My Favorite Kids’ Cartoon

I’ve been a fan of Studio Ghibli (スタジオジブリ) and Hayao Miyazaki (宮崎駿) from the moment I first saw Princess Mononoke (もののけ姫). For some time now, Disney has been releasing Studio Ghibli productions in the US.

Just this week, I had the opportunity to watch Pom Poko (平成狸合戦ぽんぽこ). It’s about a clan of tanuki (tah-noo-key [狸] raccoon dogs, frequently mistranslated as “raccoons”) who are troubled by the humans who are tearing apart their forest in order to make new suburbs. These tanuki possess powers of transformation, so they use these powers to try to scare the daylights out of the humans.

The movie has terrific animation (if rather Japanese-culture-oriented enough to seem bizarre to most western eyes), and the unfolding story is captivating to watch for both adults and children, but that’s not what I’m gonna talk about.…

A lot of the fun of watching this movie is the fact that, at all times, the male tanuki’s testicles are clearly visible. Not only that, but the male tanuki actually use their scrota to great advantage, by transforming them into weapons, or boat sails, or picnic blankets, or parachutes. (The Japanese are much, much more tolerant of anatomical references in literature and movies [including kids’ stuff]). Disney adds some western grace to it by consistently referring to them as “pouches,”, and the animation in most cases is not as obvious as you might think (at least, for kids), so there are some who have watched the movie without actually realizing what specifically was being used.

You’ve gotta love a kids movie with balls (pun intended). And the fact that Disney produced this in the US… that’s awesome!

Intellidiscs

Did you ever own an Intellivision video game system?

After our Atari 2600 got stolen out of our home, along with a guitar and camera, my uncle Gary bought our family an Intellivision, along with scads of games. That console makes up my earliest childhood memories of videogame-playing (I barely remember anything at all about the 2600; just a dim memory of playing Basketball with my dad).

Nightstalker was cool enough, and my best friend Laban (still is) and I spent hours discovering neat tricks in Utopia, like how to turn your PT boat invisible or make it travel on land, or sink a harbored fishing boat. But far and away, my most favorite game was Tron® Deadly Discs.

Tron® Deadly Discs mini-screenshot

I’d always loved that game, Continue reading →

Five Truths About Code Optimization

I discovered a terrific blog post on code optimization, through my friend Mars’s blog.

To summarize in my own words, the most important parts are:

  1. Start with unit tests, so you can be confident that the code worked in the first place, and that you haven’t broken anything in the optimization process.
  2. Never assume you know what the bottleneck is, even if it’s “obvious”. Profile first, code later.
  3. Reprofile after every code change, so you know whether the remaining efficiency issues are still in the same place, or if a new spot is the current big problem.

There are two more points in the post, but they are either obvious or much less important, IMHO.

Tales From Earthsea by Ghibli

I just found out that there’s another great animation due out from Studio Ghibli this July. Unfortunately, that date’s the Japanese release; I’ve got no idea when Disney will release this in the States. Anyway, the movie’s Tales From Earthsea, based on the books by Ursula K. Le Guin. The SciFi Channel recently made a miniseries based on these books, but it was very poorly done. I have every confidence that Miyazaki‘s version will be a significant improvement.

BTW, I myself have never read the books. Just seen the miniseries (and seen about everything from Miyazaki that I can get my hands on).

Woohoo! “Another World” Remake!

I used to love Out of this World (aka Another World) when I was a young teen. It’s probably the first vector-graphics action-adventure game ever made. Smooth animations, for its time.

Turns out, they’re releasing a high-res remake this weekend. Woohoo! While the background graphics have been significantly enhanced, it doesn’t look like they’ve changed the character graphics one iota.

Great gameplay doesn’t age: I’m looking forward to this game.

This month looks to be a great month for adventure gamers in general, what with Dreamfall (sequel to The Longest Journey) and Ubisoft’s Paradise coming out.

Update 4/16/2006: I’ve downloaded the game, which is available directly from their website, in the form of an unlockable demo. The background graphics are indeed greatly improved; however, many of the characters and animations are essentially untouched. To me, the juxtaposition of simple, basic sprites/animations on more realistic, detailed backgrounds is a tad unsettling. Nonetheless, it’s fun to play, and it does look better than the original.

You get to play through that first beast-chase scene, at which point the game ends and you have to buy the codes to unlock the full version. In my opinion, that’s way too short; although it actually probably provides a good idea of what the game is like for people who’ve never played it before (those fanged worms might be easy to me now, and the beast easy to avoid; but that was hardly the case the first few times I played it).

At any rate, unlocking it is only €7 (it’s a french company, so price is in euros; works out to be $8.62, for me). Well worth the price, IMO.

The Optimus Keyboard

I totally freakin’ want one of these. It’s a keyboard, where every key is also a miniature, programmable screen. You can instantaneously alter the keys to show Latin or Cyrillic characters, or whatever else you want—even animations!

Learning C through BASIC?

While trying to think of ways to make learning the C programming language a less frustrating experience, I was struck recently with the idea of writing a complete tutorial on C entirely from the viewpoint of writing games. I’d be teaching pure ISO standard C, so that means I’d have to stick with text-based games. Still, doable.

Anyway, thinking about this made me remember a set of C books (BASIC Computer Games and More BASIC Computer Games) that I used to check out all the time from the Sacramento Belle Cooledge Library when I was a kid (it was at a completely different location back then, FWIW). These were books filled with nothing but listings of BASIC source code for hundreds of text-based games.

So I did a quick search for these books, to see if I could still find them somewhere, and lo, to my surprise, their complete contents can be found at AtariArchives.org!

Continue reading →

The Day I Questioned

Okay. Something weightier.

I was raised to believe that the Bible is the Word of God, and is inerrant, infallible. I’d run across difficult passages, but there was always at least a plausible explanation to make it believable.

So about a year ago, I’m reading along in Luke, and I come across the following passage: Continue reading →