Pretentious, opinionated language

Moving...

2008-06-03T02:08:00.001+02:00

I'm taking all my junk elsewhere, sad to say.

www.doomsday.no

If i could migrate all my stuff over i would. Sigh :)

Imagine Peoplez

2008-05-14T13:11:00.003+02:00

Today's obsession for me; Video games for kids with titles ending in z.
Observe.

Ok so i made up Cowz. But come on!

Open screen project

2008-05-01T23:23:00.002+02:00

http://www.adobe.com/openscreenproject/

I'm stoked. For all us developers this basically kills a ton of aggravations we've struggled with for ages. Joolz on the flashlounge mailing list sums it up beautifully:

"

1) From the point of view of developers, it will be as if there is one flash player to write for. No more Flash Lite and different versions of Actionscript for different platforms. Write once, run everywhere.

2) The general idea is that there will now be a uniform consistency for interfaces across all embeddable devices - TV's, cable boxes, mobile phones, microwave ovens, whatever.

3) There will be no fee payable by companies that embed the Flash Player in devices. Companies implementing Flash previously had to pay a licence fee. The removal of the fee will drive adoption.

4) The api used to implement Flash on a device, has now been opened.

5) Competing Flash Players will now be allowed. Anyone will now be able to write a flash player, previously something that was restricted under licence terms. The significance of this is greater than it seems. One of the criticisms of Flash has been: "What happens if Adobe goes out of business?".

6) The Open Screen Project has been adopted by every important business in the world with the exception of Apple and Google. The massive support for this initiative means almost certain success and much wider adoption of Flash as a platform. Apple with the iPhone and Google with Android, would be the losers if there were a successful adoption of Flash across all imaginable devices.

Basically, those are the nuts and bolts of it. If successful, it could have dramatic effects on the adoption of Flash across the world of devices. The type of device on which Flash could be implemented, is now open ended. It could be the dashboard for your next car."

Fucking spectacular. Personally i'm hoping for videogames adopting flash for 2d UI. I've been wanting Flash to "officially" branch away from web development for years and years, and finally Adobe is doing it right.

Kick ass!

Forgotten gems: Discworld Noir

2008-04-05T02:36:00.004+02:00

Now here's a true modern adventure classic if you ask me.
The third of Perfect's Discworld adventure games, this euro-only 3CD point&click adventure basically slipped in under the radar in 1999 and pretty much stayed there since. Considering how bloody smart and enjoyable it is, that's an enormous shame. Other classics such as Lucasarts' masterpiece adventures enjoy continued life through software like SCUMMVM, while the later installments of the genre stand a very real risk of simply vanishing from memory.

Discworld Noir came at a horrible time for adventure games. Released the year after Half life, console gaming was rising fast, PC gaming was making mile long strides towards purely hardware accelerated high tech gaming, and Noir's admittedly low tech approach did not give it the best legs to stand on. However it's impeccable writing (some of which was supplied by Mr Pratchett himself) made it shine.

As an adventure game, you know the drill; You explore locations, pick up objects, talk to characters and solve puzzles that periodically unlock new locations to explore, advancing the plot as you go. What sets Noir apart though is its inventory system, dialogue and subject matter.

The story concerns a disgraced policeman, Lewton, who makes his living as a private eye. In classical film noir style, he is approached by a beautiful woman (at least that's what they were gunning for) who asks him to find her lost lover. From there on he becomes implied in a murder case, infected with lycanthropy, and eventually have to fight off a world threatening conspiracy.
In Noir's Discworld of endless night and perpetual rain, unsavory characters and vicious murder, Perfect's previous two games' Monty Pythonesque jolly tone fades almost completely, and Pratchett's biting sarcasm and smart dialogue is truly allowed to shine. To be short, this is the best videogame adaption of Pratchett's vision you're likely to find.

On gameplay terms, Lewton is an investigator, and as such you collect clues as well as items. This means you have a book of words, names and locations in addition to your standard box of random items. The genius comes from the fact that you can combine clues with eachother as well as items, which may generate more clues. In addition, you use your clues and items as topics for conversation. The impressive bit is how rarely this becomes a random crapshoot of trying everything together; an old adventure game caveat. In addition to the actual snooping you do, Lewton becomes a werewolf quite early in the game, which gives him certain abilities, such as identifying smells (which can again be combined with inventory items or clues).

The result is an absolute ton of really interesting problem solving, where you combine ideas and dialogue rather than items to solve problems that are often about uncovering more clues. It really feels like solving a case, and it's one of the best twists on adventure games i've ever come across (and i've played a lot of them).

On the visual end, the game is quite rough, with prerendered characters and backgrounds. Lewton himself is polygonal, but he might as well not be. Make no mistake, this game can be downright ugly, which earned it some nasty comments on its release. It is, however, consistent, and the graphics effectively convey the atmosphere Perfect was going for. Things become quite a lot better on the audio end, with great voiceovers and a moody ambient soundtrack.

The real meat to Noir however is undoubtedly its gameplay; something you don't typically say about adventure games. People tend to remember adventures for their stories or graphics, i remember Noir for its sleuthing.

If you ever enjoyed Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, or brainy adventure games with logical puzzles, you owe it to yourself to try this game out. If you can get it working on a modern PC that is.

More reading:
wikipedia
mobygames

Gary Gygax, 1939 - 2008

2008-03-05T20:45:00.004+01:00

"I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else."

Gary Gygax was a true giant, and i owe him more than i can even fathom. There are years of my life that i remember almost exclusively for the gift of his work. Next to John Peel's death, this is the only other time i've felt as touched by the death of a person i never met.

Some retard out there said something along the lines of "He's immortalized through his appearance on Futurama". No you idiot; he's immortalized through shaping a huge part of the foundation of games as we know it, influencing scientists, musicians, writers, painters, and giving millions of people a way to connect through their imagination alone.

Rest in peace man. You've truly earned it.

Will Wright at GDC08

2008-03-03T03:12:00.003+01:00

http://www.podtech.net/home/4933/the-rebootgdc-2008-an-evening-with-will-wright

I don't really care much for his games, but he's an absolutely spectacular speaker that's obviously hugely in love with games and world building. Utterly amazing 30 minutes, don't miss them; this applies to more than just games

Another Wii rant

2008-03-01T07:57:00.001+01:00

Everyone saying they havent turned on their Wii in forever belong, according to my awesome theories, to one of two camps:

1. The people that actually bought into the prelaunch hype and thought it was going to utterly revolutionize their world from the get go. This isn't a Wii specific issue. Exactly the same thing happened with the PS3 and 360; lots of promise, very little immediate gratification.

2. Gamers that "grew up" on the previous generation.

I think the Wii appeal comes down to wether you truly like playing games, or you're just some dude who wants one specific thing from the media and that's that.
That's fine! But it's called checking out the market and weighing your preferences against what you buy. You don't typically go eat Italian when you really want Chinese.

I own the whole trinity, and to me the Wii is still the most exciting one. I know there's a heap of fun stuff coming out soon, and most recently? No more heroes, Zack & Wiki, Endless Ocean. Those titles just flat out justified the system for me, AGAIN. Zack & Wiki in particular; it's a truly gorgeous game and i have a hard time picturing it on any other console, including the PS3.

If you want to talk about buying potential, here's how i gauge the future;

Xbox 360 and PS3 will continue to host awesome looking titles with large budgets that take years to come out with gameplay that make increasingly gradual tweaks to existing conventions out of abject fear of losing money. I don't remember who said it, but there was a comment on here recently going something like "WHY IS EVERYTHING AN FPS!!?!" I totally share that sentiment. I'm sick to death of FPS shooters with recharging health, left trigger for iron sights, left stick clicked to duck, A button activates/reloads, yada yada. I know it's mad to be hung up on the controls like that but the games truly start feeling like the same game with a different mod, especially in these UE3 times.

I'd like someone to tell me, honestly, what they think the chances are of a game like Zack & Wiki coming out on the PS3 or 360 anytime soon. If the graphics hadn't been super next generation hootnanny, if there hadn't been fully voiced speech. If there hadn't been the motion sensing conceit. The game would instantly have less foundation for actually entertaining people.
Doesn't take a genius to see how much money would be lost on a Zack & Wiki for the 360.

Fact of the matter is, if a developer isn't up to snuff for the "truly" next gen platforms they're damned either way. I don't think people realize just how crippling the budgets have become.

River city ransom just landed on the virtual console, and i'd almost forgotten how brilliantly simple and entertaining that game is. It made me want to dig out every game i TRULY loved over the years, like Chu Chu Rocket (where's my Wii version already!?), Power Stone 2, Ooga booga, Ninja Gaiden, Monkey Island...

I love games. It's such an engrossing, exciting medium, nothing else out there can do the same. When my dad bought me a Gameboy in 89 i almost instantly dropped out of choir and piano practise. I remember making a papercraft gameboy in school and a simple contraption so i could drag strips of paper through slits on the sides of the "screen" so i could make my own levels and just at the very least see them moving on something LIKE a game console. Ever since then my life has been geared towards just worshipping the medium, as a player and as an academic. I read about them, write them, play them, talk about them, compose for them. They can be such amazing things.

So why in fucks name do people insist that all they now want from them are first person shooters, rpgs or other easily identifiable genres? Games aren't about genres, they're about putting your mind in places you don't normally go, challenging instincts you don't typically challenge.

What's happened is this: Increased consumer demand has forced a competitive industry into an arms race where the production values of the product has necessitated distillation of gameplay into the absolute gray area where EVERYONE can at LEAST enjoy SOME of it. Microsoft's game testing "labs" are a great indicator of how wayward this whole thing has become.

The arms race has to stop, or at least reach a plateau, and i think we're nearing it. I think what we're seeing is hollywood versus direct to video, and i for one am a huge fan of direct to video, where people get to play around with ideas without complete TERROR at the prospect of losing millions of dollars.

The 360 and PS3 are Hollywood. Take from that what you will. I for one am hugely satisfied with my Wii purchase; it lets me play that steady slow tricle of those rare gem direct to video titles.

The Akai MPD24 and its crutches

2008-02-24T06:06:00.006+01:00

Quick preface: I know i always sound like i hate everything. I don't! I love some things!

I recently had to get a quick replacement for my faulty M-audio Trigger finger MIDI control surface, and the cheapest/nearest alternative was the Akai MPD24.

I haven't used it so much yet, but first impressions are generally good. The hardware itself is weighty and solid, the pads, knobs and faders feel great, and the performance i used it for went down well. Now i've spent a day trying to get used to it, and the thing is just packed with poorly weighted design choices for a general purpose MIDI controller, and if you're looking to buy this thing i think you're entitled to hear about them

Aftertouch with no CC fallback
The vaunted aftertouch for a controller of this sort is a huge misstep. Typically you'll use such a unit with a software sequencer or such and route midi from there. Midi CC, as supported by the Trigger finger, is easily the way to go. The fact of the matter is, you can't use the pressure sensitivity of the MPD24 with any of Ableton Live's effects, nor any other effects on any software that uses CCs for MIDI control mapping. This is a near fatal limitation for me, as the device is used primarily as an effects or DMX controller. The reliance on aftertouch, with no CC alternative, denies me the use of 16 potential controllers on the surface, leaving me with 16 digital switches in their place.

