January 29, 2007
by Andrew Stern · , 3:32 am
Journalist extraordinaire Clive Thompson (1 2 3 4 5) has a new Wired article about Pleo, a next-gen robotic pet, created by Caleb Chung, the creator of Furby. The Pleo website is rife with cheesy pronouncements — “Can the seemingly impossible… be possible?”, “Can the subtleties of nature be… re-created?”, “Now is the time to bring magic to life”, and “Pleo is the first truly autonomous Life Form capable of emotions that allow personal engagement” — yet, Pleo does looks interesting. Although the YouTube video in the Wired article, to me, is a rather stiff, mild demo — in fact the Wikipedia page suggests that demo was rigged — I assume there will be more exciting behaviors in the final product. How big it will sell at $250 is a question; at that price, it probably can’t become the phenomenon Furby did.- Brian Eno will be composing generative music for Spore!
- Don’t miss GameTunnel’s list of 2006’s top 10 indie games, including the oddly abstract-looking life simulator, Kudos.
- Gamespot has a list of 2006’s Best Games No One Played, an interesting collection of relatively experimental games from mainstream publishers. Also, via King Lud IC, the awesome-looking, in-progress SketchFighter 4000.
- Here’s a nice writeup on Joystiq of Ken Perlin’s talk at the recent Montreal Game Summit.
- Drama Princess continues to make progress, and now has a new demo you can download.
- A Parsons grad student, Catherine Garnier, has a neat interactive comic-ish prototype worth a look, Table for Two, and she’d like your feedback.
- On the topic of head games in interactive drama, here’s Dan Savage on the real thing.
January 16th, 2008 at 10:23 am
[…] (Speaking of Pleo, I haven’t heard much about it. Anyone have one?) […]
April 1st, 2008 at 9:53 pm
Leigh Alexander at Game Set Watch had a good experience with Pleo — she played along.