano (Former NVIDIA Devtech guy) just joined the small team.

http://braid-game.com/

Gish

http://www.garagegames.com/products/gish

Old game bust still cool. The simple concepts leads to complex physical things.

Eets

http://www.eetsgame.com/news/index.php

This simple game is neat. Good art. Simple gameplay.

Chain Reaction

http://games.gamepressure.com/game_info.asp?ID=2532

The Art of this game is really bad. But when I see my 9 years old playing it, I can see it has a great potential.

My Kindle DX experience

First of all, I want to say that the Kindle DX experience is great. But do not expect this device to behave like a Handheld device or a small computer. It is not a computer: it is a reading device. So, think twice before buying it : you may first really wonder why you would spend more than $400 for such a device.

The Kindle DX has a very good form factor for reading more than the books you bought : the screen size is big enough to allow you to read technical papers or powerpoint-converted documents. And at last the acrobat format is fully functional : plug the Kindle to your computer and drop whatever you like !

Note that the Kindle Dx is a nice piece of compact technology. But its weight (same as a Best seller big book) will certainly push you to put it on your legs after few minutes of holding it. This is especially true when you want to write something with its keyboard: the weight will give you hard time to wear it at the same time typing text. But the keyboard is small and good quality. It doesn’t take much space, which is a good point: the rest being used by the screen.

Despite the fact that many features are missing, Kindle DX is such a very nice device !

The excellent reading experience; the free access to internet and the freedom of reading any of your PDF/Text document makes this device worth its price if... if you are used to spend of lot of time reading documents and browsing for information. In fact, one could even take a big advantage of this device without buying any E-book...

Let’s just hope that Amazon will provide a Firmware update with some missing features as soon as possible.

Very good features :

• Display size for reading. Perfect size for technical documents
• E-Ink : being able to access information and read you documents outdoor is such a pleasure.
• PDF documents. Technical papers (like white papers from research areas etc.) are perfectly rendered.
• Web browser : either “basic mode” or “Desktop mode” are nice. Blog-style sites (Ubergizmo...) or Wiki sites (Wikipedia) are the most compliant. Other sites are still working pretty well. I can check my google emails and write short answers (long answers slows down the refresh, because of the E-Ink technology display) without any issue.

Missing features, or features that would be most welcome:

• No grouping of PDF documents. Even if you copied your PDF documents in various sub-folders, they appear as one single list. It can become a problem if you stored thousands of them
• No selection within a PDF document. As opposed to a Ebook or text file where you can highlight and lookup the word into the dictionary, PDF documents don’t offer this feature at all.
• No annotations on highlighted text
• General search feature not working for PDF documents. Text and books are indexed so that you can perform a global search and get the list of documents/books that contain your keywords. PDF documents aren’t part of this search. The only way to search in a PDF file is to first load it...
• No Zoom in a PDF document; No way to change the size of letters. The only way to zoom is to rotate the Kindle (Auto mode or by explicitly asking for the rotation...)
• No grouping of Web-browser bookmarks. Again, this can become a real issue if you have many
• No Synthetic Voice for PDF documents... but I can understand that it can be a hard problem to solve. Especially if the PDF document contains equations and other crazy keywords !
• No way to browse mp3 files. I would have loved to get this feature for a specific purpose : listen to recorded conferences while reading the slides (converted in PDF) !
• No picture viewer. Although the display is in grayscale, I personally like this. It gives an artistic touch (if you did a correct contrast setup and maybe post-processed the image with some patterns).
• No way to choose which image will be displayed when turned off. Currently, the Kindle display very nice images when Off. It would be cool if we could choose our own image... so the Kindle would be usefull even when off : as a decoration in your living room :-) !
• No touch screen

Frustrations:

• Although I didn’t use it so much, yet... I got few random crashes (web browser, pdf document...). Firmware update will help
• Missing features when Reading PDF documents : Font size; indexed search; Highlighting; lookup to dictionnary; zoom...
• No way to choose the mp3 from a list
• Getting lost in the list of documents stored in the Kindle. After 20 documents uploaded, it becomes difficult to quickly access them.
• PDF load time can be long

Chocolate

Yeah... not very interesting. But I wanted to mention this...
after all, this is the first time I write a blog and franckly, I still don't understand the interest of doing this. I even don't understand how other may spend some time to read other's blogs... I also wonder what human kind will think in thousands years, when they'll find back soem data from our time. Would you still have the same admiration on Pharoe's time if Champolion did translate Egyptian hieroglyphs that would deal with chocolate spread ?
I guess that most of us may use a blog as a public diary book, or as a notepad of ideas and findings : so that you can send the hypperlinks to your friends whenever you think that, at last, something can be interesting for someone.



Yesss. I found my favourite Dutch chocolate spread (habit from my tender childhood in Holland) in a chinese grocery store, 4 mins from our house in Cupertino...

You should try that : put some butter (salty : even better) on 2 toasts; spread this on one of the toasts then cover with this other one... eat.

I still wonder who these "Spion Oranje" are... this movie seems fantastic.