the moving pictures

[jazzfish]

What's it making? Why, it's making BITs. OMG WANT. [via chaobell]

Rayman 2, the game that's been ported to more consoles than I can comfortably count, gets one more. Sweet.

A two-minute film featuring Owly, who is of course adorable.

Comments

[rbandrews]

Rayman 2 has always left me somewhat uneasy, and I think I know why.

I want to believe that they had a lot of foresight and made the code very modular and abstracted away all hardware concerns, so that it's easy to port. I want to think that the codebase is beautiful and loosely-coupled, that there are unit tests everywhere to quickly find regressions on new hardware.

But I don't.

My mental image of Rayman 2 is a dark, locked room with three or four programmers huddled in a corner, clutching laptops and half-empty bottles of whiskey, haunted by the prospect of looking at that code ever again.

The door opens and a triumphant businessman in an expensive suit grins and says "we got a new platform!". He flips a small object into the room and closes the door; as the lock clicks an iPhone clatters to the ground.

The programmers groan, and open laptops and bottles in one motion.

[jazzfish]

I think of it more along the lines of Michel Ancel in a smoky bar, telling the businessman "okay, one more port, but then I'm out, going straight." Given other practices from Ubisoft, though, I'm gonna have to say your scenario's a bit more plausible.