Zision Interactive

• "On the importance of Magical Girl Heroines & Weaponized Femininity"
• "You, Too, Can Be a Monster"
• "Techno-Culturally Faking It"
• "PS Vita Is Dead; Long Live PS Vita"
• "The hidden dangers of legal highs"
• "Notes on Tomb Raider"
• "Spirits by the Numbers"

  Sales data for Spirits

• "Let's Play: the first section of Anomalous Materials from Half-Life 1"

• "Soylent Month Three"

  I'm amazed how much they can figure out about nutrition

• "Cities & The Dead"

  Interesting interpretation of capitalism

• "Our Immiscible Future"

  on formalism vs zinesters

• "Getting the development / PR balance right">
• "Love or Money?"
• "Fiction Denial"
• "Steven Soderbergh’s State Of Cinema Talk"

  Fascinating both for the parallels to game development and for more general insights

• "Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Might Be The Highest Form of Literature on the Planet"

  An exaggeration, of course, but Pratchett is the only time I've seen comedy not get in the way

• "Zooming In"

  More pretty paperrendering

on Bioshock

• "Bioshack"
• "Only one of Infinite Endings"
• "He Doesn’t Row: Player Interaction in Bioshock Infinite"
• "Why Is "Bioshock Infinite" A First-Person Shooter"
• "Richard Cobbett on Bioshock 2"
• "BioShock Infinite: Now Is The Best Time"
• "Broken World: the Failure of Columbia"
• "There's Subtlety, Then There's Cowardice"
• "BioShock Infinite’s first moments, and why game openings are so important"
• "Nobody at the tower"
• "The American Dream(s)"
• "On Bioshock Infinite"

the rest

• "Cara Loft : Tomb Raider Concept Raiding"

  a bit of info on the development process

• "From Doom to Dishonored, considering the firstperson shooter's various waveforms"

  I miss 100pt based health...

• "No One Knows About Your Game"

  A sobering reminder

• "Bloggingheads With 'The Week's Scott Meslow : 'Game of Thrones' As TV Novel, And 'Mad Men' Season Six"

  I've always wondered about the mechanics of multiple protagonists in video games

• "A Letter to Leigh"

  There was a big fuss about this letter, but reading responses to it felt like we must have read a different letter. As it is, it contains a few interesting observations throughout its rambling length

• "The Jellyfish Entrepreneur"
• "If you make PCs and you’re not Lenovo, you might be in trouble"

  It's not the market, it's you

• "Talking is Harmful"

  SPEC OPS SPEC OPS SPEC OPS

• "Android piracy still sucks"

  A pirated copy is still a lost sale, it just isn't costing you money

• "Bullseye from 1,000 yards: Shooting the $17,000 Linux-powered rifle"

  It's only a matter of time until you don't need to aim

• "Plastic Soul: One man's quest to build an AI that can create games"
• "We Are One: JRPGs, the Group Journey, and the Mechanics of Cooperation"
• "Identifying the “Problem” with Female Protagonists"
• "Light and shadow"

  More interesting information on rendering paper

• "Mansplainer, For Men: Why Don’t Women Like It When You Tell Them They’re Hot, In Public?"
• "Mobile Hardware Stats (and More)"

  Mobile is growing

• "This Isn’t the Article I Wanted to Write About Tomb Raider"

  On triggers

• "Brindle on Mechanics"

• Heuristics Ho!

  A quick observation on psychology.

• A Third Option
• No Self-Respecting Woman Would Go Out Without Make Up

  Not sure what to think if this one. It had a lot of interesting thoughts with a perspective I haven't seen before, which is always good, but there were a few things that left me scratching my head...

• Where the Heart Is: The Use of Home in Video Games

  Although the article doesn't touch on it, I've always liked/wished for scenes where the protagonist visits their home again part way through their journey. Assuming it wasn't destroyed, which is a depressingly common trope.

• To Swell the Ranks

  Thoughts on Sony and indies

• How To Make Paper

  A very interesting technical read on rendering paper. Things like this make me happy simply because I'm reminded that people actually care about this sort of thing to such an extent.

• personality hunger and the regulation of consumptive choice

  Many interesting observations on consumerism

• Storms and Teacups

  I'm not sure what they're actually talking about, but it has many interesting observations on the gender divide

• Who's buying all these niche simulation games, anyway?

  You know you've been wondering. A few sobering tidbits about the problems even niche players are facing as well.

• "You sleep rather soundly for a murderer": on murder systems and destabilizing virtual societies.

  Murder has lost its impact.

• I have been a writer for two years., I interviewed Nolan North on a prepaid credit phone for 12 minutes

  Always good to get another perspective

• Relax, don't do it: pulling the trigger in Spec Ops: The Line

  Spec Ops!

• Concerning Garriott, Game Designers, and Corporate Overlords
• A Uniform Rebellion

  On indie as a genre

• Apathy and refunds are more dangerous than piracy.

  Or, the problem with stocks

• RPGs: Is Old-School the New School?
• Editorial: Let’s Not Pre-Order Games Any More, Eh?

  This should really be obvious...

• This Is Actually Happening
• Esther and Stanley and Fate

I got a hold of an old EM Stock Car pinball machine a few weeks ago with the hopes of repairing it, but my first attempt ended in failure. The machine had been sitting in a damp, moldy garage against a wall, under a leaky window for at least twenty years, and it was beyond repair. About a third of the inside was covered in mold, all the moving parts were stuck, all the metal was rusted, and the back glass was damaged beyond repair.

So instead I realized that this would be a good way to use an Arduino. I could just plug one into all the inputs and outputs of the machine and then program it to react in the same way all those complicated and broken electronics would have. I ordered an Arduino Mega, which has 54 I/O ports, and then got to work investigating how complicated it would be to interface it with the pinball machine.

Some quick testing revealed that all the moving parts of the pinball machine ran off 25V AC, which posed my first problem, as the Arduino runs off 5V DC. Asking about how to fix this online wasn't much help; the experts couldn't even agree on whether an AC coil would work with DC. Being the pragmatic and cautious individual that I am, I of course took the rational route, and hooked two old car batteries up (12V DC each x2=24V DC) to a solenoid to see if it would work. (It did). Of course, this still left the big problem, which is that even if the coils would work off DC, they still needed 25V.

The answer, of course, was to use a transistor, or a MOSFET to be precise (I still haven't figured out the difference), to switch the high power current with a low power current from the Arduino. Three burned out husks of transistors later, I'd figured out how they worked, and rigged up this insane hodgepodge of circuitry to control the eight solenoids in the machine.

After an arduous day soldering wires to all the components and hooking them up, I now have control of all the moving parts of the machine from my Arduino.

Tomorrow, I get to start working on wiring all the rollovers to the Arduino so it can begin actually scoring points