➟ Studio Ghibli's Ni no Kuni for PS3

Studio Ghibli and Level-5 are making a videogame for the DS, and it's just been announced that a version for the PS3 will also be released; most likely a different story in the same world rather than a straight port. The screenshot above is purportedly the actual game being rendered by a 2D/3D animation engine. Compare it to a still from an actual animated cutscene here. They are almost indistinguishable in terms of art quality. That a console game controlled in real-time by a player can look (at least when paused) just like a real Studio Ghibli movie is utterly amazing.

Link [Joystiq.com]

➟ iPhone 4 Drop Test

For a brief moment after the iPhone 4 was introduced, I thought I'd risk using it without a case. Now I'm pretty sure I'm not going to get one until I see a really nice solution from SwitchEasy, InCase, or Speck. Having a glass phone for most people is like having glass knuckles as a boxer.

I used my black iPhone 3G for a year with nothing but some anti-glare screen film, and all it got were a few minor scratches on the back. I might have dropped it twice, but not on bare concrete. I've been especially careful with the 3GS, and it's been in some sort of case from Day 1. Unfortunately, the Power Support Air Jacket* I've been using since December has caused some scuffing of the chrome bezel. If you're getting a case for your iPhone 4, be sure that all surfaces coming into contact with the phone have some sort of soft buffering material, not hard plastic.

* Power Support products are grossly overpriced outside of Japan. That USD$35 case is about SGD$60 locally, but I got mine in Tokyo for about half that price.

Update [25/06]: Now Gizmodo's dropped their own phone by accident, and the back is all cracked too.

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➟ Magician Michael Ammar on Letterman

Back when magic tricks were something I did without irony, Michael Ammar was one of the best names to start learning with. His how-to videos were slightly dated, and his gentle, fatherly style of performance at a green felt table suggested that pejorative term "parlor trick", although his illusions were neither cheesy nor dull. It's been years since I'd heard his name, until he popped up on The Late Show with David Letterman last month. His presentation has been updated a little, and it ends on a great (and unexpected) note.

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➟ Star Trek: Tik Tok

Hands down the best Tik Tok video I've ever seen, and one of the best Star Trek ones too.

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➟ Mark meets Kuato

Just discovered this hilarious video by my friend Mark, from four years ago. Basically it's the scene from Total Recall where Arnold Schwarzenegger meets the stomach mutant, with Mark inserting himself into it.

Link [YouTube.com]

A short aside on handheld game prices

When I bought my first Nintendo DS in the spring of 2005, touchscreen gaming was new to the mainstream and the idea of downloadable handheld content was still a few clouds short of a perfect storm. I believe you might have been able to download a game directly to a Windows Mobile PDA, but syncing them over from a desktop was the standard practice.

At that time, I was happy to plonk down £20+ (nearly SGD$60) for a simple casual game like Zoo Keeper, which many will recognize as a clone of Popcap's Bejeweled. Yeah, that game you can play for free online. I remember ordering it online from the American Amazon.com because it wasn't yet due in England for some time, and the ensuing wait for something to play on my new DS was torture.

Even though it launched alongside meatier fare like Super Mario 64 DS, this Match-3 game was an incredible new experience. The ability to directly manipulate blocks onscreen was hailed in the gaming press as something that could "only be done on Nintendo's new machine". You could even wirelessly engage other DS-owning friends in a competitive mode without them having to own a copy. I have fond memories of Zoo Keeper because its mechanics were finely tuned to allow ever-flowing speed combos, and till today still consider it a better Bejeweled than Bejeweled itself.

