If..Else Log

The new King Kong for the XBox 360 can be rendered unplayable on standard TV due to development tuning for High Definition TVs.

Fans wanting to get the best out of the King Kong video game should avoid the version for Microsoft's new Xbox 360, the game's maker Ubisoft has suggested. Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot admitted that the 360 game is too dark on standard TVs, making it hard to play.

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The Ubisoft boss said the team who made the game used certain settings on high-definition TV screens. It did not occur to them that there would be a problem with standard televisions, which are what most people use to play console games. Other 360 games, like Microsoft's Perfect Dark Zero, offer an option to select what type of TV is being used.

"When you play on an Xbox or a PlayStation 2, you start to see that it is beautiful," he said.

That said, how many people really have a 360 now anyways? :)

Say So is a web-app in which you post a question/dilemma and other people vote/choose which side of the fence they sit on regarding that topic.

Check out Celebrity Say So in which Powazek, Cederholm, Gruber et al put up their divisive questions such as Film or Digital, Flash 8: Hype or not and Blue or Graphite.

A wonderful idea; wish I'd thought of it first.

Everyone's favourite web framework has hit 1.0! There's even a new home page design. Congratulations to all involved and great news for anyone trying to convince a client, boss or teammates to use it.

Photocritic shows how to convert a Pringles can into a surprisingly good macro lens. Impressive.

There's an article on an idea developed for a Toronto art exhibition last year. A copy of Super Mario Bros was hacked up so as to feature a looping level with no enemies, power ups or any of the other such obstacles. With no obstacles or objectives, it was a fascinating study in seeing what different people did with the limited time that their character had to live.

The onus was therefore on the players to find ways in which they could "amuse themselves instead of passively responding to the challenges the game places before them… [The player is] forced to find our own methods of challenging our minds and imaginations."

Some would dash as fast as they could through the world, while others walked. Some would jump in one spot, engaged by the rhythms of the jump sound-effect. Some would hop over bushes as they ran, creating a more traditional challenge for themselves. Some would remain on a single block, seeing how far in the air they could jump away from that block and still be able to return to it. Even in the most barren of conditions, people still found ways to entertain themselves and make a game out of their surroundings.

Near the beginning of the level, Myfanwy intentionally left a single prize block embedded into the ground, making it inaccessible. She told me she had seen several people become obsessed with this block. These people would stand on the gold, flashy treasure until they died.

Chris McEvoy has now added spoof notices for the Ajax sucks article which managed to get featured on Slashdot.

I actually thought that It was a pretty good spoof but it was probably too subtle for those unaccustomed with Jakob Nielsen.

With Forty Media is nearing its one-year anniversary, James Archer reflects on the lessons learned when running a business.

Amrita2 is a templating engine for Ruby that separates template logic and content with an interesting twist from the usual approaches. Whiles RoR doesn't necessarily need a templating engine, there is a handy Rails plugin to make it easy to install and use with Rails.

A pretty good writeup on what a videogame journalist should not do if they truly want to be an authoritative source. Anyone with an avid interest in computer games cannot have failed to have been disillusioned by videogames reviews.

Journalism isn't easy. The videogame magazine market (with the exception of Edge) and the sorry state of online game review sites are evidence of that. It's (relatively) easy to produce a news and preview site/magazine. It's more (and harder) work to consistently pump out strong content such as editorials, features, interviews and reviews which are more than superficial summaries. Videogames have become big business but journalism hasn't really caught up.

This cannot be serious… it sounds like a The Onion article. Apparently, the new "no diet diet" developed by a Brigham Young University health science professor has helped him lose 50 pounds and stay that way. How does it work? Well, what you do is only eat when you're hungry and stop eating when you're full.

That's genius! Why didn't I think of that? There I was eating when I was full and not eating when I was hungry and wondering why my weight was fluctuating.