The decade is...just about over.

Here's my list of the 10 best games of the decade:

>>Brad's top 10 best games of the 2000's

It’s time for endless top 10 lists.  So what makes my list special? The answer is that while other top 10 lists are merely the opinions of people, this list has been put together by teams of scientists working in laboratories for months on a new super computer to determine the definitive list of the 10 best games released in the decade based on their quality, design, and impact.

Here they are:

#10 Bejeweled

This game has sold over 47 trillion copies in over 5 million countries on 3 million devices.  It has single handedly helped replace Solitaire as the game people spend crazy amounts of time on without admitting it.

#9 Call of Duty 4

Call of Duty 4 was the very first game that featured the player holding a weapon of some sort from the “first person” perspective and then shooting other people.

Or not.  What made Call of Duty 4 special is that it helped mainstream these types of games in a way nothing before it had.  Sure, you reading this have played Counterstrike endlessly. Heck, I probably shot you through a wall (damn punk buster).  But normal people play Call of Duty. Even people who watch the footed ball sport game on TV.

#8 The Orange Box

Half-Life, Counterstrike, Portal. These are the games you must play to be a man – even if you’re a woman.  Without their success, the 3D engine that powers them, Source, wouldn’t have been able to be used on other titles that we enjoy today. Titles that involve killing zombies.  Moreover, the success of the Orange Box helped launch the increasingly ubiquitous Steam digital distribution platform.

Can you imagine life without Team Fortress? Do you want to live that life? I didn’t think so.

#7 Wii Sports

Without the Wii thousands of children whose parents happily let them watch hours of Sponge Bob would be deprived of playing video games on the basis of it not being “active”.  Wii Sports helped get millions of Wii’s into people’s houses where children could quickly migrate to games that were more fun.

#6 Knights of the Old Republic

Okay: Watch this: JAR JAR.  Note the involuntary tremor you just experienced. Knights of the Old Republic was so good that helped save the Star Wars universe. Moreover, apparently there was a way to win the game as a good guy…

JAR JAR!

#5 Halo

Halo demonstrated that yes, a first person shooter on the console can be fun.  Not for me. But for other people anyway and that opened the consoles to a whole new world of awesome games.

#4 The Sims

Allegedly not everyone plays The Sims to lock up their Sims in a room and watch them starve to death. At least, that’s what my team of therapists claim.

#3 Guitar Hero

A court order prevents me from playing this game again but it and its similar “Rock Band” have become a genre of their own that has really helped expand the realm of gaming to another level.

#2  Grand Theft Auto III

This urban training tool took on a life of its own. Social services continues to complain that I allow my children to play the games but as my driveway full of stolen sports cars indicates, it can pay dividends.

#1 World of Warcraft

Pretty much everyone has played this game at one time or other. Sure, games like Ultima Online and Everquest were first but nothing in that genre has had the impact of World of Warcraft.

Consider this, World of Warcraft allegedly grossed approximately $1 billion in 2008. If World of Warcraft was a country, it would be richer than Liberia.

Now, I’m sure this list doesn’t have every favorite game of all time. No Super Mario Galaxy? No Metroid Prime? What about Soul Calibur? Resident Evil 4?  Don’t blame me, blame the scientists and their sentient machines!

See you next decade!

As someone on Twitter pointed out, the same people who want universal healthcare are the same people who are hoping Rush Limbaugh will die.

Whenever the government gets involved in something, it becomes about politics. I don’t want health care decided by politicians.

As the Stimulus spending has shown – the best predictor of who will get government money is whether they agree with those spending it.

Ironically, this article comes from the much hated (by some) “Faux News”:

http://www.foxnews.com/slideshow/politics/2009/12/31/big-stories-mainstream-media-missed

What is interesting is that for all the angst about Fox News that I see online that its popularity is often due to reporting things that simply get ignored elsewhere.

I prefer bias by commission rather than omission.

As we approach the New Year, we end the first 10 years of the 2000’s. And what a decade it has been. Let’s take a quick look at the decade in skinning.

>> The Decade in Skinning

The decade is just about over. In that time, we’ve seen skinning rise from being a power user niche to being mainstream and now returning to being a power user niche again.

Let’s take a look at some of the highs and lows of skinning for the past decade.

The rise of WindowBlinds

No discussion of skinning would be complete without WindowBlinds.

WindowBlinds demonstrated both the marvels of skinning and its occasional depravity by letting users completely change the look and feel of the Windows GUI.  The success of WindowBlinds sparked a cottage industry of skinning programs but none (so far) have rivaled WindowBlinds in terms of sheer popularity.

