Bip bippedy boo bop wey

This is hard to describe, it's a lot easier to see how it works in action. It's called Tenori-on which means "Tenori-on" in English. It makes music, quite nicely actually, and you can buy one for just £617. Personally, I'd buy 2, just in case one of them breaks.

Red Alert

This is the second time in two days that I've given respect to EA, but with the 13th anniversary of the series, and the new game (Red Alert 3) coming out soon, you can now download Command & Conquer: Red Alert for free. That's right, free. Sure you're actually download ISO's, and sure it's not "officially" compatible with Windows Vista, but it's a free game! You can also get Red Alert 2 free is you pre-order the third one. Command & Conquer was never a big favourite with me, but it's still awesome news.

Spore's the merrier

Sometimes I just crack myself up with these titles; that one's definitely a keeper. I've come across this before, but was only reminded of it again today. EA (again) and the Spore team have been releasing different prototypes that they used to test different gameplay ideas. Working out what goes on is a bit difficult, but they sure have purdy hair:

Chrome Dome

They just come to me, I swear it. Google's expanding its ever wider dabble pot by entering the browser business with an open source effort they've named Google Chrome. They've released a 38 page comic detailing what it does. It actually does seem quite nice, with some nice ideas in there; such as separating tabs into their own process, so if one goes down it doesn't take your browser with it; and creating a new Javascript engine that compiles code once, into machine code, so it's über-fast. There's a bunch of other stuff in there, but I'd hate to take away from your enjoyment of the comic. By the time I've finished writing this sentence, their website went live, so you can actually download it and try it today.

One part PVA glue, 10 parts water

A really nice article on http://www.gamecareerguide.com about the benefits of paper prototyping - i.e. cards, tokens, hand-drawn boards, and changing the rules as you go - over traditional computer based prototyping. I'll let you read the article rather than talk about it, but if you read it and you're interested in how exactly to go about doing it, read this guide on how to paper prototype.

Graffiti for dummies

That's actually quite a clever title - An Italian group has created an application that uses boids, AI, and real world architecture to create some nice graffiti visuals. In your face Banksy. Check out the videos, they're pretty cool (although some smoothing would have been nice with some of the boids).