Thfreema

As an Industrial and Product Design student at the UK's Sheffield Hallam University, Charlie Ransford's final project was designed to teach others to 3D print. For the task, Ransford developed a 3D-printable turntable called The Songbird:

The Songbird
Prototype 1 Context

The Songbird
Prototype #1 Render 2

The Songbird
Prototype #1 Render

The Songbird
Prototype #1

The Songbird
Prototype #1 with Speaker

"The Songbird is an educational, 3D printable turntable kit designed to be printed on almost any home 3D printer. Each instructional step in the build explains not only what the user is doing, but why in a hands-on learning experience for the user."

The Songbird
Prototype #2

The SongbirdPrototype #3

The SongbirdPrototype #3

The Songbird
Sketch Development

After gaining his degree last year, Ransford teamed up with photographer and former schoolmate Kiran Pearce to commercialize the design. Together they started Frame Theory, a company that designs 3D printable kits. For their inaugural project,The Songbird went live on Kickstarter this month, and reached full funding on the first day.

The $188 Maker kit comes with all of the hardware required--the turntable's brass bearing, a CNC-cut aluminum frame, the motor, the counterweight for the tonearm, etc.--and the user prints the rest, assuming they've got a minimum build area of 220mm x 220mm x 50mm. For those who want the entire thing and just want to put it together without printing, the Printed Kit runs $295.

Buyers of that latter option, though, would miss the point. "We not only create products and designs that are intended to last a long time, we teach you how to make them," Ransford writes. "Should you need to replace any part of any of our kits, you can repair it with ease by simply re-printing the file.

"You will gain an intimate understanding of not only the Songbird, but how all turntables work, whilst learning the skills of 3D printing. Our goal is to give people a starting point into this exciting field."

At press time there was still 27 days left to pledge.

Two of Bungie's most popular games join Xbox Game Pass today even though they launched about a decade apart. It's a union of new and old, with the throughline being that they're both beloved.

Let's tackle this chronologically. Halo 3: ODST is available (get ready for the prepositional phrases!) on Xbox Game Pass as part of the Master Chief Collection in conjunction with its launch on PC. This addition is only a recent development for PC. ODST was already on Game Pass on consoles.

However, what's new is the inclusion of Firefight. This cooperative venture was one of the first to help popularize horde modes in the Xbox 360 era. New Halo vanguard 343 Industries brought Firefight back for the PC port, and it'll be included as a free update for the console version too.

You should play ODST. This spinoff started as a small project that kind of snowballed into being one of the better Halo games despite not starring Master Chief. It still gets a lot of love, which is why people have been eyeing this particular Master Chief Collection PC entry for a while now. If Xbox Game Pass isn't your thing, ODST is a $5 standalone purchase on Steam or part of the $40 Master Chief Collection. Both are pretty great deals.

The second game is much more relevant and much hotter and will be downloaded many more times. Destiny 2 and its expansions (including Forsaken and Shadowkeep) hit Xbox Game Pass today on Xbox One. When the Beyond Light expansion launches in November, it'll also be a day one addition to Xbox Game Pass. Microsoft is certainly doing its damnedest to wrestle the title away from PlayStation as the place where you go to play Destiny on consoles.

anatomicalart:

Let me link Yall’ to this holy grail.
I present to you Character Design Reference
on [Pintrest] || [Tumblr] || [Twitter] || [Facebook] || [YouTube]

I couldn’t even include all of the reference boards this blog contains on this photoset. That’s right! There’s EVEN MORE! There are pages and pages of them! It is an inspiration treasure trove!
Bookmark this link!
Fill your life with inspiration!

Not too much longer to go - about six weeks - before western Persona fans will be able to go on another exciting adventure with Joker, Ryuji, Mitsuru, Chie and that kid with the long socks, in the localised edition of Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth.

Atlus, staying true to franchise form, has already announced a wealth of DLC which will be dropping on the first day of release. 27 items will be available come launch, one of them - an item set - will be free. There will also be three battle music sets which will be free for the first month, before transitioning to paid DLC like everything else.

