Lackadaisy

Lackadaisy (http://www.lackadaisycats.com/) is a comic about cats. Anthropomorphic, Prohibition-era, bootlegging cats. It’s an interesting little web comic that doesn’t update nearly as often as its fans would want it to, but every update is of a quality unusually high for web comic art. The skill of the artist and creator, Tracy J. Butler, is a big draw of the comic; her art is some of the highest quality work in any standing web comic. She really knows how to draw life and incredible detail into her characters. But of course, fans aren’t just gaping at the art; the characters have a lot of life to them and the subject matter of the comic is fairly interesting. Personally, I’m a sucker for Prohibition-era gangster stories. The characters are all very unique and very different from one another, and their personalities add a lot to the story. The comic’s website is set up very creatively and presents itself in a very unique way. I’d recommend giving this comic a look-over because it really is a work of art.

Final Fantasy XII

“Final Fantasy XII” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_fantasy_12) was a decent enough game, but it suffered from one very big problem: it’s combat system was atrocious. Combat in this game was a jumbled, complicated mess built around the premise that you could set it up so that it played itself. Is that really supposed to be a good thing? Letting your game take you out of the equation and play itself? I hate to say it, but I couldn’t finish this game because of the way its combat system worked; it was just too jumbled to enjoy for me. In fact, the combat was the main complaint almost universally raised against the game. Since its release, Square Enix seems to have recognized this, and from what I’ve read about the next game in the series they might be abandoning the combat game play they used in XII all-together and opting for a more action-based style. I’d like to see what they do in the next game, because my one complaint about the series over the years has been the boringness of its combat. If they manage to blend more action into their traditional turn-based system, or forego turn-based for a real-time system it might just fix the one major problem I’ve always had with the series.

Gamestop

Gamestop (http://www.gamestop.com/) is a business in a very odd place. On one hand, it’s a good thing for the consumers; the ability to buy-sell-trade is an interesting concept, and quite honestly it puts a lot of power into the consumer’s camp. On the other hand, it’s a bad thing for game makers; the ability of a store like Gamestop to sell a single product multiple times takes away from the developer’s profits. I, as a consumer, tend to like the advantages it gives a consumer, but I think the company’s business model is insane. They charge you $20 for some used game that they probably paid less than $5 for. They only accept games from the current console generation, they’ve all but phased PC games out of their stores, and the only time you get anywhere near your money’s worth for a game trade-in is when you’re putting it toward some new game recently released, and even then they rarely offer that deal and the games you need to trade in for it are still selling for around $40 +. Any other time, you’d get $15 or less for that game; with this deal, you get a whopping $20 (also, you can only do it when you trade in two games at once). Honestly, I believe that they need to seriously rework their trade-in system; make it substantially more worth the consumer’s effort. That way, people would buy into it more.

Kotaku

Kotaku (http://kotaku.com/) is a video game news blog; quite possibly the most popular one. It covers a wide array of news; the only real thing they have in common is a link to video games. They also do simple game reviews that list what the reviewer personally liked and disliked about the game. I think Kotaku is an excellent model for news distribution; it’s focus is online news distribution, it has a very casual air about it, and it simply posts EVERYTHING. Anything even remotely noteworthy that they see they talk about; there are even some articles on occasion linking to and commenting on other articles on other sites. It’s not just simply about video game news; it’s an entire presentation of gamer culture’s high and low points, and it fosters constant discussion amongst its readers about the subject matter. I love what the site is doing for the culture, and I can’t really come up with a way to improve what they do; they present a ton of articles, make them easily and freely browsable, they have a comment system for each article for the community to discuss them, and they take the time to breathe some humanity into the news they’re presenting.

Netflix

Netflix (http://www.netflix.com/Default?mqso=80010165) is really an ingenious business model. If you think about it, Netflix is simply the most recent in a long chain of increasingly easy access methods of cinematic experiences. Cinema started in the theaters, and eventually moved into the living room, allowing people to view their favorite movies easily and in the comfort of their home. The next step in this progression is video rental shops; now, not only could you view a movie in your living room, but you didn’t need to worry about it sitting on a shelf indefinitely once you lost interest in re-watching it. Furthermore, with the advent of video rental, many movies that would eventually come off store shelves were now still findable and could be picked up by newer audiences years after the movie’s original run. The most recent link in this chain is the advent of Netflix and related services. Now you can have all the advantages of rental without actually leaving the house to get your movie; now the movie comes to you. Furthermore, they also have an instant-view online service that features some 17,000 items that you can view instantly on a computer. If I had to guess I’d think the next logical step here is to simply do away with the dvd; make the entire movie library browsable online, instead of roughly 1/5 of it.

morgueFile

MorgueFile (http://www.morguefile.com/) is a website with a large archive of photos that anyone can use in anything. It’s a very useful website for a design specialist because of how much easier it makes it to find photos for projects. It’s very hard to find non-copyrighted photos to use in projects, but morgueFile offers a wide selection of photos absolutely free for the designer to use. Seeing as everything has a copyright, it’s nice to find a place where you can get material to work with that you won’t be breaking the law by using. Hopefully morgueFile inspires more websites like it to do this; hopefully this kind of file sharing in the public domain will rub off on bigger copyright holders and get them to share their works more freely for legal use.

Rapchop/Jamwow

I don’t quite know the story behind why this guy made these—probably just to do it—but I have seen these two remixes used as actual commercials for the products late at night on Comedy Central and Spike TV. Personally, I like them; it’s a very inventive way to reinvent the commercials, and I think it was a very good idea to play on these videos’ popularity to revitalize the related products. It’s interesting because, instead of shutting the videos down, they actually embraced the creative reworking and used it. I’d love to see more remixed ads like these used as actual commercials instead of just being shut down and removed from the internet. I think that embracing projects like this could one day possibly lead to a relaxation of copyright laws and substantial growth in artistic creativity. A lot of creativity seems to be stunted right now because of how hard it is to work around copyrights and make anything similar or related to an established copyright.