If you like puzzle games such as Tetris, Lumines, or Bejeweled, check out Polaris, the new kid on the block. Polaris features amazing particle effects, slick graphics, 3 gameplay modes, and 2 difficulty levels.

In Polaris you must plan your moves carefully! With the right strategy you can clear up to five rings at once, or set off incredibly long chain reactions that are sure to amaze your friends.

Visit the Polaris Website for more information or go directly to Polaris on the iTunes App Store to purchase.

A few of my friends have been working on this awesome iPhone game in their DAC 304 class. It’s called Drag Racer: Perfect Run. You can see a preview video of the game above, and look for a Lite version coming soon to the iTunes App Store, with a full version in development. David will add some more details about the development process and evolution of the game as well as updates on his blog as they move towards an official release!!

Packed3D takes 2D Flash games and automatically converts them into 3D. The system works by taking in 2D vector game assets, analyzing them, and generating 3D models based on a ‘guesstimation’ of how a 3D version of the object might look like.

Please see Packed3D for details.

Here’s the greatest demo I’ve ever seen, and I watch lots of presentation videos:

Lightstage technology allows you to cross the uncanny valley, by using high speed cameras to capture the way different light conditions affect the skin, and generating a normal map, a texture map, and the mesh itself.
Lightstage has already been used in a few movies such as Spiderman 3, and the Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It truely revolutionizes the traditional way of generating meshes.

For anyone interested, Electronic Arts is coming to UW tomorrow (Feb. 12th).
I went to it last term, but don’t think I’ll be able to make it out this term.
It’s 7-8:30pm in DC 1302. Pizza + Prizes!!
http://devkiwi.com/download/Waterloo_poster.pdf

Here’s an awesome event coming up at UW.

Here’s something I came across on the Flashkit board. Germany is big on Conferences, and of the top 150 conferences, 100 are held in Germany. Well a Casual Games conference called Casual Connect is being held in February. You can read more about whose coming at: http://europe.casualconnect.org/content.html

What do I mean? Well if you buy a domain name out of impulse, then you might be addicted. Buying 10 domain names in less than a year is another sign that you might be addicted. If you bought a domain like takeasniff.com, just so that you could reference it, in fine print, within your arts project, then you truely are addicted. Hi, my name is Ivan and I’m a domain-buy-a-holic. Well, what’s so addicting about it? Buying Domains is like buying property in some ways; but in other ways it is worse. With each domain name bought, the quality of the remaining names deteriates due to the fact that shorter names are now taken. It is a huge market as can be seen on eBay. The owner of pizza.com was paid $2,000,000 for the name alone. That is ridiculus because all it is, is a substitute for an IP address and only one variable needs to be changed to link the name server to the web server. My addiction sprung up due to fact that I lost a good domain name to someone else. That name was aditin.com planned for an in-game ad network.