Control knobs with no physical limits
The knobs on the device have no physical limits, nor a center "groove", not letting you check with a light tweak of the knob wether the knob is at an extreme or at a center. Having to actually look at the display to get the current value feels somewhat ridiculous.

"16 levels" mode is pointless
The device has a mode where hitting a switch will map the same pad to all 16 pads and divide their velocity maximum by their pad number. I'm curious as to what situation would require you to play the same note with velocities that precise (yet arbitrary). Particularly for drums!

4 pad bank buttons only alter pad nodes
You get 4 banks of settings to hotswap between during use. Except these don't change CCs for sliders and knobs. Given that the aftertouch basically renders the pads useless for effects use, you're left with 4 sets of 16 digital switches. Not bad if all you want are switches, but there are far better control surfaces available for that exact purpose.

Summary
The MPD24 is, i assume, awesome for whatever purpose the designers at Akai intended for it, but as a general purpose controller it's got some crippling limitations. I just want to make any potential buyers aware of them before comitting; If M-audio's drivers hadn't sucked so bad, i'd actually recommend the Trigger finger.

Turok logo malarky

2008-02-15T01:21:00.002+01:00

Anders Psychofreud makes me painfully aware that this new "edgy" Turok logo actually reads "Turdy". Irony.

Sins of a solar empire, first impressions

2008-02-12T23:13:00.001+01:00

What a name. I can think of a lot of names for a game about interstellar conquest, but i doubt i could top this. Sins of a solar empire.. It's got epic poetry to it. Bodes well.

If you haven't been keeping up with this, Sins of a solar empire is a kind of hybrid real time tactics / 4X strategy game, published by Stardock, the same dudes that rolled out Galactic Civilizations 2, and developed by Ironclad, a bunch of ex Rockstar/Barking dog elopers. The pedigree is impressive.

I've been mildly interested in it, mostly for the name, but after actually playing it i realize it's one of those games that will give and keep giving for a long time, and give proportionally to what you invest.

It's staggeringly elegant, incredibly atmospheric, and even though the tech tree looks (and is) somewhat limited, the game offers a preposterous amount of strategizing. Played at a somewhat sedate pace, the game offers real time galactic strategy, with management down to unit level should you want it. The game adopts the same disdain of the minimap as Supreme Commander, letting you zoom smoothly in and out from a galactic view down to the windshield on a fighter ship. It's natural and direct. In addition, the left side of the view is dominated by a abstract "map" of your empire in the form of a tree, branching from celestial bodies. It looks a hellish mess at first glance, but given a little time it becomes indispensable. It's brilliant.

My favorite example of how thoughtful the game is laid out is in its merging of macro with micro.
Colonizing new worlds is typically done with a colony frigate. You can select your frigate, click on the "colonize" button and then on the planet. Or you can just right click on the planet. Or you can just leave the colony frigate in the same system as the planet and do something else; colony ships have their colonize ability defaulting to auto-cast. When your colony is up you can zoom in, choose your construction frigate, choose to make a crystal refinery, then click on an asteroid. Or you can just click on the asteroid and it will have a button that calls the closest available construction frigate in to make a refinery. Or you can zoom out of that solar system altogether and do something else, choose your new colony from the empire tree, click on "planetary development" and, lo and behold, there are buttons to build crystal and metal refineries if there are available asteroids on which to do so.

It never seems like the choice you want to make is distant. It feels wonderful.

I need to play it more, havent even tried multiplayer yet, and the larger galaxy maps are simply intimidating. Will be back with a review.

leisure suit larry revival, female protagonists, sexy sexy!

2008-02-06T20:32:00.000+01:00

Kotaku pointed me to this excellent interview with LSL series creator Al Lowe, which again directed me to this great summary of the series. Thank you, hypertext markup language, for delivering on your promise.

It's funny how a franchise as sad and awkward as Leisure Suit Larry can be remembered for being funny. The first LSL was a complete horror show to me, filled with people who detest you in a filthy city where imminent death or dishonor is around every corner. There was a strong tone of sadness to the whole experience. Later games in the series became progressively weirder and grew in scope, and the character himself seems to be more of an idea of a lonely guy out of touch with reality than some charicature.

Another point of contention is how the series is often referred to as pornographic, when it's positively tame and thoroughly benign compared to insane things like Dead or alive Xtreme 2, a game i actually bought out of curiosity, and occationally play just to be weirded out by the trippy david lynchian creepiness of it.

Check out the articles, particularly the interview. I thought it was genuinely interesting and a little alarming to be reminded just how mature the games really were compared to the oversexed T&A mania we're seeing in nearly every game with a female character these days.

Speaking of female protagonists, here's a list of some i thought were pretty rad.

Cate archer - No one lives forever

I'm a tremendous fan of this series. I thought they absolutely nailed the female protagonist, with just the right ratio of sexy and elegant. Cate chopped up trenchcoat wearing special agents with her katana stolen from ninjas before picking a lock with her hair pin, investigating the scene of a crime. Later she'll be fighting more ninjas in a house caught in a tornado. Then she reports in on her makeup kit communicator.

Awesome.
Jade - Beyond Good & Evil

She's downright impossible not to like. She's got an original design that doesn't emphasise her ass and tries to create a character that's simply naturally attractive, and then sets out to make her awesome through her actions.

I hope i wasn't the only one that thought the idea of sneaking into a compound commando style to get photographic evidence of crimes is a more exciting way to solve a problem than with guns..?
Samus Aran - Metroid series

This is such a nobrainer. Samus is one of the few game protagonists out there where gender is genuinely irrelevant to the character. Samus is a human being in a context where that is exactly all that matters. Her imposing armor serves to remind us of that, and the more recent games frequent audiovisual cues remind us of her femininity. With Samus Nintendo made a female character everyone thinks is a total badass without alienating anyone else based on gender. That's impressive.
Julie - Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K.²

Don't roll your eyes just yet. Heavy Metal is a magazine notorious for its t&a content taken at face value, but it's one of the most sexually empowering publications as well. I absolutely love the idea of the fantasy "heavy metal babe" saving a world populated by strong women and weak men against everything inhuman about the corporate entity, all in latex and leather, wielding chainsaws and uzis. It's totally off the hook, but to me the game was a complete fantasy world, and that's something we shouldn't forget; playing with the rules is what makes a fantasy fun.

Sidenote; Ritual entertainment (RIP) were notorious for this kind of over the top dumbass muscly men and big titted strong women shooting enormous guns at eachother. It was deliriously politically incorrect, and i loved them for it. Here's a toast to Ritual!

It's complete bullshit to say female protagonists should be exempt from sexuality. No male protagonist with a semblance of realism to them is created without sexuality in mind, be it overt or not; it's simply human nature to look at a person of the opposite gender and consider the probability and value of mating.

In my opinion, we need to reinstate a policy of dignified sexy. We live in a society where sexy women tends to be equated with childlike weakness and sexual subservience to man, particularly in terms of fashion. Sexy has become the domain of girls. There was a time when sexy meant dangerous, and was a property of women.

Movie review: Aliens vs Predator Requiem

2008-02-02T12:44:00.000+01:00

Wow, just wow. Go to the movies and watch this oedipal train wreck of a film, hollywood's latest and probably not last attempt at fucking its own heritage in the ass.

I suppose we should be given to have some level of understanding that a film called Aliens versus Predator is inherently ridiculous from the offset, but the fact of the matter is, all it takes is one glance at the two franchises being fisted here to realize any attempt at bringing them together should either be left to people with HUGE brains, or left well alone. Two of the most recognizable horror franchises of the pre 00's, stuffed ass first into this, a one and a half hour long cavalcade of off-screen deaths, shaky camera work, shoddy rubber suits, half baked attempts at paying homages to the original films, and exactly no characters to care about. It's a party.

I can't be arsed talking about the plot, because there isn't one. Predators act like drunken sailors and fail to realize one of their guys has a little alien baby coming, smashing their alien-filled ship into America. Always America. Considering it's actually cheaper to shoot a movie filled with unknown actors in eastern europe, i'm frankly surprised the film wasn't moved to a european location. You know, if only to attempt to convince the rest of the world US filmmakers actually know what's outside their own borders. But i digress.

Aliens. On earth. And there's a predator dude out to clean up the mess (presumably). There's a town full of "people", including The Jock, The Sherriff, The Outlaw, The Tough Mom, and The Kid That Needs Saving. There are also some army dudes of unfathomable ineptitude. Who cares.

I'm actually stumped as to what else i can say about this, because it really is one of the dumbest films i've seen in a very long time. What i will do is a point by point list of what i liked and what i didnt.

What i liked
* One nice explosion effect shot.

* It's always good to see Predators wrasslin' it up. Still a fun character.

What i didn't like
* Bodycount overload, on both sides of the fence. There are so many aliens and people biting it here that you become desensitized to it within moments. There is no impact to any death; there are too many bad guys, and they die all the time. There is never any triumph to taking down the villain. In terms of death, this film shouts at you, all the time. It loses its effect rather quickly.

* Terrible, terrible sound work. The aliens apparently have exactly two words in their vocabulary; Hiss, and pitched up elephant. WRrreee. Oh come on. This movie has more pitched up elephant in it than a movie about elephants would have if you pitched it up. Every sound effect that's well done was well done in the 80s. No attempt at playing with the audio template has been made.

* Annoying attention to child murder. I'm not saying child murder is a bad thing. In fact, i fully condone it in the context of the horror film, because it's one of the most disturbing, horrible things i can imagine. Playing it off as The Gimmick Of The Film though, as is done here, is exploitive. Also cue lots of kids watching their parents die. Gnarly.

* Aliens have never, ever been less scary. They're in plain sight, all the time, in all their hobbling man-in-a-suit-ness. Gone are the hideous deliberate biomechanics of Alien, as is the abstract insectoid mob of Aliens. There is nothing particularly alien about these dudes anymore. They're just a bunch of scrawling, whining pig elephants that drip water everywhere and bleed yellow stuff that is SOMETIMES acid and sometimes nothing at all.

* Women get it. Big time. Screw those guys for being able to have children!

* The attempts at homages to the alien films. Woman driving an APC, turning to the camera shouting "Hold on!". Guy named Dallas. Subtle. Retarded.

* The hilarious magical predator/alien hybrid, which looks like a big fat hydrocephalic man with hotdogs hanging off his head.

* One of the single worst soundtracks for a movie of this sort. It's like sci-fi channel originals material.

If you want to see a really freaking dumb movie with lots of people dying and some aliens and also there's a predator, then by all means, support Hollywood's rape of the artform and pay to see this film.

Everyone affiliated with this film deserves a hard knee in the groin.

edit: check out the wikipedia page for this film
It may be as retarded as the film itself. God i love it when people try justifying sci-fi logic.

You, over there by the bar drinking your beer

2007-12-28T21:57:00.000+01:00

You're sat in one of the best god damn drink bars in the city, and you sit there sipping your cheap stale piss. What the fuck is wrong with you people?!

