Iain Macmillan was a photographer who, as the title suggests, was born in Dundee and ended up working with The Beatles, amongst many others. And yes, he took that picture.

Right now (until June 3rd), there’s a small exhibition of his work at Discovery Point Gallery here in Dundee. It doesn’t take long to look around, and it’s free, so why aren’t you there already? As if seeing the six photos Macmillan took for the Abbey Road cover wasn’t interesting enough, you’ll look at some of his work and wonder exactly how he was able to do that in a time before Photoshop. At least, I wondered it.

-David (@dwlt)

We know that you, as loyal readers, probable gamers and inquisitive souls do most likely play demos of games before they hit the market, but we’re talking about a different kind of demo.  The kind in which programmers (and artists) use code to ‘procedurally generate’ visuals and sound to create a whole new style of art.

Well, we say new, it was popular as far back as the Amiga (if not before).  There are some staggering examples out there.  You can find demos which stretch over 10 minutes and feature the most stunning graphics – all generated in real-time, which is packed into four kilobyes of code.  It’s technically, aesthetically and geekily incredible.

One of our favourite Denki alumni (yes, we have a favourites list), Paul Grenfell, is a bit of an expert on the demo scene, contributing the odd column to the well-worth-reading GameSetWatch blog and running his own blog, Bite This and AteBit (as well as working for a game developer – phew!)

While demos are not games in any sense of the word, they use elements of the same technology and show what can done with some clever code.

Of course, the idea of procedurally generating environments is something which is actually used in a few games, such as Nethack and Spelunky (and, we believe, Introversion’s new title too).

All of the blogs have examples of demos which can be viewed (or downloaded). If you ever have five minutes to spare, we’d highly recommend you take a look.

- Brian (@flackboy)

One of the developers we respect, for their games AND their general approach to things, is Valve.

They seem like a fun bunch.  They don’t take themselves too seriously and they’re not afraid to get out there and actually talk to the people playing their games.

Then they do cool stuff like this…

A seemingly innocuous new update to the PC version of Valve’s cult hit puzzle game Portal has turned out to be far more than anyone expected, and could be the first instance of using a three year old game itself to hint at future titles.

The update’s changelog only wryly stated that Valve had “changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations”, causing players to note that each section of the game had been updated with a new radio object. At first glance, the new radios appeared to be the same that otherwise normally existed inside the game, which simply chirped out a samba version of the game’s iconic end-theme song. Only later was it discovered that these new radios each contain a hidden audio file that’s transmitted when you carry them to one particular point in each of the game’s levels.

Things have moved on since then, with images, morse code messages and double encoded numbers finally revealing a dial-up number for the original Aperture Science Bulletin Board System.

Gamers worldwide have been scouring the new information and revealed messages from Aperture Science Lab founder Cave Johnson – all coming from a nice early version of GlaDOS herself.

The resulting media coverage shows just how involved and interested people are in this ‘meta game’ and how well people respond to being given something to play with.

According to Kotaku:

One theory being bandied about by forumgoers is the version of GlaDOS responding from the BBS, which is 3.11, is a reference to March 11, the date that Valve will supposedly reveal more about what this Portal puzzle is all about. It’s also the date the Valve founder Gabe Newell will receive his Pioneer Award at this year’s Game Developers Conference Awards.

We’re agog and admiring.

- Brian (@flackboy)

Oh how I sighed when I discovered this post on Boing Boing:

Whimsical nostalgia indeed. I owned a similar sort of motorbike-based game (Kickstart? Eddie Kidd? Google has failed me so far), which used a strip of red film, pulleys and gears to make a plastic motorbike jump barrels and crates (yes, crates, even then).

I improved things slightly by painting over the crates with Tippex to make the plastic motorbike jump double-decker buses. That worked well, so I tried to speed it up by fitting about five nine-volt batteries lashed together to form a sort of miniature nuclear power core.

Oddly enough, it didn’t work and Mr Kidd never rode again. A year later it was a blessed relief when the ZX81 came out and my half-baked attempts at game improvement were confined to software (POKEing and PEEKing a blocky 2-colour Sam Fox if I recall correctly).

Appreciate the time you live in, kids (sniff). You don’t know how easy you have it.

- Brian (@flackboy)

Dave’s post on the Instructoart book (and more to the point, nicking the book from his desk) reminded me why it is that people say pictures are worth a thousand words.  One of the more awesome things about the Internet – outwith the easy acquisition of sparkly kitten graphics – is the ability to find people who can summarise very complex ideas in clear, easily understood ways.