Present day: one can download a similar game onto an iPhone in under a minute, for free or about a dollar. You compete against hundreds of friends online through Facebook. If Zoo Keeper were to be ported to iOS tomorrow (please please please), USD$4.99 (about SGD$7) would seem too high an asking price. Even Popcap's own sequel to Bejeweled goes for $2.99 on the iPhone while desktop PC/Mac versions continue to retail at $19.95. How did we get to this point? I love a low price on games, and while $60 for Zoo Keeper was certainly too high a price – accepted at that point in time as a form of "early adopter tax" whereby new technology for which no benchmark price has been established often goes for as high as producers dare hope the market will bear – I worry that this might not be sustainable for our ecosystem of independent and major developers. Which is why I welcome Apple's iAds program onto my device, and everyone whining about having ads in their games can go buy themselves a PSP Go or whatever.

➟ Sizing up the iPhone 4 for shutterbugs

Fantastic review of what we know about the iPhone 4's camera unit. In typical Ars Technica fashion, they get into the specifics of sensor suppliers and engineering technology while understanding what photographers and casual users want. News to me is that the larger sensor combined with the same lens as found on previous iPhones = a wider angle of view, close to 28mm (by 35mm film standards). Very exciting news.

Link [arstechnica.com]

➟ CNET Behind the Scenes feature on Windows Phone 7

The company decided more than a year ago to start over yet again, with a new approach and a firm target--holiday 2010--to have the all-new Windows Phone on the market. "I think when we look back on the release five years from now, this was a foundational release, not the release that broke through," Myerson said. "We've got some tough competition.

Confirmed: Copy/paste functionality won't be included in 1.0, and the producer doesn't consider it one of his top 10 things to add in the future. I applaud their start-from-scratch approach, but they are starting way, way behind. Although many will demand multitasking, VoIP/video-calling, and a ready to go marketplace of apps in 2010, the combination of Zune/Xbox Live/Office features may be enough to attract some customers.

Link [CNET.com]

➟ Rumor: Microsoft may have sold just 500 Kin phones

[...] Microsoft has only sold about 500 Kin One and Two phones through Verizon since they went on sale in May.

Unofficially, it's speculated that the lack of a smartphone OS but the insistence on charging for smartphone-level plans may have muted interest and driven customers to the Motorola Droid and other phones with now-similar prices but more features.

Poor KIN and Danger. It's almost as if that stepchild division were given rope and ordered to hang themselves. Still, they must be feeling better than the JooJoo guys.

Link [Electronista.com]

➟ 56 Criterion Collection DVD covers

Some of the best designed cover art you will ever see. Why aren't movie posters made this way? Well, apart from the fact that Joe Popcorn isn't going to see something without a collage of all the stars standing next to each other.

Link [unstage.com]

➟ Too Many Lenses, Too Few Eyes

“Camera, Camera” captures one of the most disturbing examples I know of the way tourists can overwhelm their subjects. It is the scene of what once was a heart-stopping moment in the ancient town of Luang Prabang: the early morning procession of hundreds of barefoot monks in their bright orange robes, carrying begging bowls. As the film shows, this sacred ritual is now swarmed by scores of bustling tourists, some of whom lean in with cameras and flashes for closeups as the monks pad silently past. “Now we see the safari,” a local artist, Nithakhong Somsanith, told me bitterly. “They come in buses. They look at the monks the same as a monkey, a buffalo. It is theater."

The New York Times' Lens blog on a new documentary about the increasingly intertwined acts of travel and photography, and the difficulties facing news photographers. One of the points I found interesting: how reframing experiences for the camera may be robbing us – travelers as a whole – of what joys come of immediacy and individual perspective. Certainly the opportunity to take new photos outside of my regular existence is one of the main reasons I get excited about travel; the surrounding unrecorded moments seem almost a scatter of sensual information in my memory, lacking narrative. It's those that are probably worth more.

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➟ German student flashes Hells Angels, hurls puppy, escapes in stolen bulldozer

A German student created a major traffic jam in Bavaria when he made a rude gesture at a group of Hells Angels, hurled a puppy at them and then escaped on a stolen bulldozer.

Forget our Orchard Road floods for a minute. This is news.