If you're at a good bar and you have the option of having a classic drink prepared for you at the same cost, why would you choose NOT to? It's like i'm sitting at the table and everyone but me is sitting on their food. What in gods name.

Ace Combat 6 gets my vote for disappointment of the year

2007-12-06T02:43:00.000+01:00

BE WARNED; THAR BE MILD SPOILERS

My god what a mess. It's a pretty mess, but compared to the almost impossibly well made Ace Combat 5 and the gritty Zero, Ace Combat 6 is an incredibly hard fall for the series as far as i'm concerned. It literally breaks my heart.

But let's rewind.

Ace Combat is three things since it's proverbial rebirth with Ace Combat 4; It's sci fi, it's army hardware porn, and it's the de facto standard for how arcade flight sims should be made. It's a series of games known for their top notch production values, elaborate storylines and constant flirtations with obscure narrative techniques.
Ace Combat 6 is the first non-Playstation outing for the series. It's also the first next generation Ace Combat, and the Xbox Live demo has had me tearing out my hair in anticipation. After all, after 5 and Zero, both crammed with interesting storytelling and creative set pieces, who can imagine what these dudes can come up with given next gen hardware?
Well, it turns out they pretty much phoned it in. This is a game about pretty graphics and moving the series formally away from Sony hardware, very little else.

The good

Graphics are ridiculously pretty, with huge draw distances and massive battles, and clouds and contrail effects you pretty much believe as you play.

It's rock solid Ace Combat. The gameplay is pretty much exactly what you expect, which is a good thing. The core mechanics of flying around shooting stuff are precise and thoroughly enjoyable. The lack of analog buttons for rudder and other more obscure mechanics do little if anything to hurt the gameplay. Flying around shooting stuff is awesome.

Breaking the missions into larger scale battles divided into operations you can pick and choose from on the fly is great and makes missions feel less scripted. Earning allied support by completing operations, letting you use the allied attack and allied cover options is also great incentive.

The new allied attack/allied defence mechanic is fun and makes a lot of sense in the game's larger scale battles. As you complete operations, forces delegated to that operation will begin following you around the battlefield, and can carry out coordinated attacks by holding up on the d-pad. The result is often dozens of missiles flying at the enemy at the same time, and the satisfaction never really diminishes.

The voice overs during flight are still uniformly top notch. It's simply impossible to be bored playing this game; even simply flying from A to B will typically give you some semblance of narrative advancement.

So the core of Ace Combat gameplay is nudged forward a tiny little bit, the presentation is great, and it makes some worthy next-gen-ish additions to the formula. Where it falters though, and dramatically, is in providing a context for that formula.

The bad

The single worst narrative of any Ace Combat game to date. Again attempting an unconventional approach, Namco have chosen to omit the player character from the narrative in general, and instead focus on a set of side stories involving other characters caught in the conflict, including a distraught mother looking for her annoying little cloneborg daughter, a handicapped enemy commander, a tank crew looking to rob a bank and so forth. The problem with this is that the storyline is spread too thin. The game takes place over 15 missions, and none of the actual in-game narrative push advances any of the storylines of the characters shown in the meandering cutscenes that separate missions. As a result, trying to tell such a wide set of stories in such a short span of time makes each story completely unmemorable, winding up essentially as non-sequiteurs to the simplistic yet at the very least coherent story that propels you from mission to mission. You play an arcade shooter flight sim for one moment, then you're forced to sit though uninteresting melodrama about uninteresting characters that are never allowed the slightest chance to grow on you.

Worse yet, the voice acting and writing for the cutscenes are mindblowingly poor, especially coupled with the enthusiastic and fun voice work on display during gameplay. Abysmal lines delivered by bored actors portrayed by plastic mannequins (rendered in real time with decidedly mixed results) certainly don't help you get involved. A lot of the time, you simply want these boring melodramatic characters to shut the hell up. And, as some have said before, what in gods name is up with the ridiculous "dance with the angels" line? It doesn't sound good, and never makes sense in the context uttered. But i digress.

Let it be said that i am no enemy of melodrama. Ace Combat 5 and Zero really pushed my tolerance, but their narratives were never spread this thin and applied with so little conviction. Even the insane live acted documentary style cutscenes of Zero had real heart, and Ace Combat 5 even managed to make me sit through the credits genuinely happy. Hell, when AC5 made me sit through a long mission where most of it is made up from various squadrons joining yours, singing a peace anthem in wailing false radio voices it was incredibly hard to feel offended by it as much as you wanted to hug the insane people who would subject you to that kind of rampant heart string yank wish such enthusiasm.

Ace Combat 6, however, falls on its ass literally after the first mission, and never recovers.

The last nail in AC6's narrative coffin is the incredible simplicity of the actual campaign arc. Some dudes attack and occupy your country. You counterattack and take back your city (it turns out there is only one city in this country), they counterattack (weakly). You beat them again. The end. Considering the sprawling complex mess of the AC5 campaign, which had branching missions, shifting allegiances, and a near infinite onslaught of sci-fi monstrosity bosses and minibosses, AC6 simply doesn't appear to give a rats ass about anything, and gives you a set of plain excuses to have planes in the air.

Speaking of those sci-fi elements, there are two in AC6, only one of them are remotely fun to fight, and neither require anything special from you. Nothing like the constant divebombing of the Scinfaxi submarines in AC5, or the downing of the Arkbird. The game's set piece count also end with those two battles. Where AC5 wisely saved the tunnel flying and other "xtreme" stuff for the end, AC6 drops it in there like it's every day's business to go flying little jaunts into enemy bases. There is no impact, no triumph, and no holy shit moments. None, zip. It's all in a day's work.

When Ace Combat 6 ends, it ends too soon, without even having become remotely challenging, and you're sat there scratching your head wondering where the rest of the missions went.

Overall

Ace Combat 6 is a great engine and some great gameplay wrapped in an abysmal narrative that somehow drains it all of charm and purpose. When it makes you go "Oh come on" it is never with a smile, and when it ends you want to go up to whoever wrote the manuscript (there were something like 8 of them apparently) and just shake them to bits over how they botched it.

As someone who played the games for sci-fi army wank shootery second, sci-fi army wank melodrama first, i can't recommend this game at all on the basis of its storyline. It is truly preposterously bad, and a huge step back for the series.

New TV, Metroid Prime 3, Ace Combat 5. Yeah.

2007-11-04T22:22:00.000+01:00

Hi! Been a good while since my last post now, and things have happened!

First and foremost, i finally grit my teeth and quit my job. So freelancing from now on! Freedom! Yeah! The first thing i did was invest in a 32" HDTV, which felt crazy when i did it (i have never owned a tv), but was totally worth it. Finally i can play all those 60hz and NTSC games i've wanted to play for so long, as well as finally give my 360 the hardware it deserves. As frivolous as spending that kind of money on a tv seemed, it really does come together when you're playing with R-type Final shaped sunburns.

Lots of gaming since that entered my house! Lots of Speedball 2 and Exit on XBLA (both brilliant), but finally getting my hands on Metroid Prime 3 was sort of a revelation (wiivelation. Ha! HA! I can sense your cringing from here). A properly thought out first person shooter on the Wii really is amazing, and i was double convinced of that after a 5 hour MP3 session followed by attempts at getting back into R6 Vegas. Anyone else think it's funny that R6 uses a scheme that punishes your aim for excessive camera movements, yet is played with a control setup so unprecise rapid camera movements are required to aim precisely? Prime 3, for me, is the best console first person shooter ever made in terms of control. It puts everything else to shame, and there's no autoaim whatsoever. The lock on mechanic is a stroke of genius, as it locks *your movement* on to your target's center of mass, and still requires you to aim precisely from there. It makes circle strafing and such movements second nature, and still demands that you work for your payoff.

Aside from that, soon there's Ace Combat 6 in the house, and i decided to finally finish Ace Combat 5 on the PS2, which i've had a long flirtatious love affair with, playing it on and off and always loving it just as much. The Ace Combat franchise has gone from being a mere arcade flight sim to becoming a sprawling anime EPIC with each installment, with near constant voice overs, sci-fi influences and soundtracks of an incredible calibre. I haven't been playing the series for long, but i did play the original Ace Combat arcade game, and i've been curious about the Playstation installments basically ever since. Simply put, Ace Combat 5 is completely awesome.

It's the kind of awesome where you kind of laugh at yourself for letting it get to you, because the storytelling is amazingly pretentious and contains spoken lines such as "8 skilled pilots against us! The adrenaline! I can feel my heart beating, my body shaking!", but all the insanity is uttered with such conviction (courtesy of a voice acting studio commonly associated with Anime dubs) and understanding of the material that you just can't help but cheer along with it.

Some scenes are staggering. A theme of the game is nations whose people want peace but whose generals want war, and near the game's climax mass army defections take place, their common language a popular song about peace, and you start the mission flying with your squad, as more and more planes from various armies join in, and they're all singing the song! You're flying your jet through the rain with a fleet of other planes that you've been shooting at for hours before, and there's a cacophony of radio broadcast singing coupled with a strong string and brass driven soundtrack. It's a tug on the heartstrings of incredible proportions, and while part of you is screaming "OH COME THE FUCK ON", you can't help but grin at how hard they're trying to move you. If you're like me, it makes you happy.

Ace Combat 5 is a game's game with a big, big heart. In spite of its gameplay pacing problems (they exist bigtime), It's well written, has a fantastic soundtrack, and it makes you care. It also has boss fights where you shoot enormous sci-fi planes firing lasers at you. It's awesome.

I can't wait for the next one. If the demo on live was any indication, we've got good stuff coming!

Bruno Sanfilippo blows my mind

2007-09-10T23:45:00.000+02:00

The latest edition of Ultima Thule is dedicated to Bruno Sanfilippo's latest album, simply titled Piano Textures.

listen to Piano Texture 3

It's melancholy, lonely ambient on a level i haven't heard in a long time. Simply numbered rather than titled, tracks 3 and 8 in particular put me in a place that makes me want to curl up and cry.

I often feel as though ambient music is the only genre that can truly transport us somewhere else, sometimes completely changing our state of mind in an instant. I tend to gravitate towards the harsher, darker side of it, but Sanfilippo's work is gentle and moving, and should be listened to by anyone.

Another favorite for me, right next to Lucisferrato's Ingermanland.

Listen to the Ultima Thule broadcast, check out the samples on his site, and if you enjoy it, please buy this album to support this brilliant musician.

Gamespot rating system is.. odd...

2007-08-30T20:14:00.000+02:00

I know the recent revision to Gamespot's ratings, basically rounding off to halves and adding "achievements" meant well, but i'm confused as to why they still have the decimals at all. Especially when faced with such things as this:

Warhawk : 8.5
Metroid Prime 3 : 8.5

I'm sorry, but i've played both. Warhawk is fun, but it's another Battlefield clone. Prime 3 was apparently "not so good" for being like the previous 2 games in the trilogy. Y'know. Aside from having completely new controls.

We didn't hate on Prime for being different from Super Metroid, so wtf is up now?

