The Quixotic Engineer

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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While I’m a relative neophyte to the world of comics, I’ve become a rather big fan of two series: Mike Mignola’s Hellboy and Jeph Loeb’s Batman stories (such as The Long Halloween.) Both revolve around a stoic world-weary anti-hero, and they share a certain dark sensibility that I rather enjoy. If you were to combine the mystery, folklore and occult of Hellboy with the familiar faces of the Batman universe, the result would be the mini-series Batman: Dark Knight, Dark City.

The story begins in a cellar in 18th century Gotham, where a group of robed cultists (including a young Thomas Jefferson) prepares to sacrifice a young woman to gain control of a demon they have summoned. The ritual goes awry and the men flee the evil presence they have unleashed, locking the girl inside with it. Scarred by what they have seen, they decide to dissolve their group and forget the incident.

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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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