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An Interview With Bungie’s Senior Graphics Engineer, Hao Chen.

That’s kind of the problem with computer game graphics these days. A lot of things people consider solved problems are actually quite far from being solved, and shadows are one of them. After all these years we don’t have a very satisfactory shadow solution. They’re improving; every generation of games they’re improving, but they’re nowhere near the perfect solution that people thought we already have.

A crash course in NES programming.

A great game’s great big problem

In many video games, these two skills — the skill to figure out which guesses are reasonable, and the skill to build on the information you already have about a situation — aren’t just useless, they are actively counterproductive. A lot of the challenge in video games comes from the designers and developers picking smart moments to defy your expectations, prompting you to try the thing that you know isn’t supposed to work — to the point that players are conditioned it might be the best way to approach every problem. Perhaps it has contributed to a generation of contrarian curmudgeons who immediately look to what is wrong with any situation — which isn’t the worst point of view on things, but maybe isn’t always the best.

At 69, Sir Howard Stringer’s time as CEO of the unwieldy electronics giant is running out. Can he and heir apparent Kazuo Hirai turn it around?

In retrospect, the PlayStation system, with its elegant blending of hardware and software, might have provided Sony an early platform for competing with Apple’s iTunes. Stringer himself called Kutaragi “the epitome of convergence,” and Kutaragi said he had aspired to create “a fusion of computers and entertainment.” But he cordoned the business off from other parts of Sony, mostly ignoring entreaties from executives at other units who wanted to work with his talented engineers. Kutaragi cultivated a renegade image within the company, telling BusinessWeek in 1999 that Sony suffers from “big-company disease.” The bosses tolerated him until the troubled launch of PlayStation 3.

Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism and the demands of the market. Brute-force programs play the best chess, so why bother with anything else? Why waste time and money experimenting with new and innovative ideas when we already know what works? Such thinking should horrify anyone worthy of the name of scientist, but it seems, tragically, to be the norm. Our best minds have gone into financial engineering instead of real engineering, with catastrophic results for both sectors.

Jeopardy! genius Ken Jennings on what it’s like to play against a supercomputer.

An interview with the team behind Nintendo’s A Link to the Past, including a young Shigeru Miyamoto.

Miyamoto: These days, fantasy games with swords and magic are quite common. When we first started out, there wasn’t a market for that, so that’s where the game got its appeal. However, now that we’re doing a series, we’ve got no choice but to continue using swords and magic. But the more we do that, the more we’re reluctantly forced to go in a different direction than we were aiming for. I feel like there’s no challenge in swords and magic anymore.

A postmortem on Rare’s Goldeneye from a programmer on the project.

To date, GoldenEye has sold more than 8 million units. In the US it is the best selling N64 game ever. Ahead of Mario Kart in second place. Ahead of Super Mario 64 in third place. Ahead of Ocarina of Time in fourth place. I consider Mario 64 and Ocarina to be vastly superior to GoldenEye. And both have a better franchise for gaming. People expect Mario and Zelda games to be good. They expect movie licenses to be rubbish. Why did GoldenEye sell better? Why did it sell better than Ocarina? Why did it sell better than Perfect Dark? Why did it sell better than all those other Bond games? Why did it sell better than Doom? And Quake?