These two games don't match up in this way, at least not when you're decimal specific. I argue that decimals are removed. Both getting an 8 i can stand for. Both being equally close to a 9 is weirding me out.

Expresscard universal slot design is insane

2007-08-24T20:15:00.000+02:00

I need to vent now that i understand this is a conscious design choice.

I use a laptop for playing live shows and making music. To connect my laptop to my external firewire sound card, i was basically forced to get an expresscard firewire adaptor (apparently laptop firewire ports are shit). I'm mortified to find that the slot for the card is almost twice as wide as the card itself, basically leaving the card "Hanging" with wall contact on one side only, meaning a slight shift of the laptop or a careless hand gesture will easily push the card sideways and out of the slot.

Behold, internet illustration:

Expresscards are apparently "designed to be hot swapped". Well the stuff that connects to expresscards has a nasty tendency of NOT being designed to be hot swapped. Sound cards for instance. They really, really hate being yanked out during mid use. So does XP actually, commonly freezing up completely once this accident happens. And this accident happens a LOT. The firewire cable is short and stiff, meaning as soon as i hook this thing up, i don't dare put my hand anywhere near the right hand side of the machine. Tomorrow i'm playing a show in Berlin and the debate of wether to bring the sound card and enjoy ASIO and zero ground loop and fear The Accident or to accept ground loop and sound like shit but safe is killing me.

I can't believe this design is allowed, and certainly not how the computer or card didnt come with a sort of slot-in object to keep the inserted card from jiggling around. The immediate result is i have to shove some cardboard in there or something, and i HATE THAT.

Fuckers.

Close to god

2007-08-08T16:39:00.000+02:00

Easy to forget these things really exist sometimes. It's surreal to watch.

Alien Hominid HD patched

2007-08-02T19:34:00.001+02:00

Dunno if this fixes the save bug. But i assume it did! And if so; Great!

Marathon: Durandal XBLA, a biased review

2007-08-02T14:03:00.000+02:00

Halo's granddaddy.

There's something strange about seeing this game running on the 360. Last time i played it in earnest was 12 years ago, on my family's Mac IIsi (if you can believe that). I spent a ridiculous amount of time making mods, maps and scenarios for it, being quite active in the Marathon Map Makes Guild. Rarely you'd see a game inspiring such lavish worship from its fan community on the grounds of its single player experience.

It converts staggeringly well to a console title. I played it primarily with a keyboard as mouselook was jittery, and the translation to analog sticks has worked better here than it does in most big budget 360 FPSes. Put into context; i can play Durandal with aim assist off just fine, turning speed is sensitive enough that 180s are almost mouselook fast, and the look stick deadzone is small enough to make minute adjustments to aim a cinch. The movement stick at its extreme is sprinting speed, substituting the original title's need for a run key, and the addition of analog movement is overall hugely successful, much more so than the 360 Doom port. The more i play the game, the more it seems at home on the 360, which is a very impressive achievement.

The core game is, as always, an objective based first person shooter heavy on exploration and text driven exposition. The classic argument of Doom versus Marathon is side by side proven to be completely pointless, as the games serve different purposes. In fact, Durandal has more in common with the Metroid series than it has with Doom, as a methodical approach is entirely necessary for effective progress, checking your maps and paying close attention to your surroundings. The basis of progress is not so much about getting from A to B as it is about solving riddles and accomplishing objectives in the labyrinthine levels, all named with hints as to the experience that awaits you. It's quite a sizable game, even for today, easily outsizing the original Halo and many other modern action adventures, and considering the story can be quite involving (given the will to fill in a few blanks with your imagination) Durandal feels like you get your money's worth based on the single player campaign alone.

Combat is surprisingly intense, making up for its admittedly retarded AI with large numbers of agressive and strong opponents, color coded like insects for easy threat reference; The richer the color, the more grenades you should lob at it as soon as possible. The game can be quite hard, given that enemy placement often puts you at a distinct disadvantage, ammo conservation and scavenging is a far bigger deal than it was in Doom, clip sizes and reload times have to be taken into account, and health recharge terminals are few and far between. The result is a slow methodical approach, where you often find yourself planning your attack before pushing on. The AI can also be ambushed from behind, as they have a limited cone of vision, often leading to some very satisfying moments when you're down to your last bar of health.

Further improving combat is the inclusion of several interesting firearms with distinct areas of advantage; from crowd control to anti mech to long range, Durandal's weapon selection remains useful from top to bottom throughout the game, with no weapon clearly better than any other depending on the circumstances. In addition, certain weapons can be dual wielded, and most that can't be have twin firing modes, ranging from the pulse rifle inspired assault rifle/grenade launcher to the chargeable fusion pistol. The absolute joy of the collection is still being able to dual wield shotguns, which is still ridiculously enjoyable.

The enemies themselves are an odd crew of alien soldiers, monsters, android suicide bombers, insects, gestapo-style alien inquisitors and monstrous hovering tanks, often from opposing factions. The AI is able to switch allegiance on the fly, so tricking an alien storm trooper to fire a grenade into his comrades may make his comrades very upset with him indeed. Often when low on ammo, using the enemy's numbers against them is a viable tactic, especially with some enemies firing homing weapons that can be pulled into their own ranks with some quick maneuvering. Sometimes you find yourself walking in on battles between opposing factions, choosing sides to take down the tougher opponents first before you mop up the survivors. On occation, this gives an almost emergent feel, as the larger combat scenarios rarely play out exactly the same.

A returning gimmick for the franchise is the motion detector, cleverly updating far slower than is convenient, and completely ignoring any lurking enemies. Seeing the detector erupt in a flurry of red as you blunder into an ambush is remarkably intense.

The end result is a very enjoyable combat experience which belies its age and seems almost up to date in how it approaches large scale battles. Today first person shooters rarely put you up against more than 4-5 opponents to compensate for advanced AI, and it's strangely refreshing to be put up against large numbers where the properties of each opponent are what you need to take into consideration rather than merely surviving how bloody smart they are.

Durandal was known in its day for per-level physics models, which allowed each level to essentially rewrite the rules of the game. Fan mods made the rocket launcher fire people, or made the assault rifle fire fusion pistol bolts. Suddenly the weakest enemy of the game could be nigh unstoppable should the designer wish it so. In the campaign, this translates to shifting allegiances, altered gravity properties, vacuum space walks, underwater missions and other such oddities, and even for today Durandal still keeps you guessing. The basic physics of the game take some getting used to. There's no jumping or crouching, but the game encourages you to exploit its physics to use momentum to take you where you want to go. Occationally this includes what was known as "grenade hopping", using the recoil/blast of the grenade launcher paired with lateral movement to produce a jump. Exploration is constantly rewarded with secret messages, ammunition, health and sometimes weapons.

All this, and i still haven't mentioned the multiplayer. Marathon LAN play was legendary in its day, and what they have basically done here is give it a huge overhaul. 8 players can play games of deathmatch, team deathmatch, tag, "kill the man with the ball", king of the hill or the single player campaign cooperatively. You heard me, 8 player co-op. Play can be done with up to 4 on a single console split screen, through system link or on live. As an added bonus, you and 3 friends on the same console can join live games together. Network play is fast, unsophisticated and frequently hilarious, with king of the hill a complete riot. The real boon here is the co-op however. The campaign is long, difficulty gets ramped up considerably according to the number of players, and ammo conservation becomes a far bigger issue. It's impressive stuff, and makes for one of the most enjoyable multiplayer titles on live arcade as of the moment.

Visually, the game has seen some considerable upgrades, moving from the classic raycaster engine to a true 3d engine (albeit with the same properties as the original raycaster), HD sprite and texture updates, a new interface and the aforementioned updated controls. It also runs at a blistering 60fps that obviously never see a single hickup. The original textures are still available for purists, although this purist found the updates consistently flattering.

Sound is an adequate bunch of bangs, clicks and hisses, while the traditionally crap explosion sounds are still completely crap. But it grows on you. There is, aside from the title theme, no music to speak of, leaving you with the ambient sounds of the world. I wouldn't have it any other way.

There are unfortunately some downsides. Achievements were something i was hugely looking forward to, and Freeverse have really dropped the ball on this one. An early achievement is awarded for merely picking up the assault rifle (along with a reference to the level it is attained in the original marathon). A couple more are given for completing specific chapters, and one for killing 7 enemies with melee attacks. The rest is tuned to multiplayer, with the typical "won 20 games" types of requirements. It's just so incredibly typical and boring. There are no time trials, no "hit an enemy full on with a grenade from 200 yards", no actual exploitation of the intrinsic challenges of the gameplay. Just a list you will easily fill out through normal play. Boo!

There have been reports of motion sickness, particularly IGN's otherwise favorable review, and i'll have to agree. The tight confines, the close perspective, the sensitive motion controls and the constant silky 60fps contribute to some serious nausea if played without precautions. I found very quickly that pushing either movement stick to its extreme is indeed an extreme, with the move stick in particular putting you at a run that in the original was used primarily to exploit the game's nearly weightless default gravity to "jump" across chasms. Moving with a sense of moderation will greatly improve the experience. Games like The Darkness make us curse the protagonist for moving so slowly. In Durandal you want to take it easy.

Overall, i'm astonished. This is clearly a labor of love for Freeverse as it was for Bungie, and by far the best first person shooter experience on live arcade. It puts titles like EA's Wing Commander utterly to shame, and makes for a compelling argument for Marathon's historical place in the FPS family tree. A strong single player campaign, silky and challenging gameplay and a ridiculously well equipped multiplayer suite make this 800pts feel like i paid too little.

Heartily recommended.

Mirror's Edge makes me hungry

2007-08-01T10:09:00.001+02:00

Latest issue of Edge has a sizable feature on DICE's new first person action adventure, Mirror's Edge, which is being described as a sort of dystopian sci fi first person prince of persia. Think about that for a moment as you look at the design for the protagonist:

That, is BAD ASS. I like this new trend of female protagonists that circumvent classical conceptions of sex appeal and come off triple sexy because of it. Heavenly sword's Nariko was a strong deviation from the Lara Croft formula, and now this. Good job lads!

I heartily recommend picking up this issue just for the article and accompanying concept art. It's some of the most striking stuff i've seen in ages. DICE are describing totalitarian society as "too clean", and the art style reflects this. It's got a Perfect Dark Zero kind of quality to it, without the wet clay look.

I can't wait until there are videos for this thing. The way Edge describes the feedback from walking to sprinting is something i've wanted to see for years. Running in games have always been too slow, never capturing how outright fun it is to run, and why we loved to run as kids.

I'll be keeping my eyes peeled on this one. 360 and PS3 baby. Fuck yeah.

Friendly XBLA warnings

2007-07-28T12:38:00.000+02:00

So we're getting Marathon 2 on XBLA. We've got Symphony of the night on XBLA. We've got Alien hominid on XBLA. Naturally we now have expectations of the platform. Even veteran titles like Outpost Kaloki X are full games in their own right.

Then came a bevvy of Digital Eclipse driven emulated titles, the grand majority of which are undeserving of your attention.

