Link roundup

1. This sounds like a Pixar movie:

It feels like spring has already sprung this Valentine's Day month in California, especially at the Orange County Zoo, where a wild bald eagle has been making daily visits to the zoo's 6-year-old female bald eagle, Olivia, for more than a week.

The wild bird "frequently perches near the enclosure of Olivia...and calls back and forth with her," Marisa O'Neil, public information officer at the zoo, said in a press release.

2. A long, detailed look at how Minecraft became such a huge hit, and suggestions for how other companies might emulate its success. Via.

3. I've mentioned several times how great the first half of Dead Space 2 is (if you like Alien, then you should definitely watch the Dead Space 2 playthrough), but wow, the second half of the game is terrible. The first half features an intriguing, albeit cliched plot, and one fascinating environment after another (mental hospital, zero-g high above a moon base, daycare center, gore-spattered hallways under ultraviolet light). The second half of the game is just one tedious gun battle after another against the same handful of foes in one forgettable room after another. The behavior of Ellie is so nonsensical that I was convinced (hoping) that she was a figment of Isaac's imagination, and the plot developments in the last two levels made no sense at all.

Link roundup

1. Fascinating look at the life of prowrestler Ravishing Rick Rude.

2. From a lengthy review of the game Darksiders, this meditation on the original Legend of Zelda game:

Zelda is not a game in the spirit of Adventure, even though it contains bats, swords, keys, castles, and, eventually, chickens. Its main deviation from Adventure is that the vast majority of the player participation part is in trying to discover what they are supposed to be doing, and where things are. Zelda, if anything, and possibly somewhat ironically, is the console’s best attempt at the Adventure genre, as beaten to death by Roberta Williams et al. You start on a screen, there is a hole. You navigate into the hole. You are given a thing. The thing is used to stab. Never are you given the kind of information you might logically need to progress, such as ‘someone sells a candle, it shoots the fire, senor leenk, perhaps some booshes will burn?’ No, that never happens. What you have, instead, is a world built with layer after layer of proudly standing contradictions. If a set of statues appear to be inert, then, eventually, on some screen, one of them will start to move if you stand near it. Presumably, when it moves, it reveals stairs, though, I can’t recall if every statue that came alive was guarding stairs or if it was just a couple of them, and therefore, the other stood as a kind of weak and ambiguous hint that, if you want a statue to move, it might. If, from that, you learn that, sometimes, stairs may be hiding under something that is not stairs, then you are smarter than me. The first time you had access to a bomb it seemed like an awkard weapon. How would you know that the 4th tile from the left on some clifface could be a door?

We now make assumptions about bombs and walls, and, granted, in those days, there was a lexicon of bizarre icons that we documented as we explored the NES. Balloons could be worth points, they could also be fragile. If you had a balloon, then you needed to protect it. If the enemy had a balloon, it was a weak point. If a balloon was unattended, you need to capture it. The entry for balloon in the encyclopedia of gaming was one of the easier, less obtuse examples, and it was still somewhat of a mystery. The entry for bomb took up page after page, and ranged from a specific key that opened a very particular place, to a dangerous thing not to be touched, to a tool that could backfire on you, to any number of other uses. In wrecking crew, bombs not only didn’t break anything, they interfered with your attempts to break things. Bombs could even be worth points and have no function at all. A bomb, really, could be anything. It’s not that the Zeldas bomb is internally inconsistent, just that, now, we know what bombs are for. They’re for feeding to triceratops, and widening cracks. A bomb, now, is defined to within an inch of its life in the mythology of the zelda context, which, as mentioned before, does not really exist.

3. Cool animated gif of the monolith from 2001.

*Buy 2001 posters at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. "The protagonist of The Shining is the hotel" - - observation from a well-written and multi-part analysis of Kubrick's The Shining. Via.

2. Pointing out how archaic the Final Fantasy systems have become:

Our major concern with the battle system is the use of numbers: quite frankly, it’s jarring in a game where the visuals have obviously been afforded so much care. Numbers were, in the early days of the role-playing game, a placeholder for some more-effective future means of communicating the awesomeness of an attack. In Final Fantasy XIII, you will never see an enemy’s total hit points: you will, however, see the shit out of the amount of HP being subtracted with each attack. The stronger the attack, the bigger the numbers. The bigger the numbers, the bigger the . . . numerals. The numerals themselves grow in size, turn gold, begin to glow and gleam. The growth, goldness, and gleam of the numerals indicates to us that the game designers might understand, on some subconscious level, that using the graphics is the key to enhancing the effectiveness of the game’s communication of damage to the player.

3. Step 1 of 12 from instructions on putting on a sports bra:

1. Approach the sports bra with confidence, secure in the belief that you will wear it.

*Buy Advent Children at Amazon.

Link roundup

1. Tim Rogers makes lots of excellent and funny observations about video game designs in this post at Kotaku. In fact, there are observations about design in general and how even napkin dispensers are a sort of game:

In short, a "perfectly usable" videogame is no fun at all. If Super Mario Bros. were perfectly "usable", you would walk right from start to finish in a world free of obstacles, monsters, or any other reason to jump. That sure would suck a whole lot! Matt and I seem to be in agreement that any good software interface requires some kind of "friction", whether it's about saving princesses or moving files from one folder to another. I'm not saying that it should be as challenging as Tetris to install an application: just that it should feel and look like something cute and fun. Then again, do you really want moving files to be so fun in your computer operating system that people are tempted to sit around moving files back and forth all day? You probably don't, in the same way that you don't want people to stand there and, giggling like a heliumed gorilla, straight-blast paper-grabbing at your napkin dispenser until it's empty and they're breathing heavily and sweating all over your floor. In short, the new napkin dispensers are too fun; they are so too fun they are dangerous to restaurant productivity.

2. I had lunch at Umami Burger for the first time today. Really fantastic (and it better be because a burger, fries, and 8 oz(!) soda plus tip is $20).

3. "George Clooney is financing the use of surveillance satellites to monitor violence in the Sudan in advance of an independence referendum there."

Link roundup

1. Quorra by Chris Battle.

2. Grim Batman and Robin by Dan Krall.

3. Farmville and games like it, "all optimize for the same two things: virality and monetization. Or put another way: get 2 percent of your users to pay you and convince the other 98 percent to spam their friends in search of more “whales” to pay you. And while it’s a great trick, it’s also on the way out." What's next? Games that let people play together, at the same time. Via.

*Buy Tron toys at eBay.

Link roundup

1. The Smurfs freeware game for the iPod is apparently designed to trick kids into racking up credit cards charges.

2. Relatedly, video game designer Jonathan Blow talks about how games like Farmville are designed to make people feel bad:

It's about "How do we make something that looks cute and that projects positivity" -- but it actually makes people worry about it when they're away from the computer and drains attention from their everyday life and brings them back into the game.

Via.

3. Responding to the terrible reviews of Epic Mickey, Warren Spector acknowledges that getting the camera right is harder than he thought. (Who cares if a game has a good story if the camera's terrible?) Via.

Link roundup

1. Who knows if this anonymous writer is right, or just spreading sour grapes, but don't set aside money for The Old Republic just yet. Boy, I hope the claims are untrue. Via.

2. Yeti paper toy.

3. 15% off in stock/non-new items at the BBTS. Newly available for preorder is this adorable plush Jack Skellington.