TheSodapopspeaker has been designed to solve the main problem for small portable loudspeakers: They struggle to reproduce low frequency bass, resulting in a somewhat feeble sound.The Sodapop invention solves this problem by connecting the speaker to its own carrying case or any other suitable plastic bottle.This offers a compact portable wireless speaker that provide you with louder music, twice as much bass and an overall superior sound.

Sodapop Speaker 03

Credit: Øyvind Warp

Sodapop Speaker 11

Credit: Øyvind Warp

Sodapop Speaker 01

Credit: Øyvind Warp

Sodapop Speaker 01

Credit: Øyvind Warp

Sodapop Speaker 04

Credit: Øyvind Warp

Sodapop Speaker 05

Credit: Øyvind Warp

Sodapop Speaker 06

Credit: Øyvind Warp

Sodapop Speaker 09

Credit: Øyvind Warp

Sodapop Speaker 07

Credit: Øyvind Warp

Sodapop Speaker 08

Credit: Øyvind Warp

Perhaps "sucks" is a bit strong of a word, but Mighty No. 9 certainly isn't good. It isn't the game I think most of us thought we'd be getting. The repeated delays were a warning sign, but they came far too late.

Playing Mighty No. 9 I feel like I can see the blue bomber in there, somewhere. He's just trapped beneath the surface. And being suffocated by odd design decisions and questionable level design.

Now bear with me, as I've not actually played a Mega Man game in nearly a decade... but I seem to recall that collecting certain boss' weapons proved helpful for defeating other bosses. And so there was a strategy to the order you chose to tackle the levels. Thus I was fairly disappointed as I started clearing bosses with just the base weaponry, and found no particular reason to go hunt down a boss' particular weakness.

I did like the dash mechanic, which is something Mega Man never had... but the level design is constantly working against you, putting up obstacles and barriers that prevent you from maintaining any sort of momentum. As soon as you start feeling a rhythm zipping along through your foes, you're forced to stop.

I also cannot help but be disappointed with the visuals of the game. It's hard for me to imagine that in this day age, this sort stylized, sidescrolling aesthetic is all that hard to execute cleanly, and yet everything seems muddy, with varying degrees of resolution to the textures. There are points where I stopped entirely and questioned "did they forget to finish this part?"

Take a look at the art used to sell us the concept back during the Kickstarter:

It's not unreasonable to think that the game was aspiring to look like this. It is, after all, a sidescrolling endeavor. Even in the switch from 2D art to 3D elements, I'd like to think I'm not the only one who thought this was the direction they were going. Instead we got this:

I don't find the graphics to be at all impressive. It feels, as I said above, unfinished. The textures are bland, the particle effects are dull and messy, and the models feel fuzzy and rudimentary. Even the game's hero, Beck, seems to have lost something crucial in the translation from concept to game element.

The character we were first shown has attitude. There's a sleekness in his design that definitely evokes that classic Mega Man look, but updated with the fidelity of detail that games of today can support. In-game, however, he looks like a tortured ballon animal.

Mighty No. 9 is, at it's best, playable. But it doesn't feel like the game we were promised. Capcom doesn't seem terribly interested in Mega Man as an ongoing franchise, and Mighty No. 9 looked like our best shot at bringing the formula into the current generation. But for some reason, Keiji Inafune has been unable to reproduce the recipe here. It's not because the new elements brought to the table didn't work... in fact I feel they did, to a degree. But some of the important basics, like precise jumping, and shooting, fell by the wayside somewhere along the way.

Galactic Cafe's critically acclaimed adventure game, The Stanley Parable, has finally made its way onto Mac. It is available on Mac, it is not available on Mac (ha ha, see what I di -- oh, screw it).

The Stanley Parable will work on machines running OS X 10.8 or higher "right now," as noted by Gran PC; he also revealed that he's currently working on releasing a Mac demo for the game. That's nice.

I've been meaning to give this game a go. To those who've played it, how is it?