I was super excited about Super Contra, foolishly thinking it was the SNES Super Contra. Failure. It's the arcade Super Contra, which is nowhere near as rad as the SNES title (sorry #shmups, but arcade apologists < nintendo apologists in this round). Play the demo and weep. It's hard, but what of it? It's also ugly as sin and plays like poo.

The biggest offender though is EA's new Wing Commander title, Arena. This seemed like such a nobrainer for me. Drop players in an enclosed space, maintain the oldschool fly/shoot mechanics, show Project Sylpheed how it's done. Simple, straight forward arcade space shooting. Add teams and mission types, and you'd have tournament material. Hell, i can list you a control scheme:

Left stick: x/y thrusters
click: toggle intertia compensation (y'know, to let you drift freely when releasing thrusters)

Right stick: pitch/yaw
click: target ship closest to crosshairs

Left trigger: brakes
Right trigger: forward thrust
Left button: fire missiles
Right button: fire guns

Dpad left: change missiles
Dpad right: change guns
Dpad up: Shield power to guns
Dpad down: Gun power to shields

What they've done instead is shit all over Wing Commander. The game would have been fine, had it not been saddled with the WC legacy, because to this day there are two series that pulled off arcade space combat that well, and that's Freespace and WC. This third person pseudo 2.5D piu-piu deathmatch bullshit with thimble sized ships, terrible music, and an overall presentation completely devoid of any personality is unworthy.

If you've never played a WC game; this is not what it used to be about.
If you have; don't play this game. You will howl with anguish.

Marathon 2 XBLA Q&A

2007-07-18T18:38:00.000+02:00

This is an incredibly encouraging read. I wasn't too psyched about this at first, but they sound like they have their shit together. Also, 8 player co-op is so droolworthy i don't know what else to say about it. M2 CoOp is one of my best gaming memories. Can't wait to do it again.

midines++

2007-07-18T05:48:00.000+02:00

This is the sweetest thing i've seen all week. May have to dig out the ol' NES for this.

Total truth

2007-05-21T23:59:00.000+02:00

Halo. A world gone mad

2007-05-15T03:42:00.000+02:00

This is pure opinion. I'm through arguing over this. But i will say it again. And again. Because it can't be said enough.

Whoever it is at Bungie that greenlights Marty O'Donnell's Halo soundtracks, in spite of his masturbatory and immature classic rock outbursts, his one-off-and-done-with-it drum sequences and shameless recycling of themes. You should be ashamed.

There are segments of the Halo soundtracks that are completely brilliant. The basic theme was and still is stirring, but it's in danger of self parody at this point, much like George Lucas' rampant reuse of the Star Wars theme in his prequels. The infrequent but solid sequences of ambient music are perfect without exception.

These are elements to be capitalized on.

It would've been easy for me if the Halo soundtracks were just flat out terrible. Instead, they run a pretty static ratio of 3/7 brilliance/garbage. It's the 30% that makes it especially painful, because the insane "look what i can do" flailings that cut the good stuff into slices of yum in a sea of ouch really, really hurt the product.

I'm not a crazy person. I don't have incredible demands. Okami, Viewtiful Joe, Dead Rising, Gears of war, Shadow of the colossus, Ninja Gaiden, Splinter Cell, Mario Sunshine, Metroid Prime. I love these soundtracks, and technically O'donnell is more than capable of delivering similar product. Halo and Halo 2, however, have an incredible tendency of half giving me goosebumps, half making me drop "oh come the fuck on!" exclamations.

In a sense, i think it's down to art direction and production, and on that level, i hate to admit, i assume the guitar laden cartoon scifi soundtrack works with the guitar laden cartoon scifi voiceovers (Master Chief in particular has one of the single worst voiceovers ever conceived, both in writing and performance. I mean jesus fucking christ, Marcus Fenix came off more respectable, and THAT sir, is madness), the babylon 5 level scifi clichès, the fact that the protagonist can jump something like half-again his own height.

But it doesn't add up! I adore the art direction, i adore the core creative ideas, during Halo 1 i adored even master chief. Most of all i adore the core single player gameplay, which is just flat out good, in spite of level design flaws.

There's a discrepancy in artistic vision that i can't really put my finger on. It's realism, grave choices, genocides, religion, disinformation. There are interesting ideas at play that are coupled with bumbling and insane mashups of comedy and cartoon dialogue, paired with wailing guitars and piano segments that aren't even up to soap opera levels.

Someone at Bungie, whoever it is that's greenlighting all this, seriously disagrees with me on some fundamental things, and now that the series is basically coming to an end, i suppose i'll merely have to agree to disagree.

I always saw Halo as a cousin of Marathon, but Halo is Armageddon to Marathon's 2001. It's a damn shame.

Fallout 3 site live

2007-05-06T23:36:00.000+02:00

Old news this, but what the hell:

http://fallout.bethsoft.com/

Sofa cliques, or Why Gaming And Club Scenes Fail

2007-04-15T17:46:00.000+02:00

I've thrown a few club events, and without fail, if you ever allow your patrons to become comfortable, you've lost all recruitment to the scene. You have what we call "sofa cliques". You know the type, you enter the venue, and there's like 6 guys sitting around a table talking. Commonly, you'll have several. One in the sofa, one at the bar, one standing in the corner. Instantly, that door is shut for you socially. You come in the door, you immediatly feel discarded.

No matter how rad the music is, if the people into that music are dicks, or you wind up sitting there alone, you're not going to want to partake.

The solution? Keep throwing curveballs. Every party i've thrown since we picked this up have been multiple demographic events. Electro/Reggae/Industrial. Breakcore/ambient/hiphop. Hiphop/jungle/schranz. If you break up preconceptions like that, keeping people on their toes and never letting the attendance coagulate, you get an equally confused and confounded audience every time, and they find unity in their confusion.

Many, confused and happy > few, knowledgable and content.

If anything, the term "gamer" has fucked us up. We have a "language" now. We have "terms". It makes gaming look like buying into a social group, and it really isn't. It should be about pushing the buttons to solve problems, and coming out of it with a smile on your face. Not coming out of it with "cred".

Fuck gamerscores. Fuck kudos. Gamerscores and achievements = sofa clique generators.

Privately owned luxury subs for ultimate greatness

2007-04-08T18:25:00.000+02:00

http://www.ussubmarines.com/submarines/phoenix_1000.php3
*starts saving up*

This is a moment for mad ramblings.
If i had the money to construct/maintain that thing i'd:

Hire a crew made up entirely of hot asian chicks and/or ninjas. Combination is also acceptable. Hot ninja chicks.

Make them wear uniforms that have my name on it, maybe even my face embroidered

Train a small army of dolphins to defend the sub from angry whales

Hire an angry whale

Christen the thing "Deathshark", give it shark decals like jaws etc

Paint the thing ninja black.

Fill the thing with traps, in case of boarding by pirates.

Install a way to electrify the hull in case of boarding by primitive tribes

Install an unbelievable sound system. On the outside of the hull. When i'm under the ice caps, scubadivers off hawaii will hear creepy music

Arm the thing. Somehow! Please?

If we all get in on it now we could have a FLEET! Imagine! We could rove the seas, solving environmental problems with our supreme knowledge of the seas!

Wii gestures that have to die, now

2007-04-03T19:57:00.000+02:00

I hate these. Please, please stop putting them in games. Please.

* Nunchuck jerk upwards for jumping. Just. Not. Precise. Enough.

* Shaking the nunchuck and wiimote randomly for "powering up" or whatever.

* Tilt as a gesture. These occur way, way too randomly. A tilt in one direction, then back another is a gesture. A simple tilt anywhere is not. Please!

There. Whew. Thanks for listening.

Wii SD card support sucks almost as bad as the holocaust

2007-04-02T21:02:00.000+02:00

I, like many, bought a Wii. It has this thing on it called the virtual console(tm), which indeed lets you play old emulated games. These games take up space. Most are quite small, but some are relatively large. The Wii has 512mb internal memory. I am about to run out.

The Wii has SD card support. To me, this seems logical: cheap and affordable space expansion. Except it doesn't expand shit.

Games can't be saved directly to SD.
Saves can't be read directly from SD.
VC games can't be downloaded directly to SD.
VC games can't be played directly from SD.
Saves or VC games can't be moved quickly from SD to internal memory or vice versa. This requires a copy-then-delete approach.

VC games saved to SD are only playable on the downloading console: this i understand.
Savegames copied to SD can only be loaded by the originating console: this is so blindly retarded i don't even know where to begin chastising it.

What the hell is up with this? I hope to dear god there's going to be some kind of system update to fix the file management, because this is stupid on a level most definitions of poor software design can only imagine beginning to relate to.

Dark crusade no longer broken

2007-03-26T22:05:00.000+02:00

Can't believe this passed me by. Patch 1.2 has dropped for Dawn of war Dark crusade, and it pretty much fixes everything.

Crons no longer own everything.
Turret rushes are dead.
Vespid rushes are dead.
Broadside battle suits no longer completely retarded.

Shitloads more positive changes. If you played DoW DC and found it broken, do return now. They did a good job with this patch, least contested patch in years.

YEAH!

2007-02-23T09:25:00.000+01:00

Those kids in the arcade are the best actors in history.
Thanks to Knifehandchop for this :)

Timbaland is a thief, AND an asshole

2007-02-14T08:22:00.000+01:00

Whoo-ee this just keeps getting better.

If you're not up to speed on this; watch this.

Done? Here's Timbaland's response.
"It's from a videogame, idiot. Freakin' jerks"
It's around the 6 minute mark.
Not enough for you? Well.

from mtv news:

A European musician Tim is familiar with is, however, is the Finnish producer who accused him of stealing a beat (see "YouTube Clip Claims Timbaland Got Furtado Track From Finnish Dude"). Timbaland called the accusation "foolish."

"It makes me laugh," he said. "The part I don't understand, the dude is trying to act like I went to his house and took it from his computer. I don't know him from a can of paint. I'm 15 years deep. That's how you attack a king? You attack moi? Come on, man. You got to come correct. You the laughing stock. People are like, 'You can't be serious.' "

Great work man. Not only did you demonstrate complete ignorance about how the fuck copyright laws operate, but you showed complete disregard for the hard work of another musician, which makes you, by most standards accepted in western society as fact, a fucking asshole.

I used to have a great deal of respect for this producer, and that respect just became really hard to justify. I find it intensely satisfying that the first hit that pops up on youtube when you search for timbaland is evidence of plagiarism. Rock on.

Ninja Gaiden Black - A reminder

2007-02-05T22:35:00.000+01:00

Just in case you forgot. Ninja Gaiden Black is still the single best hard action adventure game on the market. It trounces any and all opposition in terms of putting you in a world, giving you solid controls, stiff opposition and methods of decimating it/being decimated BY it that never get old.

Whenever you think about Tomonobu Itagaki, please, ignore DoA. Remember NG. I don't think the man will ever make as good a game ever again. It is truly a spectacular achievement.

It plays perfectly on the 360 as well, making it the best action adventure on the 360, and, rather alarmingly, one of the best looking ones as well. You can probably pick it up at a budget for a cough and a tip of the hat these days. If you haven't played it, you'd be sorry to miss it.

zune setup is retarded

2007-02-03T18:25:00.000+01:00

three letters. lol.