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➟ Wired hands-on with the 3DS

Wired's Chris Kohler gets a little time with the newly-announced Nintendo 3DS. It's only the most promising handheld gaming device since the original DS! Does everything an iPhone can do and more, now that it has 1) a more powerful graphics processor, 2) an accelerometer and gyroscope built into each one for six-axis motion sensing, 3) a touchscreen + analog joystick + D-pad, 4) a download store. Of course, there's also the 3D screen that gives the illusion of depth without the need for special glasses.

The games announced for it so far include a really epic-looking Kid Icarus title, a remake of Ocarina of Time (widely considered the best game of all time), Paper Mario, Pilotwings Resort, Super Street Fighter IV, and all-new entries in the Saints Row, DJ Hero, Resident Evil and Metal Gear Solid franchises. No pricing info or release date yet, which leads me to believe they're trying to bring costs down, but we should expect a higher than usual number. Say around USD$200-220.

The graphics, which are much more advanced than you’d expect from Nintendo, left me pretty much in disbelief. They’re on a level with Sony’s PSP, probably even a little better than that. But the eye-popping 3-D effect makes everything that much richer.

You can only see the 3-D effect if you’re looking at the 3DS screen straight on, although there’s a good amount of fudge factor there — you can move the unit around quite a bit and still get the effect.

Link

Here are some DS games I've been playing lately:

➟ Time magazine's new tablet app

A huge improvement on their first try at an app for tablets like the iPad. There's significantly more content in this version than in the print, which goes a long way towards justifying price parity – $4.99 in this case. It's not a real product yet, just a demo I hope they'll make real. Interesting points to note: the demo device has a 16:9 screen, so this wouldn't actually work on an iPad the way it's currently designed. But it looks really right when used in landscape mode. Also, a lot of non-standard interaction widgets like the copy/paste selector, which might not be in compliance with Apple's approval process.

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➟ Virtual Shackles explains science

Virtual Shackles is a webcomic about games by two guys that's fast surpassing the original two-gamers webcomic, Penny Arcade. In today's strip, they combine two games I've been playing a lot lately: Bit.Trip Runner (Nintendo WiiWare) and Robot Unicorn Attack (Flash, free & iPhone, $2.99).

Both games are variations of the winning formula that Canabalt (Flash, free) defined – a character constantly runs forward, and the player is in charge of making sure it jumps at the right time. Bit.Trip Runner throws dodging, leaping, and kicking into the mix, making for an insanely hard but hugely satisfying reflex tester. It also happens to be rendered as an homage to blocky-pixeled retro games. Robot Unicorn Attack is pure madness from Adult Swim: a metal unicorn (double)jumps amongst the clouds to Erasure's "Always". Do well, and sky dolphins leap with you. It's the epic bombast of Peggle's Ode to Joy sequence meets the wacky, more forgiving Japanese run-jumper, Tomena Sanner (WiiWare & iPhone, $1.99).

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➟ Steve Jobs at D1

From 2003, Steve Jobs at the first All Things Digital conference. At this point, Apple had only sold 700,000 iPods after two years on the market, and the question of whether Apple would build PDAs and tablets was in the air. Steve said no, but his replies were conditional and it's clear that the iPhone/iPad were brought to market only after satisfying all the shortcomings that these concepts had in 2003.

On everything else they talked about, he was dead right. Microsoft's just-announced tablets did fail, and handwriting technology is now irrelevant because everyone prefers the speed of typing. And yet Bill Gates just repeated the other day on Larry King that he still doesn't believe in the iPad because it lacks pen support.

Update: 27 minutes in, Walt Mossberg gives him a few minutes to demonstrate the newly-launched iTunes Music Store. It's a real masterclass in sales pitch delivery: passionate, concise, human.

Link [45min video at allthingsd.com]

➟ Luther Opening Titles

Luther raises the bar for British television serials, granted that's not usually saying much, but it raises said bar to the rafters. Starring the incomparable Idris Elba (who played Stringer Bell in The Wire) as detective John Luther, this six-part crime show will knock the wind out of you by episode five, I guarantee it.

Luther - Opening Title Sequence - BBC One