The Quixotic Engineer

There’s always been a minor niggle at the back of my mind when I played the Nintendo DS. “They’ve got it backwards,” I thought, “The A button should be on the left and B on the right. That’s how it’s always been… I think.” A speedy investigation showed that my memory was a little foggy, and that the answer was significantly more interesting than that. Therefore, I present to you a brief history of gamepad button mapping.

Nintendo: BA for Life

The NES was the first console to move away from the joysticks of the Atari generation, opting instead for what would become an iconic design in gamepads. Despite my previous complaint, note that A is indeed mapped to the right of B. D’oh!

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Last fall featured one of the strongest holiday games lineup in recent memory. Games such as Bioshock, Super Mario Galaxy, Team Fortress 2 and Rock Band were all arriving within weeks of each other and life was good. However, it’s easy to overlook the fact that there were just as many major titles that fizzled in the last year. Consider the following sampling from Metacritic:

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What do the Nintendo DS and Looney Tunes have in common? They both have a well-deserved reputation for shovelware. Since dozens of mediocre licensed titles come out every week, it’s no surprise that this one managed to skip the endless cycle of previews that plagues games journalism today. It didn’t feature any bold new mechanics, and garnered an unremarkable average review score of about 67. Heck, I wasn’t even aware of its existence until Skrud suggested I check it out. However, if you enjoy rhythm games, this is a game that is definitely worth your time.

Looney Tunes: Cartoon Conductor is a blatant Elite Beat Agents clone. Like EBA, there are notes on the bottom screen that must be pressed with the stylus in time with the music. It also splits up section of the song with a cartoon narrative, in this case featuring the familiar cast of Looney Tunes.

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Back in April, there was a lot of excitement around the rerelease of a game called Ikaruga on Xbox Live Arcade. The game seemed to have garnered praise from all corners, including many people whose opinions I’ve come to greatly respect. My anticipation grew, and when the game was finally released I immediately jumped on my console to give the demo a whirl.

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Bloom is a shader effect used to simulate the real appearance of very bright light. While it was once considered too hardware intensive for real-time gaming, modern systems with HDR rendering make frequent use of it. So frequent, in fact, that the effect has become synonymous with “next-gen” graphics. Today I’d like to take a closer look at bloom, and address what I feel is an unfortunate trend in its use.

Bloom aims to recreate the optical effect known as the Airy disc. In the real world, when light passes through a circular aperture such as your eye it diffracts, causing flaws that limit the maximum resolution of even a perfect lens. These defects are negligible for normal incoming light, but very bright sources can appear to bleed into surrounding darker objects.

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