PS3 euro lineup

2007-01-25T12:22:00.000+01:00

Resistance: Fall of Man™ - SCEE - Disc
MotorStorm™ - SCEE - Disc
Genji™: Days of the Blade - SCEE - Disc
FORMULA ONE CHAMPIONSHIP EDITION - SCEE - Disc
Ridge Racer™ 7 - SCEE - Disc
Tekken®: Dark Resurrection - SCEE - Network
Lemmings™ - SCEE - Network
Go! Sudoku - SCEE - Network
Go! Puzzle - SCEE - Network
Blast Factor™ - SCEE - Network
flOw™ - SCEE - Network
Super Rub’a'Dub - SCEE - Network
Call of Duty 3 - Activision UK Ltd - Disc
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance - Activision UK Ltd - Disc
Tony Hawk’s Project 8 - Activision UK Ltd - Disc
Gundam – Target in Sight - Namco Bandai Games - Disc
Full Auto™ 2: Battle Lines - Sega®Europe Ltd - Disc
Sonic the Hedgehog™ - Sega®Europe Ltd - Disc
Virtua Fighter™ 5 - Sega®Europe Ltd - Disc
Virtua Tennis™ 3 - Sega®Europe Ltd - Disc
World Snooker Championship 2007 - Sega®Europe Ltd - Disc
NBA 2K7 - Take 2 International SA - Disc
NHL 2K7 - Take 2 International SA - Disc
Blazing Angels Squadrons of WWll - Ubisoft Entertainment SA - Disc
Enchanted Arms - Ubisoft Entertainment SA - Disc
Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent - Ubisoft Entertainment SA - Disc
The Elder Scrolls lV: Oblivion - Ubisoft Entertainment SA - Disc
Def Jam: Icon - Electronic Arts Ltd - Disc
Fight Night Round 3 - Electronic Arts Ltd - Disc
NBA Street 4 Homecourt 2007 - Electronic Arts Ltd - Disc
Need for Speed Carbon - Electronic Arts Ltd - Disc
The Godfather: The Don’s Edition - Electronic Arts Ltd - Disc
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2007 - Electronic Arts Ltd - Disc
Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom - Electronic Arts Ltd - Disc
F.E.A.R. Vivendi - Universal Games Intl SA - Disc
Gripshift - Sony Online Entertainment - Network

Wow. A list full of stuff that's already out there or perfectly average. Not impressed.

Crackdown smackdown

2007-01-25T00:08:00.000+01:00

Straight up, the Crackdown demo has me convinced. It is rough around the edges, but at its core it's fun in the same way Hulk: Ultimate Destruction was fun. It's just a hugely liberating game, complete with a Verhoeven-esque ironic fascist slant on the future-as-logical-conclusion.

Visually gorgeous, with a subtle cel-shading effect that really plays to the strengths of the engine, and with incredibly fitting sound design. Smashing things this way hasn't really been fun since said Hulk game, and it's about time we got more of it.

Definitely check out the demo on Live. I haven't tried it co-op yet but i'm terrified at how immense that might turn out. I'm literally drooling.

Nintendo: Some suggestions follow

2007-01-17T11:26:00.000+01:00

I enjoy this here Wii thing you created. I enjoy it much.
However, i must admit a slight tickle of the fearing sort imagining the interface you have created for managing friends and messages within the context of online multiplayer, or even the device's functionality as a community facility.

You appear to have made the assumption that, at an absolute maximum, i will have something like 5 registered friends in my adress book. However, as antisocial as i am, i already have two pages full, and i have a good few more coming. With a list as such, and with online multiplayer on the horizon, i have to ask; how do you intend to facilitate easy communication between groups of individuals rather than simple one-to-one messaging?

Rather than expect a response, i will provide my own personal suggestions for a Wii frontend update, if only to have said it and gain some peace of mind.

Allow me to add more than one recipient for a message
This seems simple enough. Instead of returning to the message upon selecting a recipient, allow me to "tag" multiple recipients from my adress book and press an "ok" button.
Give us a real message board
If i have registered John and Mike. And John and Mike have registered me and eachother, shouldn't we be allowed to exchange messages freely as a group, or even DISCUSS through these messages? Give us functionality that allows us to send messages to a public "friends" board, accessible by all registered friends, and readable in chronological top to bottom order rather than the freeform postits-on-a-calendar paradigm. Make it a separate "tab" on the message board screen.
Automatically notify friends when a new game is used on the machine
A wonderfully underestimated aspect of Xbox Live is the ability to quickly assess what games your friends play and to what extent they appear to enjoy them. A simple implementation of something like it is to be able to send an automatic notice to your registered friends that you have played a game on your Wii you have never played before.
Automatically notify friends when you have achieved generic game goals
Auto-brag! Tell my friends i've completed Zelda! Tell them i'm Pro at Wii Sports Bowling!
Tag a Mii as ME
Automatically send it to registered friends and update it whenever i change it.
Let me rate VC games
Right now there's nothing worse on the Wii than getting a VC game that sucks. Allow me to rate VC games with a 1-5 star scale. When i enter the Virtual Console store, display my registered friends' ratings as an average. If 5 of my friends play a game and rate it at an average of 4 stars, i'll know it's at least worth a purchase. You have no demo functionality like Live Arcade, and frankly you need something like it. This would help greatly.

None of these suggestions require real alteration of your existing online framework, only software on the user end, and would improve the experience quite a bit. As is, my Wii friends are nothing but entries in an adress book, when they could be my Wii community

Burning crusade will eat your soul

2007-01-15T23:35:00.000+01:00

I am, as stated, not a fan of World of warcraft. Tonight the expansion launches.

I thought i'd commemorate this occation by pointing out to you all the things i think are wrong about the game, as a symbol of the genre at which vanguard it stands, howling with fury at the enemy, claymore at the ready. Who is this enemy? Your very soul.

Much of what i'm about to say are matters of fact. Obvious matters even. The important thing, and i can't stress this enough, is the maddening insignificance of it, and the very real toll these insignificances take on you as an individual.

Nothing you do in this game will ever matter. Every moment of your life you spend grinding, spamming heals or dots in raids, talking shit on vent, all these moments, minutes, hours and days are moments you could have spent becoming a better person. You could've spent them tending to your relationship. You could've learned something new, something real. You could've learned how to play an instrument. You could've read a great book. You could've learned how to create your own game. Every hour you clock in is an hour closer to the grave, and hour you'll never get back. And you're paying to undergo this vampirism.

You create nothing in this world. You destroy nothing in this world. Whatever you remove from it is returned in moments. Whatever you give to it is surpassed in moments. Whatever you say in it is forgotten. And you pay for this oblivion.

There is no achievement to be made in this world. Any achievement you meet has been placed in front of you by the designers, and your only boon is the fact that you spent the time and wealth to get at it. Within moments, across the world, your glory is washed over by a tide of insignificance as your achievement is repeated a hundred times over, and you are left with one option; to start over on a different path. But what is the point? Whatever you will do has been done before. Whatever you experience has been experienced before; your ability to manifest yourself with this world instantly nullified by a game design out to make all men and women equal to the molecule. But men and women ARE NOT equal, and should never be forced to partake in such a totalitarian concept of the self. You will never be made truly manifest in this world. And you are paying for this slavery.

Every time you log in, what is truly your goal? A simulacra of a socialite existence? Truly this is not the case, because isn't this a game? A challenge to be overcome, a challenge to your senses, your sensibilities, your intelligence? Shouldn't a game in the true sense of the word pose a question to which your SELF will provide the answer? In this world, you joyfully commit genocide. In this world, you slay women, the weak, animals in the wild, for no reason other than a figurative means to an end that is entirely hollow; a loose concept of achievement and progress that is in itself a lie, because not only is there a physical end to it, but it comes quickly, and when it comes there isn't a thing you can do to surpass it, the only form of progress from that point a test of endurance. And you are paying for this empty, aimless existence.

I loathe everything world of warcraft stands for. Its craftsmanship is a boon to Blizzard's ability, but its popularity is a boon to the game's simplicity. This is a "game" in only the loosest sense of the word, where challenge is solved with time, and failure is punished with time. Time for which you pay hard earned money, but more importantly, time forever lost.

You will never see this day again.

I could level these ballistics at any game of the genre that exists only to mine the bored, the lonely and the easily distracted of both their lifespan and their economy, but in truth WoW is the ugliest of them all, most spectacularly because of its complete disregard for the individual. You are faceless in this world. You are ageless in this world. You can't create. You can't build. Your efforts will pass away into nothing at the push of a button, and none of that effort will ever become something you can be truly proud of, because deep inside your secret heart, you know all you did was waste time.

I love video games. They're a constant flood of wonderful images and ideas, of scary things, pretty things, sad things, funny things. But they should never feed off you. They should never take bleeding chunks out of your life, and they should never grow fat off your loneliness, your disconnection from the world, or from your urges for acceptance and conformity.

Play games, but guard your heart, guard your self. You are guests in their worlds, not them in yours. Don't let them inside, and if you do, don't give them they key.

I wish sony...

2007-01-06T07:14:00.000+01:00

..would stop using the play beyond slogan. Right now it's hurting them so fucking bad.

Bioshock, my 360 is HOWLING for your company

2007-01-01T20:05:00.000+01:00

Since i got the Wii, my 360 has seen progressively less play. It could be that i'm all played out on Gears of war online (it needs a patch, srsly), or that i'm not getting Vegas until i can get a reliable co-op partner, but mostly it's my need for peace and quiet in my life right now, and frankly, the 360 sounds like there are gale force winds spelunking in there.

I had almost forgotten how quiet consoles can be. We have become so accustomed to consoles needing multiple fans, disc drives, or motors in general, that we've forgotten a time when you switched on the SNES or Genesis and all you ever heard from it was the click of the power switch.
The 360 is hopefully the noisiest console we'll ever see, because it is seriously crazy. WHOOOSH.

I want Bioshock so bad i can taste it. I have so much faith in Irrational it borders on the irrational. They truly represent Looking Glass to me.

I look at this screen, and something in me just snaps. It's a steampunk mutant with a drill.. In a graveyeard, in a garden, in an art deco underwater city, in the 60s. I can try, hard, but i'll be damned if i can come up with a more perfect setting for a survival horror FPS.

Fuck you 2006

2007-01-01T01:40:00.000+01:00

Even in spite of all my efforts to better you, you consistently beat me down, rejected me, turned me away and made a laughing stock of my efforts. You were the worst year i have ever lived through, and i hope to never see anything as voracious in its appetite for breaking down the human spirit.

Fuck you, hard, right in your quantum asshole

Here's a toast to a 2007 to wash all that pain away for all of us. Salud!

INEXCUSABLE #2: Things i hate about Metal Gear Solid

2006-12-25T22:59:00.000+01:00

I 10x hate the controls Kojima and the boys concocted for the MGS games. That's hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate them.

