Mrs.Bairdy

A simple ‘work in progress’ sketch, done using traer physics, featuring an octopus-like creature that goes where the mouse is when the mouse button is pressed. Completely lacking in usefulness, but I like the potential of the legs. Not sure where to take it.

Octopus

Heavily inspired by a sketch in Ira Greenberg’s excellent “Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art”, this is a simple sketch randomly generating ‘distressed cubes’ at 30fps, written while my wife watched Dante’s Peak

Developed by Sony London, it’s yet another ‘rhythm action’ game where you press the buttons in time with the icons on-screen. “Yay!”. The selling point of Beats is that instead of relying on predetermined patterns, it auto-generates patterns to your own music, in this case the MP3s on your memory stick. It works pretty well in practice, better than other attempts at this automatic pattern generation I’ve seen.

The “twist” to the gameplay is that in addition to pressing the correct face icon at the right time, you have to press left, right or no direction depending on whether the icon is crossing one of three circles. Combine this with the “overdrive mode”, and you get a lot of symbols whizzing around to time the buttons to. I likes. It’s no Guitar Hero, but it’s not pretending to be – it’s a way of interacting with your music, having some fun with it, and giving you the freedom to use your own music. I’ll be buying it.

$5 on the PSP store.