There was a Discworld game that came out way back in 1995, and as such games do, it had a collection of 8 bit music. It also had Eric Idle doing the voice of Rincewind, which I think is a brilliant bit of casting, and Jon Pertwee doing a whole lot of the other voices. It was based on Terry Pratchett’s book Guards, Guards! but somehow wound up with Rincewind instead of Vimes in charge. If you still have the game you no doubt need a legacy system to play it on, but thanks to Sorek142 you can still listen to the soundtrack, or at least the incidental music, from the various scenes. Note that does not include Eric Idle’s song That’s Death, ranked by PC Gamer as among The best songs in PC gaming in 2010, because that was on the Discworld II game.
SIGGRAPH 2013 is coming up on July 21st through the 25th, with the latest and greatest in graphics development for movie production, gaming platforms, and scientific visualization. Some of the presentations and exhibits each year focus on new and emerging technologies, and as usual they have put together a prevue of some of the more interesting ones. A few of these are silly, and more of them need context to understand their potential applications, but a couple of them are obvious game changers that will revolutionize how we do things once they get into full production. And as a special bonus, I am including their Real Time Preview for this year as well.
I would have loved a copy of this game if it had only existed, but this very funny video was put together by the folks at Collage Humor. The site has a large number of highly skilled contributors with a range of different talents, so you can find all kinds of amusing content there.
Ravi Fernando is a Stanford undergrad who can actually solve a Rubik’s Cube while juggling it. When he doesn’t juggle it, he can solve it in as quick as 10.49 seconds. Pretty amazing to watch, isn’t it? Back in 2011, Mike Dobson and David Gilday built CubeStormer II from a Lego Mindstorm set, a smart phone, and a custom written android app that solved it in 5.32 seconds. I used to be so proud of being able to solve it in 10 to 15 minutes… ah, well. Thanks to Open Culture for the heads up on this one.
The name of the song is Warning Signs, the name of the band is The Anix, and the track is from the new Mass Effect animation Paragon Lost. Funimation is carrying the feature film, and it has just been released so you can grab a copy for the permanent collection now.
Happy Thanksgiving to those of you in or from the USA, wherever you are. One of the things to be thankful for is the Avengers Initiative Lite game, available for free for a limited time over at the App Store. Rampaging as the hulk is probably around the limits of my game skills, so I am expecting this to be fun. Obviously Marvel and Disney are hoping you get addicted to the free version and go ahead and buy the full version.