Another restless weekend, yippie. Fortunately, I’ve been playing Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes for the Nintendo DSi in the last few days. Clash of Heroes: nothing to with Might and Magic. Everything to do with being an excellent tactical puzzle, with atack formations coordinate by colors and map orientations. A highlight of the more recent DS fare, just too bad that Ubisoft had the “brilliant” idea of using the name of a series that doesn’t justify the game itself and vice-versa. Oh well.

• Less Talk, More Rock is a BoingBoingBoing feature about how “the native language of video games is neither spoken nor written”. In other other words, it promotes that games such as Super Mario Bros. and Another World are closer to a purer game experience than what one would find in, say, Mass Effect. The argument has merit if one considers how other forms of expression distinguish between themselves, though. What makes videogames unique is their interactivity, after all, and even while Chahi’s game managed a better “cinematic” presentation than many modern games could ever hope to achieve, its true strength was how it condensed audiovisuals and gameplay into a cohesive whole, unshackled by design and expression artifacts such as HUDs or dialogue. Lots to think about it. Spotted it at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, where I wrote a small defense of Another World in the comments section. Until the day I finally write something more serious and complete about the game, that’s the best I’ll manage.

• Here’s something troubling and that may have gone unnoticed by some people. The british government has approved a law which allows them to shut down any site on the internet, indefinitely, based on nothing more than the suspicion that said site may, in the future, break someone’s copyright, or that it may inadvertly assist a third party in breaking some law. This means that sites like WikiLeaks, which publish leaks about documents from the government or other organizations, can be censored. Basically, what this means is we’re heading towards a future where publicly exposing the assassination of two Reuters reporters at the hands of north-american troops may be considered a bigger crime than the assassination itself. The precedents this decision opens up are terrible.
• Morpho Towers “is an installation that consists of two ferrofluid sculptures that moves synthetically to music. The two spiral towers stand on a large plate that hold ferrofluid. When the music starts, the magnetic field around the tower is strengthened. Spikes of ferrofluid are born from the bottom plate and move up, trembling and rotating around the edge of the iron spiral”. Fantastic. You can read more about it here.
• Synopsis Quest Deluxe is a collection of tiny subversions to the japanese role-playing style, with visuals fresh out of the 8-bit era in general and out of Dragon Warrior in particular. Almost like a Retro Game Challenge for people without a Nintendo DS.
• One more theory about the dinosaurs’ extinction and the one that makes more sense to date.
• Reading a newspaper, Jarbas Agnelli saw a picture of birds on electric wires. He cut the photo and transposed the birds’ position into a musical sheet. The result is Birds on the Wires, or, proof there’s always something more beyond a first glance.
• What would happen if pixels invaded our world and remade us by their imagem? Pixels, by Patrick jean.
• Matthew Albanese’s strange worlds.
• And the astounding works of Kris Kuksi.
• (I’ve been thinking too much about you)
• God bless Scandinavia and its Heavy Metal Dinosaurs… For kids.
• That’s what Gief said!
• Alison Mosshart + Jack White = The Dead Weather + Treat Me Like Your Mother.

[{-_-}] ZZZzz zz z…