Hey Juicers. I have an announcement to make.

Luster is now in public beta. Download it here. It is available for PC and Mac. I promise that it if you install it and want to uninstall it, you can uninstall it easily as you would any program.

Luster is our platform for creating interactive 3D applications. Like Flash, once the Luster runtime is installed on your computer, you can run Luster applications. Luster applications can be hosted on a website through major browsers or as applications on your desktop.

So what are you going to do now that you have installed Luster? Well easy! Download and play Blocks.

Blocks is a game we have been working on at the Darkwind Media offices to promote and test Luster. You can download Blocks for free and run it on, again, Mac or PC. Its small. It does not require installation. Just download and play, delete when you are done.

If you could give us feedback on any bugs you encounter in Blocks while playing it, that would be great. Email us at feedback@luster3d.com. Once Luster is downloaded, you can also check out some of our other demos. If you don’t want to download the demos, please at least check out our gallery.

Thanks Juicers. You are great. Huge thanks also to Brian, Choof, and Chris for putting in so much work and making this happen.

I love curling.

No, I’m not joking.  I genuinely love curling.  I think it’s awesome.  But for some reason, whenever I try to tell people how awesome curling is they smile at me waiting for me to say that I’m kidding.

What is it that is so hard for people to believe?

My money’s on the brooms:

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Real. Bad.

Those Vs stand for “OH FUCK SPIKEY ONE HIT MURDER-DEATH-KILLS!”

You can play the two level (it’ll take ya a good 20 minutes) demo here.

If you’re willing to take the plunge for the full game ($15, but hey, indie gaming!) you can purchase it here.

(Plus, how sweet of a domain name is that.)

Disney/Pixar liked it so much, they even added it to their YouTube channel, no legal bullshit. That’s awesome.

I cannot recommend watching this video highly enough. Seriously. It’s great.

Please watch it.

World Builder from BranitVFX on Vimeo.

Awesomeness. I would love to work in that kind of an environment.

http://www.npr.org/404

My latest video-game addiction has me lost in a dreamworld of never-ending explosions.  The culprit is none other than the inaugural Summer of Arcade game, ‘Splosion Man!

The premise is quite simple; you’re a man of extraordinary explosion capabilities, and you use said capabilities to traverse through 47 platforming levels (with three bosses!) in single player, with a SEPARATE multiplayer (up to four!) co-op game with another 50 levels.  There is no attack button, there is no jump button, there is no reloading or special button.

Just ’splodin.

The level design does seem to get recycled a bit in the later areas, but the general feel of the game is just pure manic fun.  There is a lot of emphasis on reaction time as you attempt to ’splode your way out of danger, whether from oncoming spike walls, rising water levels, mad scientists piloting huge running robots, little flying sentries that shoot lasers at you, and more.

The game itself also has a ton of personality to it.  It’s one of those games you could very easily assume that the developers (Twisted Pixel in this case) had way too much fun making.  It’s got a high level of humor, which is very apparent in the general style of the game, the animations of the main character, and not to mention that WHEN YOU BLOW UP SCIENTISTS THEY TURN INTO T-BONE STEAKS, SAUSAGE LINKS, AND OTHER MEAT PARAPHERNALIA (as opposed to big blood clouds and the like).

I’ve already beat the it (it’s addicting), but this is the type of game that’s perfect for doing speed runs.  There’s online leaderboards for the best time in each level, and within each level, there’s a hidden “cake” that usually takes a pretty observant eye to find.

It’s only 800 Microsoft Points, and unfortunately is only on Xbox Live right now, but rumors have it that it’ll show up on the PC (and hopefully other systems) some time in the future. I highly recommend getting it, if not at least getting the demo to try that out.

(There’s better quality videos on Youtube, but I like the following one as it’s one of my favorite levels)

Harmonix unveils Rock Band Network, which allows just about artist to submit their songs as Rock Band playable tracks.  The plan itself is just genius, in my opinion:

Rather than deal with Harmonix directly, artists and labels will submit songs to a community of Harmonix-trained freelance game developers who will prepare the tracks for “Rock Band.” Additionally, labels can either hire trained developers or school their existing employees to do the work in-house.

Songs submitted through this process must then be reviewed by other developers to check for playability, inappropriate lyrics, copyright infringement and so on. Harmonix will post approved tracks to an in-game download store separate from its existing “Rock Band” store where creators can set their own price (50 cents to $3 per song) and receive 30% of any resulting sales. Gamers will also be able to demo 30-second samples of each track.

Although originally designed to give indie and unsigned artists a way to sell music through the game, MTV quickly realized the Rock Band Network could be used to clear the bottleneck for major-label content as well. While the Harmonix team has grown from fewer than 10 programmers to a few dozen since MTV acquired the videogame developer in 2006, the company can only add about 10 new songs per week to sell through the “Rock Band” store. The same team has also been handling the development work for the upcoming “The Beatles: Rock Band,” due in September.

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Wolfram Alpha dot com, hoi yoi!

I won’t lie, it’s somewhat disappointing due to the slowness on getting some answers…but for being the launch weekend, I don’t even want to think about how bad the hosted environment for Alpha is getting hammered with queries.

I was pretty happy to see that the one question I was really hoping would be answered correctly somewhat was:

Pardon the cusses, but I believe they’re warranted.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

Link brings you to a screencast displaying some sample queries that Alpha can handle.

Apologies for not expanding more on this, but trust me, this is seriously awesome.

Update: Obviously Google wouldn’t want to take this kind of innovation from another company lying down, hence: Google Squared:

Oh The Future, you’re getting ever so close.

I mean it.

Just skip to about 20 seconds.

ExciteBots video, Doogie-Calibur HQ from Jamie Kelly on Vimeo.

UPDATE: Edited title for truth bombs.  Also, to be fair, I’m actually kinda looking forward to Final Fantasy 13 (haven’t looked forward to a FF game in a while…), and just like Choof, I’m eager to see how Diablo 3 turns out.  Regardless, I’m really looking forward to The Beatles: Rock Band.  Hell, just imagine how much fun this would have been in our college days.