Some highlights

Driftwood by Dangeruss

Frogboy by Alexandrie

Capsula by Allen Bond

As WindowBlinds reached the end of the decade, it had seen the release of 4 new operating systems – Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 and it’s still going strong.

The Uxtheme patchers

As much as I’d like to pretend otherwise, GUI skinning can’t be discussed without talking about uxtheme patching.  In 2000, Microsoft liked the idea of WindowBlinds so much that they decided to use its implementation as the basis for a new skinning system in Windows XP.  Unfortunately, the method WindowBlinds used was done because developer Stardock didn’t have access to the Windows source code. One presumes Microsoft has access to the Windows source but instead chose to implement skinning the same way Stardock did – by creating a DLL that hooks to every process and intercepts paint calls to draw a skin for a file.  Where WindowBlinds used wblind.dll Microsoft went with uxtheme.dll. Where WindowBlinds skins had .UIS files, Microsoft called theirs .msstyles.

Unexpectedly, having created an engine that could do skinning, Microsoft never went beyond the Luna skin and locked the file format.  It didn’t take long before uxtheme was cracked to allow for additional skins which paved the way for programs like Style XP and a cottage industry of third-party msstyles.  Many flame wars ensued over whether it was a good idea to patch system files.

What can be said is that msstyle skinners helped enrich the skinning community with some great designs.  Without uxtheme and msstyles, I think it’s safe to say that skinning would never have gotten as popular as it did.

Litestep

No list would be complete without talking about Litestep, the shell that let users replace Explorer.  Back in 2000, Litestep had a significant following. The Windows shell was, for the time, bloated, slow, and feature poor. Litestep helped solve this.  Its popularity has declined as Windows explorer improved and system memory has increased but it remains in active development to this date.

Litestep

Other players

Hoverdesk became popular for a time but ceased development in 2003.

WinStep isn’t a replacement shell as much as it is a way to extend Explorer. This strategy has led to its continued popularity to this day.

Winamp

You can’t seriously do one of these skinning lists without mentioning Winamp.

Winamp

Winamp is a media player that became very popular in the late 90s and helped popularize the term “skinning” in the first place.  Unfortunately, it’s fate has been largely tied to its popularity as a media player which has seen a decline as iTunes slowly took over and Windows Media player finally got to be “good enough”.  In 2007, Winamp 5.5 was released which helped make it feature competitive with other players.

Default Winamp 5.5 skin

The Gadget Wars

Widgets, Gadgets, Objects = cool technologies looking for a practical use.  The decade saw the release of DesktopX which allowed users to build their own desktops through objects which could also be exported as stand alone mini-applications (later called widgets).  3 years later, the second program of the new genre arrived – Konfabulator.

DesktopX

Konfabulator

DesktopX was more powerful – it supported C++ plugins and could build desktops and create (with the Pro version) stand-alone programs. But Konfabulator kicked DesktopX’s butt in terms of popularity.  Developer Stardock came from an engineering background – tech tech tech.  The Konfabulator team, by contrast, came from a design background and made sure Konfabulator came with prettier and more interesting default content.

Apple then came along and ripped off the concept (yes Apple fans, I said ripped off) and stuffed widgets into the OS.  Microsoft, copying Apple, then put “gadgets” into Windows later on.

Konfabulator was eventually sold to Yahoo who promptly sat on it (yahoo hasn’t updated the Yahoo Widgets page to say whether it supports Windows 7 or not).  Microsoft, having copied the gadget concept from Apple without knowing why largely abandoned them in Windows 7.  DesktopX has remained in statis for the past couple of years with version 4 only recently having gone into beta.

The problem with objects,widgets, and gadgets is that there’s only a handful of things that make sense as gadgets.  Hence, over 34 trillion weather widgets and calendar gadgets were made.

And beyond

Of course, I’m only scratching the surface here.  The comments section will hopefully let others express other programs and movements that this brief article didn’t get into.  Skinning got very popular at the start of the decade and as that decade comes to an end moves into a state of transition as the OS’s become more powerful and the graphics hardware more capable. 

It will be an exciting journey to see where skinning goes next.

106 billion people are thought to have lived on this planet so far.

Here’s a graph with some interesting stats on that.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ww4f/4108672641/sizes/l/

Rush Limbaugh has been hospitalized with chest pains.  As usual, left-wingers are out there hoping he dies.

http://radioequalizer.blogspot.com/2009/12/limbaugh-hospitalization-brings-out.html

The decade is over in less than a day. EnGadget has a great article on the top 10 gadgets of the decade.

>> EnGadget

Keyboard Launchpad is a marvelously useful utility. But its UI is pretty long in the tooth.  I was wondering what sorts of features and changes users would like to see?

Would anyone like to sketch together ideas on how they’d like to see its user interface changed?