The ESRB, Music Compression, and a Review of Real Life

Here are some interesting bits I picked up this morning:

• A game review of real-life. A quote:
  

  In terms of game play the game sets few, if any, goals: the major one is merely "survive". What goals a player sets, are often astonishingly tedious to actually achieve, and power-ups and gear upgrades, let alone extra weapons, are few and far between. Some players choose accumulation of money, one of the many point systems in the game, as a goal, but distribution of this is often randomized and it can be hard to tell what activities will lead to gaining points in advance, and what the risks will be.

• Game Politics brings us the ESRB's new widget for determination of game ratings. You can find the code on the ESRB site.

  It's a neat idea. If you have a game and want to see a rating quickly, this can be a good way to get a synopsis quickly. I don't even think there is a system to do so for movies, but drop me a line if I'm wrong about that.

Here it is in action:

• Music File Compressed 1,000 Times Smaller than MP3 - There are a couple of files on their site, but both run as 3.9 MB .wav (uncompressed) files. I assume it is because VLC does not quite play their proprietary format as of yet. I did hear a difference between the recordings and much preferred the less compressed version. Still, it's a step forward and mp3s are already small enough to be relatively fluid on the Internet. It'll be tremendously interesting to see how music evolves as the compression continues to improve.