Here are a few favourites:

• Just how deep is the Mariana Trench?
• How high is the observable universe?
• What’s the difference between the political Left and Right?
• How can the gravity wells of all the planets in the solar system be visualised?

The truth is out there and it’s usually in pictorial form.

-Brian (@flackboy)

Stu’s post on The Void inspired me to not only go out and buy the game, but to consider the games I want to rave about.  The first one may seem like a strange choice, but it’s one of the first applications that goes on every single PC I own – and has been for the last 18 odd years.

Nethack is a what’s called a ‘Roguelike‘ game.  It’s a top-down dungeon exploration.  Your goal is to work your way down through various levels of dungeon, killing monsters and amassing experience, to find the Amulet of Yendor and then escape.  Simple.

However, even describing Nethack then becomes a problem.  It started out in life, simply called Hack in around 1985 and has been in active development (it’s an Open Source game) ever since.  Awesome.

The ‘graphics’ in the game still split people pretty much down the middle.  Basic Nethack uses extended ASCII graphics to represent the dungeon and everything within it.  Some of the basic character are:

• @ - me (the player)
• d – my little dog
• & – a dragon
• / – a magic wand
• ? – a scroll
• > – staircase (down)

You get the idea.

While the game looks incredibly crude and simplistic, the real value and joy of Nethack is in its depth and complexity.  It is arguably the first ever ’sandbox’ game.  Every level is randomly generated, within a given set of rules.  So every single game you play is different.  Within those levels you’ll find hundreds of different monsters, hundreds of different items and even some world infrastructure – shops, mines, banks, guards, temples and so on.

Each and every single one of these items, people and creatures can interact in different ways.  In almost every possible way in fact.  Exploring these interactions is where Nethack creates something unique and entirely different to any other game.

I’ve been playing it since 1987 and I’m still finding new and interesting things to do (and being honest, still occasionally dying on Level 2 when I run out of food).  I once spent an educational fortnight picking up every item I could find from over 30 levels, piling it all in one spot and then zapping the whole lot with a wand of transformation.  This included my little dog (different races get different pets/familiars including cats, dogs and ponies).

In my newly-formed crystal plate mail, with my pet black dragon (& remember), I went through the next several levels like a greased squirrel.  Until I ran into a hive of killer bees nine levels below, my little dog (or dragon) fell through a trap door and I put on a cursed ring of transmogrification turning, at one point, into Lichen.

The thing is that having worked on the game for a couple of decades now, the near mythical Dev Team has run across, thought of, and then included most things in there.  This means that more than any other game I’ve ever come across, if you ever think ‘Oh, I wonder if I can do [X]?’ Not only can you do [X], but the consequences will either be awesome, indescribably punishing, or so unexpected, you’re left gaping, slack-jawed, at a screen full of ASCII, wondering how they knew you’d do that.

Oh, and that’s all without mentioning the fact that you can’t just save anywhere you like and restart, without your original save game being overwritten – just to stop you trying and retrying the same thing over and over.  Or the fact that the game saves your previous deaths in ‘bones’ files and you can sometimes find yourself in a familiar looking level, scattered with very familiar (ex)possessions, being pursued by your own unmerciful ghost.  Did I mention you can also train your dog/cat/pony to shoplift (warning: spoilers), fight monsters, find food and grab gold if it finds any?

No?  I meant to, because it’s all in there.

The best thing is that Nethack is free.  Free as in beer, as well as in speech.  You can download it for pretty much every single platform out there.  If there’s no official version of your platform of choice, it’s a very good bet indeed that there’s an offshoot out there somewhere.  Plus, if you’re really, seriously picky about playing a game that looks like a typewriter that’s been hit by a bus, then there are lots of other open source offshoots, which put prettier and stranger graphics around the same, unbelievably clever and complex core.

Try it.  Live it.  Love it (or not, I’m not, you know, telling you how to live your life or anything).

- Brian (@flackboy)

Instructoart is awesome. It “combines the art of learning, with the art of art” and it’s not kidding. It has diagrams of a variety of phrases or common aspects of life, including “Check Please” (aka the international symbol of asking for the bill in a restaurant), “The Elevator Fake-out” and “In a man’s world, everything is seen as competition”. It’s funny because they diagrams are true, although it’s fair to say that some are better than others. A bonus are notes about the making of a few of the images.

