... actually, into a game store. Which makes the anecdote even funnier.

I would so have done the same thing. But then, I'm like that.

Richard Cobbett has written an article about 50 strange moments from PC gaming history. Ahhh... the memories of strange games such as Ecstatica, Bad Mojo and Sanitarium.

I haven't linked to any of the brouhaha surrounding Rockstar Games and Manhunt 2 so far (the short story: no country in the world wants it on their shelves), but I found the following movie hilarious. It's still not quite safe for work so you have to click through.

Here are some screenshots from the intro of Phantom Hourglass, the upcoming Zelda game for the Nintendo DS. Yay for unconventional art styles.

(Thanks Mike.)

Much as I hate linking to Kotaku: Spore has been delayed until 2009. Wasn't the slip to 2008 announced just a few months ago? I guess building 6 games and making them work together, and porting them to every platform known to man is taking longer than expected. I am sure this involved some interesting discussions at EA.

(Via Kottke.)

Update: That's fiscal year 2009.

I just came back from the last showing of David Lynch's latest movie, Inland Empire, at the Gartenbaukino, a wonderful cinema built in the 60s here in Vienna.

What can I say? The movie lasts 3 hours. My ass hurts. The most frightening moment was furtively looking at my watch and seeing I had another hour to go.

Seriously. Although I had absolutely no clue what was going on, I was continuously amazed how Lynch makes movies like nobody else. The images, the locations, the people, the lighting, the sounds, the... story, for want of a better word, the atmosphere... at no time did anything happen that I could reasonably expect from having seen other movies (including art house and avant-garde movies). Nobody does barely lit rooms and ominous drones like Lynch.

Roger Ebert can explain the appeal of the movie have someone explain the appeal of the movie the way I can't, which is why he is a famous movie critic and I am not:

As they pass before you, you recognize the familiar stock images, characters and dramatic templates -- often employed to build suspense, deliver a shock, jerk tears -- from a million other movies, especially the climactic moments in noir thrillers (like the one on TV at the start of "Blue Velvet"), melodramatic serials and soapy romances. There's the dark hallway, the shadowy stairway, the gun in the drawer, the seduction scene, the portentious expositional dialogue, the bedroom/sex scene, the ominous foreshadowing.... But here they're deliberately disjointed because the usual connective tissue has been moved, removed or replaced.

And I like that. I like it a lot. Just like Pirates of the Caribbean 3, except there it probably wasn't intentional. To let causally unrelated images and sounds wash over you... it is refreshing. You can't think, so you have no choice but to feel.

Lynch knows all stories are all in our heads; we make them up and then inhabit them. "Inland Empire" plays with our movie-fed storytelling expectations line by line, shot by shot, scene by scene, even reel by reel (pay attention to those changeover marks in the upper right). He toys with the building blocks -- establishing shots, reaction shots, POV, and especially closeups -- to get us to look at them in unfamiliar ways. It's poetry: We recognize the individual units of meaning, but the grammar and syntax have been altered.

And in case you were wondering (I sure was): Inland Empire is a region in California. Pomona is inside the region. And we all know about Pomona after seeing Inland Empire, don't we?... OK, we don't know anything about Pomona.

According to Noheat.com Nintendo and Apple are going to partner on games for the iPhone. Slightly surprising... but I can't really get excited about it. Odd, and a bit sad, considering the brouhaha over the iPhone not having as powerful an SDK as people were hoping for.

Here are the most popular quotes overheard in New York. Beware: it's a major time sink, and it's not safe for work. But it's very, very funny.

BoingBoing has an interesting post about the time when software was encoded as audio and video games were hidden in the grooves of LPs.

If nobody beats me to it I will blog about the 80s Dutch radio show that transmitted software, including games for the ZX Spectrum, over the airwaves.

If you know what the waterfall model for software development is, you might get a kick out of reading about Waterfall 2006 - International Conference on Sequential Development. It has tons of great tutorials by well-known software development experts - here is an excerpt:

• Take Control of Your Team's Decisions NOW! by Ken Schwaber
• Avoiding the Seven Pitfalls of Lean by Mary Poppendieck
• Pair Managing: Two Managers per Programmer by Jim Highsmith
• Two-Phase Waterfall: Implementation Considered Harmful by Robert C. Martin
• User Interaction: It Was Hard to Build, It Should Be Hard to Use by Jeff Patton
• FIT Testing In When You Can; Otherwise Skip It by Ward Cunningham
• The Joy of Silence: Cube Farm Designs That Cut Out Conversation by Alistair Cockburn
• wordUnit: A Document Testing Framework by Kent Beck
• Slash and Burn: Rewrite Your Enterprise Applications Twice a Year by Michael Feathers

(Via Kill The Meeting, which is probably worth a blog post of its own.)