Archive | May 2007

Maker Faire

We’re getting ready to go to the Maker Faire. Last year’s was awesome and I’m sure this year’s will be even better. Taking the whole family!

LittleBigPlanet Details

The Wikipedia article has great info about LittleBigPlanet (one of the most anticipated PS3 titles), but it doesn’t contain some of the gems you’ll find in the Edge magazine article or issue 71 of developmag.

Here are some quotes from Edge I found interesting:

In Edge, director Alex Evans says “… you might have to use the painting or other creative tools to ‘beat’ a character in the game.” [So, there are enemies to defeat, not just the environment?]

In Edge, the article says “By holding down R1, the characters can be made to grab onto and manipulate any object in the world (including each other) with their stretchy, elastic arms.” [Ah, so R1 is grab.]

Edge: “The D-pad selects facial expressions: grin, grimace and frown. The right stick waves its arms around together, but hold down L2 and R2 and the left and right sticks can move them independently. And, in a simple stroke of genius, tilting the Sixaxis controller moves its head. You can assume attitudes, look at things in the game world, dance; if you wear a frown and tilt your head forwards, you’ll move in a dejected shuffle.”

In Edge, Pete Smith says “We plan to allow creators to decide which objects and images they would be happy for other users to take out of their level. It may be that you have to complete a task or the whole level to win the object. We expect people to spend a long time creating cool items, and those that do will most likely make it a challenge to get it.”

In Edge: “Platforming is the most basic form of gameplay kit we use in the game – there are others that we’ll use, and give to the players to use, but I won’t go into detail on those yet,” says Healey. “I should point out that if you want to create something with this game, you don’t have to make a traditional game level. Think of it more like making a physical website. Adding gameplay elements is an optional extra.” [LittleBigPlanet is being called a platformer, everywhere, most likely based on the demo shown earlier this year. I can’t wait to see what other kits might be in store!!]

Update: Joey pointed me to IGN’s recent hands-on with the game. Note: There is a second article in that hands on experience.

SharedReviews.com – Aggregating Independent Content, Sharing the Proceeds

SharedReviews.com looks like a great way to bring together a community of content and share ad revenue across the members of that community.

Through a process outlined on their “how” page, they plan to gather product and service reviews written by consumers and independent bloggers, organize those reviews in a taxonomy and give the community 50% of the ad revenue generated by their reviews. Reviewers can review anything they wish and in whatever format they wish. Reviews are rated by members of the community and the revenue is distributed based on those ratings.

The beta period begins next month, so for now I can only guess how this will pan out. It seems to be immune to some of the conflicts of interest that some other paid blogging services have, which should help readers trust the content. Meanwhile, it provides a way for bloggers with low page rank and low readership to be found and get ad revenue sooner. For me, the most interesting part of the SharedReviews promise is what they call “Review 2.0”. Each review will be wrapped with details about the reviewer – what that author has reviewed recently and a bunch of profile information meant to help readers understand the context of the review. Given a choice, I’m more likely to trust a fellow comic book fan’s review of Spider-Man 3, for instance.

It remains to be seen if pro and semi-pro bloggers will upload their reviews and now-popular unboxing videos to SharedReviews, as the economics might not work out, but it could mean even greater exposure for those sites, especially if the content is linked to the author’s blog. Either way, there are plenty of non-pro bloggers and non-bloggers who may find this site a comfortable way to share their views.

How Review 2.0

Update: TechCrunch has a screenshot of a sample review page.

Review 2.0