I’m not going to spoil any of the book, but if you’re interested in how pictures can be used to provide instruction (how would you draw the hokey-cokey?) then this is recommended. And if you’re just interested in funny pictures, then this is also recommended.

-David (@dwlt)

Editing is an important part of the creative process for any medium, and nowhere is that more obvious than with film. As part of my continual research for reference material, I discovered Film Editing.

It’s a great guide to the “cuts every filmmaker and movie lover must know”, because it’s completely visual: rather than try to describe the cuts with words, it just shows the frames of the cut itself. It sounds ludicrously obvious, but I’ve looked at several other books that didn’t do this.

Why would we be interested in books about film editing? Aside from being nosey, film has a long history in transitions that we happen to think we can learn from. Simple as that, really!

-David (@dwlt)

I’ve been touching The Void… and it’s been touching me back.

This is the first thing you’ll see.

Russian studio Ice-Pick Lodge is a company which is unlikely to register on your radar. They’ve had one release before this, 2005’s Pathologic which went mostly unnoticed by the majority of games media – and gamers in general.

It unceremoniously re-wrote the rule book on almost all accepted standards of videogame design. It was uncompromising, darkly funny, emotive and perverse. It placed you in a dying city, in a number of roles, trying to do *something* before your time ran out.

Pathologic

It didn’t just break the fourth wall occasionally for comic effect, clarity or to feed you a tutorial. No, the appreciation and acknowledgement of the player was intrinsically woven into the fabric of every facet of the game. Characters would reference you and they seemed fully aware of their own place in the world. Not the game world, THE world. Your world. They made you believe that when your back was turned, they’d be talking amongst themselves about YOU!

A ‘Sister’

Skip forward four years, and their second game, The Void, raises this notion to new heights. You find yourself in some kind of limbo between life and death… and that’s as far as I can comfortably go, as far as the premise is concerned!

Whereas the ‘city’ in Pathologic was something of a barrier to the game’s message (in that it forced you to try and link the action to some kind of ’simulated reality’), the creepy, surrealist landscapes of The Void, with its cast a complicated bunch of angelic ‘Sisters’ and hideously deformed ‘Brothers’; make any attempt to base your thought processes in reality almost impossible.

The inhabitants each have their own agendas, their own ways and a complex, yet clearly unstable ‘truce’.  There are no points of reference in our own world from which you can draw any meaningful comparisons. You are unclear of your ‘goal’ from the outset. Even thinking in terms of ‘winning’ and ‘losing’ is a path to madness. No, the appeal and challenge of The Void is simply to understand it.

A ‘Brother’

A lot of the games media have labelled The Void as an ‘art game’, whereas it is clearly a work of beauty and therefore, in my book, qualifies simply as ‘art’ (no brainer).  I have trouble lumping it in with other ‘art games’ like The Path or Flower, because those games raised a debate as to whether they qualified as ‘games’ or ‘interactive experiences’.

With The Void, there is no such debate to be had. It’s definitely a game, in the same way that ‘Lemarchand’s Configuration’ (The box from Hellraiser) is also technically a game. It’s a game you may find yourself playing while you’re not even at your computer, rather on your way home when something one of the characters said suddenly *clicks*.

Another slightly angrier ‘Brother’

But is that fun? Well, as a lover of Avant-garde work – in any form – I’m undoubtedly going to say yes.

It’s fun in the same way that the disorientating dizziness after watching David Lynch’s Eraserhead is fun – and in the same way that having your mind melted by Shane Carruth’s Primer is fun. Without getting into a debate about the ‘nature of fun’, these things appeal to a lot of people…

and so will The Void…

for the same reasons!

I was in two minds about recommending you give this game a whirl, since it is definitely not going to appeal to everyone. However, if you have an ounce of interest in trying a game which rises far off the scale of classifiable genres and then excels in its own right (and who wouldn’t?), then you should definitely give it a go.

Few times, after playing a game, do I find myself so inspired – and Ice Pick Lodge have now managed to get me TWICE.

They’re the only team in the world doing this kind of thing.  They’ve carved out a distinctive style in just two games over four years – and they’re still almost completely unknown in mainstream circles!

It is, sadly, the curse of the videogames medium that they will find it hard to be taken seriously, doing what they do. They will find it hard to place themselves. I just hope they keep doing it for a long time to come.

Stew (@Chicknstu)

Title designer Saul Bass:

-David (@dwlt)

[via]