Are this good or bad news? For me, the news are bad. Lego lost its “trademark protection” of their colored bricks. In theory now everyone can produce those colored bricks, that are iconic and build more than two generations from children to still playing grown-ups. To be honest: Lego always had a quite restrictive idea of maintaining their copyrights, but on the other hand, they fully supported the community of fans, and even maintained some themselves. For example check the nxtbot.com website (originally sponsored by Lego, now independent) or the E-Klocki-Community.

The BBC-News writes:

“The EU’s Court of First Instance on Wednesday upheld a 2004 EU decision to cancel the brick’s trademark status. The trademark was registered in the EU in 1999, but rival Canadian toy firm Mega Brands – which makes Mega Bloks – successfully challenged it.”

Picture by Evil Mad Scientist

The EU said, that the bricks from Lego have a functional, technical shape, and therefore can not be protected by trademark. “The functional shape must be available for everyone.” Charlotte Simonsen, spokeswoman from Lego, already said, that they will go against this ruling and that they will take it to the highest court of the EU. I wish the Lego-people all the best. Don’t get me wrong here, I normally are totally against restrictive copyrights, but I think that Lego are far more than just a product. They are a class of its own and it would be a rich trip of horror to see cheap bricks as mobile-phone accessories, low-quality children toys or other plastic junk, that do not meet the quality standards.

Lately I came upon a nice JavaScript experiment, called “GoogleDrive”, made by Samuel Birch – he likes to develop plugins for the MooTools-framework. In GoogleDrive you can actually load a map of a city of your choice and drive through this city with a small car. You simply control the movement of the car by cursor keys. The authentic thing about it is, that it has some simple kind of collision detection: you can drive on streets, but not on buildings. It is a very basic implementation and one-way streets for example are completely ignored, as well as other things. You can also drive down from bridges and this sort of things. At least, it’s an experiment, not a finished game. Unfortunately it is not possible to turn on the satellite-picture mode. It should be no problem at all, except if the collision uses the ground color to detect the buildings.

Driving with GoogleDrive through Tokyo.

If I look at the Google drive experiment, than I strongly have to think of a very classic top-down-view map implementation, where you drive a “bicycle” with your keys: the level-connecting mini-maps of the Amiga-game Bad Cat. In fact the bicycle at Bad Cat is only a dot and besides a counter, that sets a time limit, there is almost no real gameplay at all. Maybe the colors are to mention. Dark, rough, moody, autumn-like and a little bit dirty. A vintage Amiga-color palette, I’ve never seen something like this for years. In opposition the concept of connecting a game world through maps is used more often. Just remember games like Super Mario or Ghost’n’Goblins. I almost always enjoyed the maps (just a) a little bit more like the game itself…

The Bad Cad map, a game from 1988.

Have you ever seen something like this? Surprise, surprise. It is a drawing “made of water”. I don’t want to spoil you, but please watch the video till the end, to get the effect and to learn, what is so cool about water drawing. Using this technique, you can create fantastic animations out of nothing. Just with paper, water, ink and a camera. And since I assume, that aspiring game designers are also reading this blog: Why not try something new for the next custom intro or cut scenes of a game?

The drawing was made for the coming book “Alan’s War” by Emmanuel Guibert.

The Blipfestival 2008 will be held from the 4. – 7. December 2008 in New York City. It is the biggest festival for chipmusic, as well as music and visuals made on lo-fi and retro gaming devices. The Blipfestival is a 4-day(!) event, that will showcase more than 40 musicians and visual artists. It is all about the “low-res cutting edge”. Word up!

For more information, visit the Blipfestival website, or linger a little bit more on Digital Tools: Blipfestival and the Chiptune-Revolution, Interview with Paris Graphics on his VJ-Tools.

This week I finally had some time to peek a little bit on the new blockbuster-game for the Play Station. Little Big Planet is nothing less than a silent revolution when it comes to user-interaction, play, editing and creation. You can not only customize your players, but also objects, the level design, upload own material into the game, like own graphics, textures everything! You can make this game your game at every moment of play. This is really a new paradigm in the involvement of the user. The game-creators are speaking of “Game 3.0″. Plus: The game is sweet as it can be. But enough talk. Let’s roll some videos that explain everything well.

Here some crazy guy from Japan build the first level of the classic game Gradius into Little Big Planet!

Did you already seen this? The Unfinished Swan is an upcoming title for the Wii probably XBox (see update below) . The world is pure black and white. You make use of your weapon, that is some kind of “paintball-device” right in the opposite color of the world you poke in. You have find your way through the maze by coloring the walls of the – at first – invisible walls. This is a clever use of textures, isn’t it?

It fits into our series of games, that focus on gameplay, rather than being eye-candy at the first place, although almost all of this games are also visually appealing, just because of the lack of colors. For example check Echochrome or the Otawa Ascii-Game.

Update: The game is currently being prototyped on the XNA, so it is very likely, that this game will be released on the XBox. I also found the currently official webpage. The author Ian Dallas is also keeps on blogging about his process. Thanks to Frank for the advice!

Perry Bible Fellowship is a challenging comic. Each strip is drawn in a very own and unique style, and I really was amazed by the diversity and richness, as well as the cruel and obscure humor. Consume at your own risk!

Read more about the author Nicholas Gurewitch and the surroundings at the short FAQ-section of the Perry Bible Fellowship. I’m beginning to love everything from him. On this site, he collects appearances of him on blogs and articles, like that, just browse the right sidebar on the Perry Bible Fellowship and linger across the internet with some worth readable stuff.