I've played through the Metal Gears on the NES, the MSX, the Playstation, even the Metal Gear Acid ones on the PSP, and as i'm going through MGS3 now there are just some choices that i have no idea why they haven't backed out on. I know they released MGS3 Subsistence now to mend certain things like the draconian camera, but as far as i know the control setup is, was, will always be the wildest bout of controller masturbation any developer ever put a joypad through. Kojima's credo it seems is If It's There Make A Jonesey Of It (i just made that expression up. It means to use it a lot).

The PS2 dual shock joypad has the following buttons:
2 Left buttons
2 Right buttons
8 directional joypad
4 analog face buttons
two analog sticks that depress for another 2 buttons
a select button
a start button

That gives the joypad 20 buttons (TWENTY) which may be utilized by developers.

In every single gameplay mode of MGS, every single button is being put to use. Sometimes the uses differ depending on the situation you're in, how long they're held down, how HARD they're pressed, how they're pressed in combination with others.

With all this in mind, recall that Solid Snake or any other snake progeny moves like a broken matchbox car compared to the more recent Sam Fisher of the Splinter Cell games. Splinter cell has context sensitive buttons. Metal Gear has a button for every context. It's been a while since i played Falcon 4, but if i'm not completely mistaken, it took less than 20 buttons to fly an F-16 fighter/bomber, and that's in real life.

What the fuck is up with a world where a game i've played for almost a decade still baffles me with its technicalities? This is a game where moving towards an enemy slowly and moving towards an enemy stealthily are two separate actions, and as such is mapped to two entirely separate input methods. It was confusing enough in MGS2, but at least that planted you in a somewhat rigid environment. MGS3 places you in an open, "free" area with myriads of tactical possibilities, and as awesome as that is, the moments where the game just flat out stumbles over its torturous button layout are so plentiful it makes me seriously question mr Kojima's prowess as a game designer. As a storyteller and systems engineer i have no doubt in my mind he's a class act through and through, but what makes Miyamoto such a god damn champ is that he can convey this level of perceived complexity through an action that flows through your fingers like a word off your tongue.

Some games revel in complexity. System Shock 2 had an interface that almost felt designed as a moodpiece rather than an actual interface (when else would you want details on what exactly a cup was). Deus Ex thrived on its same level of perceived complexity, where a point and click inventory system would allow users to handle multiple kinds of ammo and other categories of objects. Deus Ex 2 took more flak from die hard players than any other fora, and one of the major reason was a "dumbing down".

Making Solid Snake control like a game character and not some arcane device uncovered in an alien mineshaft wouldn't, in this gamer's eye, be dumbing the game down. If MGS4 controls anything like MGS3, salty tears will fall, because this idiocy is messing up a perfectly good game of storydriven stealth action.

Wii Zelda opinions

2006-12-17T23:38:00.000+01:00

So i managed to get a copy of Zelda Twilight Princess before christmas, which is frankly a bit insane. Out goes Wii Sports, cue lots of sleep deprivation and heated debates over controls.

I'll TRY to keep it short. There are enough reviews out there to give you the nitty on everything else you might be interested in.

It's far, far better than Wind Waker
I thought Wind Waker was a thermonuclear warhead of joy
It is an incredibly attractive GameCube game, though not as timeless as Wind Waker; I still prefer the cel shaded art style to this.
It feels like a real sequel to Ocarina of time.
It is much, much better than Ocarina of time.
The controls start out feeling stupid, but become rather pleasurable after a while
The Wii remote for aiming is amazing
The Wii remote for fishing kind of sucks
The fishing kind of sucks overall actually
Probably the darkest Zelda to date. There are horrible things going on here.
Probably the most violent one as well.
There are boobies.
Epona is a very unwieldy horse compared to the horsie you got in Shadow of the colossus.
I thought of Shadow of the colossus quite often actually, which is probably a good thing
I've played the game for stretches of at least 3 hours at a time. I have not felt tired or fatigued.
My wrists did hurt somewhat at the very beginning as i was getting to grips with things.
The music is fantastic, MIDI and all.
There are MOMENTS to be found here. So many in fact i wish there was some kind of MGS-ish demo-theatre so you could easily rewatch cutscenes. There are some scenes that are j-horror creepy.

All in all, pure pleasure, as Zelda should be. To me Zelda was never about any challenge, it is about going on an adventure and seeing the end of an epic turn of events, and thoroughly enjoying yourself along the line. TP embodies this fully.

I want to discuss the controls a bit. In between Veronica Mars episodes (damn you Alice) i've been debating with myself wether i enjoy them or they feel tacked on. All that debate ended with the shield bash attack. To elaborate, up until you acquire the shield bash, remote shaking for regular attacks and nunhuck shaking for spin attack is a weak proxy of button presses. It gets tiresome, and really puts you in a position where you'd rather just run past enemies than fight them. The shield attack adds some more for you to do, with a forward push of the nunchuck pushing your enemy off balance. Suddenly, for me at least, something just clicked into place, and playing became my new objective.

I'll just put it this way; up until this point i had been half-assedly shaking the remote and nunchuck around, occationally cursing the nunchuck for not picking up my shaking when i needed the spin attack the most. AFTER this point, i do little "slashes" with the remote. Instead of shaking the nunchuck i do a quick circle in the air with it, a "spin". When i do the shield bash i do a firm forward push. After i started doing the motions as though i was pretending to be doing approximations of their gameplay representations, i never once had a problem with unresponsive controls. I started being able to much more precise fighting, and getting into a fight with something that can block and counter you became something i wanted to do.

When you take the controls "seriously" there is an implied consequence to your actions. What used to be a jab at a button just to hack at something and watch some fireworks becomes a conscious action.

I realize most won't want to do this. "Play". But in the end isn't video games an approximation of play? Childish exess? Let's just say i have a total blast pretending to be sword fighting moblins, and if my neighbors look through their window and catch the 6'4 skinhead next door waving his arms around like a retard, so be it. I'm having more fun with this than i've had with anything for ages.

Zelda, 13 hours clocked in and i don't feel like i've even started yet. It's like christmas every time i boot it up.

Wii in da house

2006-12-10T02:38:00.000+01:00

So i picked up my Wii this friday. It was pretty easy since i preordered; went down to EB during lunch hours, got a Wii and an extra remote+nunchuck. I'm super happy i got the extra controllers because Wii Sports is *worthless* without it, but more on that later. Turns out it was actually harder to get the games than it was to get the console. Most people were able to walk out with a console, but very few got the games they wanted. In my case i couldn't get Zelda. I'll go searching for it next week, maybe i'll dig up a copy somewhere.

I brought my bag of Wii-related junk back to the office, and it was almost impossible to NOT start opening boxes. Prior to this, my only look at it was through pictures and a good few brief looks at E3. Being able to unwrap one and touch it was too crazy a prospect not to jump right at it.

The response around the office was pretty much immediate. People gushing over the controllers, the console itself, even the box art, talking about the potential, how many things you could do with it. Hard not to feel a bit like the king of the castle when everyone at the office wants what you own ;)

Anders giving his approval

We set it up at my friend Richard's house later that night, as he has more room than me. The process of setting it up was, basically, Nintendo easy. I had a total blast setting up my 360, but the Wii was very, very simple to get up fast. He has a somewhat unorthodox tv tuner based setup much like my own, but we had no problem whatsoever getting the thing on, synching up the extra controller, and getting busy getting it online.

Richard's wireless network has a *64 letter WPA key with upper and lower case letters*, so it was a total chore to get his wireless key in there, giving me quite a crash course in using the remote to input text and numbers. Let me tell you, nothing else out there short of hooking up a keyboard comes remotely close. In fact, throughout the Wii interface, Nintendo have done an exceedingly good job of making it easy to write things. You even have an SMS-like interface in addition to the onscreen qwerty keyboard, complete with an SMS-like dictionary. The dictionary even had the name Anders in there, which surprised me somewhat.

The online update popped up pretty fast compared to the craziness Gamespot's launch feature demonstrated, and we were on the main menu, 2 controller "hands" on screen. Naturally, the first thing we did was create Miis. I've made quite a few since then; here's me and my girlfriend:

I'm on the left by the way ;P

The Mii thing, for the record, is mindblowingly entertaining. It's impossibly simple to get caricatures of you and your friends up there, and sometimes the accuracy is startling. My friend Billy sent me a few he and his friend Jesse made of them and their girlfriends, and the likeness is pretty intense. Being able to beat the shit out of them in Wii Boxing is another awesome pleasure.

After the first while with the remote and the interface, i found some running themes that i really enjoyed, both as a user and as a developer: The buttons on the controller relevant to general interaction is the dpad, the remote itself, the A (top) button and the B (trigger) button. B is "back". A is "confirm". B+A is "grab". After a while this feels very natural, closing your hand around objects to pick them up. This runs through the Messaging interface, the Channel browser and the Mii channel. I assume it will ring true for forthcoming channels as well.
The Channel metaphor is brilliant. There's nothing better than being able to go to the Bomberman channel.

THE BOMBERMAN CHANNEL.

We decided to go through Wii Play first. I'll write a review for this later, but i'll just say it's pretty obvious why the game is a freebie with the extra remote. It's pretty bad stuff. Some of it was rather fun, but it actually seems to complicate the controller more than it diffuses any mystique there may be. For instance the air hockey game controls by pointing where you want your paddle to be at, and the pointer functionality at the current stage has too much latency for that kind of fast reponsive behavior. It works for aiming something at a point: not so much split second accurate response. The motion sensing works far better than the positioning, with fast responsive gestures, much more so than i'd expected.

After Wii play it was on to Wii sports. We started at midnight, and i came home around 5am. Today my arms are sore at the elbows and shoulders. It's a good sore; the one i'd usually get from Wing chun training. It feels like you did something worthwhile.

We had the most fun with Bowling and Golf. Golf has somewhat of an inherent appeal as we're both, frankly, prep nerds, but it is actually a very good game of golf lite. Hardened souls will probably recognize that the motion required to hit the ball isn't necessarily realistic. We played some "overhand" golf for a while for instance, but the fun you can have by going through the full range of motion and *playing some make-believe golf* is pretty damn intense, and anyone too jaded to get into it; i pity the fool.

So far, i'm deeply happy with my purchase. The thing is fun, responsive, intuitive and incredibly sexy. I have barely touched my other consoles for 2 days. Here's hoping i can pick up Zelda sometime soon.

No VGA for Wii

2006-12-07T08:17:00.000+01:00

So there's no official VGA output for the Wii, as i previously thought. While this is no big deal to people who actually own a TV, i run all my video through an LCD monitor. When the 360 dropped with a proper VGA solution and i no longer had to run my visuals through my XGA box, i feared i had died and gone to heaven. No such luck with the Wii.

In terms of convenience, this is a major bummer.

So what options do i have? It's pretty limited, but it might work out just the same.
I wasn't aware of this, but apparently converting to VGA from component output isn't anywhere near as big a deal as it has been with composite or s-video. In fact there's a ready supply of component->VGA transcoders out there, some of which are rather cheap. I've been looking at this one and it looks like it'll fit my bill exquisitely. As for the component cable, now that MadCatz have released their third party Wii component cable, it would appear supply will be in ready demand.

