Wonderland

Every JRPG ever

Best.

"You know she's a princess, right?" "She is?" "Obviously."

Via BoingBoing.

Plants vs Zombies peashooter... in a jar

Awww. Lookit her little face!

She's $25.

TVs about to get app stores too

YouView will have one, eventually. But there are already digital TVs that will ship with their own app stores: Samsung's one.

Samsung has kicked off a €100,000 Smart TV App Developer competition aimed at populating the world’s first TV App Store, the company revealed today.

I wonder what the new net-telly remotes are going to look like? Cos that's kinda central to the whole experience.

Ahh fragmentation.

Banksy's Simpsons intro

I love this. Thank you Banksy, and Matt Groening. How on earth they get this stuff past 20thC Fox brand protectionists is beyond me. Do they just not show 'em?

(via BoingBoing)

Google TV

This is one of the sources of the panic in teeveeland right now.

Adsense muscling in on display networks?  Imagine that.

Interface looks gorgeous, too.

There's an appstore. You can interface using a smartphone: avoids the awful red button interface issue.

No news on when it hits the UK. It'll be on the shelves next to YouView boxes (assuming they turn up next year, as planned...?), and SkyTV boxes, and ancient, creaking Freeview and Freesat boxes, and Xboxes, and Playstations, and Slingboxes, and iPads, and Tablets running SeeSaw...

...but this bit is the magic:

Fantastic.

Google TV.

Changes at work: 4iP, Channel 4 Education, games and some clarification there

This is going to be short, because this is my personal blog, but there's a lot of misreporting and confusion out there in gamesland after Channel 4 (my employer) issued a press statement discussing the closure of 4iP and an Online reorganisation in order to help solve any confusion and incoherence of structure.

Develop speculates that it may or may not affect the Education dept (the bit I work from). To clarify: it doesn't affect Education. 4iP has closed, but Education has not. In fact, we're getting a bit bigger.

PC Gamer reports that the 4iP money was used to "partly fund" games like Privates and The Curfew. It wasn't. Education's money funded Privates and The Curfew entirely, and they are not under threat.

Bow Street Runner, 1066, Smokescreen, Routes, Trafalgar Origins, 303 Squadron, SuperMe, Privates and The Curfew were all Channel 4 Education commissions; Cover Girl and Ada are still set for Q4 launch, and we're very close to announcing a whole bunch more new games for 2011.

HTH. I have big sympathy for journos of course: C4 Edu has terrible googlejuice, partly because of previous reincarnations and naming, and partly because it doesn't have its own brand (and partly because the word Education is hardly a fun sell!). Hell, the 4iP website isn't even updated with the news, so no wonder there's confusion.

It's hard to know what we're up to at the moment without calling us up, and this small hoo-hah has brought that even more to the fore.

More work, more work.

(I'm very sad about 4iP going. I think it had great, great potential, and the team who work there are fantastic.)

Logic gates ... in Minecraft

Redstone on a block produces a powered block, which can be powered on, or off. Alright!

Which means logic gates. Which means things like, combination locks. This is a 6-button combination lock, made using Minecraft.

Minecraft's standard logic gates:

What next?

Here's a 16-bit adding machine...

Enough Minecraft stuff. I've given up. The starship enterprise guy overwhelmed me completely. Meanwhile someone else decided to recreate Minecraft's aesthetic in Left4Dead2. Brilliant!

CelGaming encounters Privates

This made me giggle.

The Sacrifice

More DLC for Left 4 Dead (1 & 2!)

Yep. That works for me! Out next week...!