An interesting design detail can be found on the lofi-platformer “You probably won’t make it“. Each level features only one single screen. The game keeps on suggesting, it is a “brutal hard” game. In order to reach the goal, you have to make use of double-jumps, avoid the “needles” and reach the goal. Well, if you loose a life, than the blood of your death and – this is the interesting detail – the path of you last played game will be displayed on screen. Nice thing to visualize and really not hard to implement. It is somehow a more static version of that trail of the Feist-character.

I think the game is not too hard, and the music is good, but a little bit repetitive.

via inbetween

DIGAREC, the Digital Games Research Center of the University of Potsdam, published a book about Game Philosophy, that is freely available on the web. The contents are the proceedings of a conference, that was held in May 2008. It covers three topics, that should be relevant to philosophical questions about games: ethics and politics, the action-space of games, and the magic circle. The latter is dealing with the border between games and non-games. The book in total has 344 pages. Direct download pdf.

via A Maze

Low-Rez.de, an online shirt retailer, got some very interesting Pac Man shirts available. Just in case, you want your 8-bit upgrade now. The most interesting design of course is the “unhappy ghost”, ready to be eaten. I think it will be best to directly order them all at once. Available here.

It is not only the Great Ball Contraption machine, that is fascinating, but also this brilliant soundtrack of Kraftwerks “We are the Robots”, played by the Balanescu Quartet. Did I already mentioned my love for Marble Machines? (via Brickpile)

I lately also found another strange entity on the web from Lego-enthusiasts. It seems, that this is a mixture of fan-blog and parody of the Lego-CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp. The language they used, or “invented”, there, is a strange mixture of Danish and English, but nevertheless it looks like fun. It is also unclear, how that site is related to Brickspace.org. (via eklocki)

Did you ever had that problem as a webdesigner, that you wanted to do your customer a good job, but he or she insisted on silly things? Like a navigation in WordPress made of tables? Than we have something for you. Here we go…

Why should I use table-navigation? That’s bad Web 1.0 style!

Well, that’s right. Somehow it is. But there is a certain point, you can’t manage with li-tags and css alone. If you want to display your navigation in that way, that it has always – say – 100 percent of the container width, and the single navigation elements are distributed exactly over the width, with equal padding of each element, than tables are your friends.

Standart li-tag bahavior: li-elements are floating left, leaving a “whitespace” on the right side.

Table-hack with mytag-list-pages: all navigation elements fill up exactly the space of the navigation width – no matter how many elements you add.

If you call this a silly design, let’s call it this way. Some customers demand this design. This plugin will make your live much easier, if confronted with that situation.

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This is indeed an older video from Humanoid (1989), but the quality of the music (I mean this in terms of expression) and the video itself is very much of interest. Unfortunately I do not know, if this is the original video from 1989, or other material directed by someone else. Nevertheless, although from today’s point of view this stuff is very rudimentary, I love to enjoy this over and over again. If you do not know Humanoid, please check the Stakker Humanoid (the second video), that was far more popular back in the days.

Note the plain colors. Music is plain as well.

“White Butterfly” is an excellent shooter, that (at least in my opinion) did not got the attention yet, that it would deserve. It’s an brilliant designed game, made by Linley Henzell.

The game is unbelievable hard, even the first level makes you struggle, unless you play punishment-hard shooters on a daily basis. Each element in the game is well balanced, making the game fun and addictive like hell. You can choose of five ships, each equipped with three different weapon systems. Even if you fail each time at stage one, trying out different ships and weapon systems is a pure pleasure. Linley invented funny things here. You will end up try and try out new strategies to beat the enemies with different cannons. Inside the game each weapon will get stronger and stronger, the more enemies you beat with it… So even inside the game, you can every time change your strategy and focus on a weapon of your choice. Beautiful.

It’s been a long time that I seen an indie-game, that was so well-balanced with all details, even the colors, the sounds, the music are a perfect fit, underlining the whole game-experience. I would go so far to say, that this game is somehow a secret masterpiece! Don’t let it go without trying.

White Butterfly: Gameplay Video

Linley Henzell also made lots of other really good games, utilizing the Allegro-library.

discovered via TIGSource