According to the Terminator series, today was the day that the machines attacked humanity. (At least, according to the Sarah Connor Chronicles. The date moved further into the future as the Terminator series progressed.) Be thankful tomorrow that you aren’t waking up in a dystopian future.

I’ve been spending some time checking out some of the games I missed out on the past few years. I missed out because I was always working on my own game, and my laptop didn’t have much graphics power. But, now I’ve got a little more free time and a good laptop.

One thing that astounded me was that Fallout 3 didn’t have a demo. I was talking to a friend of mine recently about having played the original Fallout 1 and 2, and was curious about the newer games and whether they did a good job with them. He said Fallout New Vegas was really good, but there were some problems with the game at release. Specifically, he mentioned this video, which is actually a pretty odd glitch in the game:

Anyway, Fallout New Vegas doesn’t have a demo, either. At this point, I won’t even bother buying a game without a demo. I want to see if the game is done well, whether I’m into it, whether there are a lot of bugs, whether it runs okay on my machine before I buy it. It’s shocking to me that they wouldn’t release a demo. Anyway, my friend said he’s loan me his copy of the game so I could check it out. I tried to install it tonight and got this error:

Duplicate Product Code

The product code you’ve entered has already been activated by an existing Steam account, and is therefore invalid. Your activation of Fallout New Vegas Retail has not been completed.

Sigh. Why do companies make this so difficult?

I have to admit: when I watch videos like this, I can’t help but think about game ideas. Like the video I posted a few weeks ago with the pencil-sketch war tribes, this makes me think of a civilization-style game where people control tribes, each with their own unique personality, culture, and appearance.

[via Ze Frank]

I thought this was a pretty clever use of 3D mapping to change the appearance of a room.

Living Room from Mr.Beam on Vimeo.

[via Fubiz] Pretty cool animation of a dogfight. It seems to be an advertisement for an animated movie.

This is just a cool video of some laser murals in London. As far as I can guess, I think they’re using a digital projector, and they use the laser pointer and a digital camera/webcam to add to the mural. When the camera sees the laser pointer dot, it adds the corresponding location to the computer’s projected image.

Just pretty cool.

Just thought this was pretty cool. What’s next? More accurate architectural models? Sliders so users can see the city in different years and historical periods? Accurate real-time traffic models?

Update: Google Earth already contains historical data. They do this by overlaying old maps over the same location. Though they don’t have 3D models of the locations.

[via ZeFrank] A friend of mine always complains about hipsters. I think he’d like this video.