On a tangent, i find Nintendo's apparent newfound love for third party hardware strangely appealing. It'll be interesting to see if that pans out to some actual third party hardware support

Project complete

2006-12-02T16:53:00.000+01:00

After that depressive list of games i own, i've come to the realization that i've completed an incredibly puny number of them. Not because they're all that hard (because games today aren't all that hard in general), but because i've constantly been moving on.

Taking it from the top, first game out is Mario & Luigi - Partners in time.
This is a tough one, i left it bored out of my skull.
I'll be putting reviews on my review blog as i go.

God this is going to be hard. Some of these games just really, really bore me, and some of them terrify me to the point where it's physically hard to go on. Lord give me strength.

Halo 3 screens do not impress

2006-12-01T10:44:00.000+01:00

Not saying Bungie won't come through in motion, but compared to Gears of war or even other "lesser" contemporary next generation titles; what the fuck is this?

I'm not saying graphics are all, and these are probably early screens, but seriously, this smells of laziness. Textures repeat fast and early, there seems to be basically no shadowing beyond the soft shadows they've run with since Halo 1, gunfire and explosions looks absolutely pathetic (smoke erupting *at the same time* as the explosion?), and those trees.. What the hell? Haven't Bungie heard of speedtree before?

Are we supposed to be blown away by what looks like HD Halo 1? There's little or nothing here that's remotely impressive compared to the rather attractive announcement trailer (which i will otherwise continue to abhorr forever due to my pet peeve with Marty O'Donnell's soundtrack - i can't stand five seconds of it, much less a trailer full of it).

Wii launch coming up

2006-11-30T09:42:00.000+01:00

Eight days until the Wii launches in norway.

I will freely admit that i'm more excited about the Wii than i have been about any game console since the SNES launch. There is none of the apprehension i felt about the DS; the motion sensing technology isn't new, but this is the first time it's been realised to this extent. I never paid much attention to the hardware race; I still play most of my games on handhelds after all, and the most technically proficient handheld out there was also the least fun to use.

I've got a preorder at EB i can't wait to pick up. Strangely, i'm ambivalent about bagging a good launch title on day one. I'm pretty sure i can manage just fine with Wii sports until the inevitable Zelda shortages end. If i'm lucky i'll get a copy of Rayman raving rabbids too.

If anything, even more strange i guess, i want to buy the Wii on launch day to buy a Wii. There is none of the fear i had of wasting my money when i bought my 360. That time i really couldn't come up with a good reason to pay that kind of money for a gaming device, so the whole occurance was somewhat of a fluke. Good thing that eventually panned out alright. For the Wii, i genuinely want to support what Nintendo is trying to do. The idea is so right; it's about fun, not "the experience", because the experience comes with the fun. Gears of war is pretty, but we keep playing it because it's fun. It isn't fun because of the graphics, it's fun because sawing prepostorously proportioned people in half is hilarious. Imagine the sawing possibilities Wii offers us! D to the r to the double o l

I've gone so far as to dream about owning the Wii. In my dream, when i took it out of the box, it was already connected to my tv.

Music that changed my life #1

2006-11-23T14:16:00.000+01:00

There was a time, right after i felt the whole ID&T Thunderdome/Gabber thing was beginning to bore me, when i turned to breakcore. I'm not sure exactly how i got into it; probably through Ec8or, considering the Patric C connection to the gabber scene. Before breakcore became a household term, DHR was basically the easiest way to get at it, and for a while it was good, bullshit politics and all.
For a while i was making the most godawful amen-driven mashup garbage imaginable, and i thought Alec Empire was a god. Ironically, this album was what turned me away from DHR completely.

According to discogs.com, the album i'm writing about was released in 97, making me 15 at the time. I guess my slavering over DHR, which seemed at least to WANT something, can be explained away with puberty. However, this album and my long surviving love for it is something i'll stand for anytime.

Purchased at Tower records, somewhere in london, at a time when i was going through some pretty rough times at home, Christoph de Babalon's debut album, "If you're into it, i'm out of it", stands, in my opinion, as the single most mindblowing experience in terms of electronica that i can remember. It beats out listening to Arne Nordheim's Warszawa when i was a kid, it beats out Klaus Schulze's dune, even discovering Kraftwerk. All these artists, awesome as they are, don't stand for any particular philosophical direction beyond their work. They never represented more for me than sound.

I listened to this album expecting breaks and distortion. What i got was the beautiful, haunting opening track Opium; 12 minutes of pads, strings and reversed bells, echoing on forever.
I listened through the whole album lying in my bed that night, start to finish, and not a single sound was disagreeable. It embodied everything i needed at the time; A frustrated yet melancholy *drive* forwards, in spite of the label that released it. Nothing else on DHR ever came close to matching the originality and artistry of this release. This album was never particularly dancable, moshable, or even headnod worthy. What carries through like a straight line right through it, is the will to combine an emotional core with a violent exterior.

The first real mindblower came with"What you call a life", with its Charlie Manson samples underlying a simple, building amen breaks over melancholy pads, is something i listen to often, to this day. It went on to inspire most of my work from there on. It taught me that a piece of music doesn't have to be all out in any direction. It can be multiple, separate entities all going their own paths, but coming together where it counts; in essence.

"What you call a life" is the single most inspiring piece of music i've heard, and you can hear its influence in almost everything i've done since then.

The second most amazing piece on the album, "Water", was a darker, less emotional piece, mechanically pounding through complex patterns of amen breaks, super low pitched kicks, noise bursts and howling background ambience. The track has multiple directions at any time, making it pleasingly tough to hear whenever something begins or ends. "Water" taught me about messing with expectations, it taught me how to build into a break when you least expect it, cutting it off when it hurts the most, and how a simple evocative title can communicate more images to your listener's mind than any number of samples or lyrics.

"If you're into it, i'm out of it" is the most evocative breakcore record ever made, and at the time, there was nothing like it. Nothing.

Pretty amazing virtual life game

2006-11-23T02:38:00.000+01:00

http://alterego.polemik.ch/

I'm pretty impressed something this simple can have such an impact. Really makes you think about some choices you've made in your life.

Xbox live as of the 360...

2006-11-22T00:24:00.000+01:00

...has become quite a bit better. Live on the original xbox turned me off bigtime, but since Gears of War came out i've gotten into quite a bit of good games with some pretty awesome individuals, and when played in good company, the experience is truly slick.

I have a few gripes. The biggest of which is Live360's hatred of clans. For such a communitycentric device, they sure like keeping people apart where it counts; getting into games together. For instance, in the case of GoW, clan support is supposedly stripped out because ranked matches are always randomized to avoid cheaters. This is complete bullshit for a teambased game.

Some fixes:

Add a separate clan ladder, randomize clan matchups
Give points to *clans*, not individuals.
Allow groups of friends to be set up on each individual 360, so users can send invites to whole groups of individuals with one action.

To my simple mind, this sounds like work that is definitely doable. If Live had this settled it'd effectively add clan support for any and all games that support teams. Glory days.
I suspect GoW won't be beating out Halo 2 all the way until something clan-ish is in place.
As is, ranked GoW matches are something i won't touch with a ten foot pole.

Game list Geek-out

2006-11-01T19:20:00.000+01:00

Thought, for the hell of it, i'd list all my games, or games i have boxes for at least, and check which ones i feel like i truly played to their fullest and really got enjoyment from. The sad thing is, a fairly large percentage of these never get any time at all, but i still feel horror at the thought of selling them or getting rid of them somehow. Even the truly awful ones, like Fallout Brotherhood of steel. I need to tone down my purchases and just really play games instead of just getting 3 at a time and only giving 1 of them the time of day.

legend:
\o/ - Good
>_< - Bad
O_o - Meh

Keep in mind, ratings-wise, i am extremely lenient. As a friend pointed out recently, i take a somewhat academic interest in certain games, and as such i am capable to a fault of finding redeeming qualities, be they artistic, spiritual or some other esoteric crap.

Nintendo DS
Mario & Luigi partners in time \o/
Super mario 64 DS >_<
Mario Kart DS \o/
Metroid prime hunters O_o
Meteos \o/
Sonic rush \o/
Castlevania dawn of sorrow \o/
Tetris DS \o/
Animal Crossing WW \o/
New super mario bros \o/
Clubhouse games \o/

Sony PSP
Daxter O_o
Metal Gear Acid
Metal Gear Acid 2 \o/
Wipeout Pure \o/
Pursuit force O_o
Burnout legends O_o
GTA Liberty city stories O_o
Megaman Powered up \o/
Ultimate ghosts and goblins \o/

Nintendo Gamecube
Legend of Zelda: Four swords adventure \o/
Legend of Zelda: The wind waker \o/
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time / Master quest \o/
Eternal darkness \o/
Fire emblem \o/
Prince of persia warrior within O_o
Super mario sunshine O_o
Pikmin \o/
Resident Evil Zero \o/
Metroid Prime \o/
Resident Evil \o/
Resident Evil 4 \o/
Starfox adventures O_o
Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance >_<
Metal Arms: Glitch in the system O_o
Final Fantasy crystal chronicles \o/
Freedom Fighters \o/
Super monkey ball \o/
F-Zero GX \o/
Super Smash Bros Melee \o/
Viewtiful Joe \o/
Animal Crossing \o/
Killer 7 \o/
Soulcalibur 2

Sony Playstation 2
Psychonauts \o/
Metal gear solid 3 \o/
Tekken 5 O_o
Guitar hero \o/
Gunbird special ed
Forbidden Siren 2 \o/
Ghosthunter O_o
Sly 2 \o/
Silent hill 3 \o/
ICO \o/
King of fighters 2000-2001 O_o
Project Zero 3 \o/
Dark Chronicle \o/
Final Fantasy X2 O_o
Jak 3 O_o
God of war \o/
Batman begins O_o
Soulcalibur 3 \o/
Samurai Warriors O_o
Kingdom hearts 2 \o/
We love katamari \o/
Katamari Damacy \o/
Hitman Blood money O_o
Urban Chaos \o/
Urbz >_<
Ace Combat 5 \o/
Shadow of the colossus \o/
Shinobido \o/
Tomb raider legends \o/
Black O_o
R-type Final \o/
Outrun 2006 O_o
Driver Parallel Lines >_<
Rumble Roses >_<

Nintendo Game Boy Advance
Megaman Zero 2 \o/
Mario & Luigi superstar saga \o/
Advance wars 2 \o/
The Legend of Zelda: The minish cap \o/
Megaman EXE \o/
Gunstar Future Heroes \o/

Microsoft XBOX
Street fighter anniversary collection \o/
Ninja Gaiden \o/
Ninja Gaiden Black \o/
King Kong \o/
Dead or Alive Ultimate (1 and 2) \o/
Predator: Concrete jungle O_o
Thief: Deadly shadows \o/
Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks O_o
Mark Echo's Getting Up O_o
Splinter Cell chaos theory \o/
Call of Cthulhu - Dark corners of the earth \o/
Psi-ops O_o
Timesplitters 2 O_o
Fallout - Brotherhood of steel >_<
DOAX >_<
Jet Set Radio Future O_o
Crimson Skies \o/
Project Zero \o/
Project Zero 2 \o/
Burnout 3 \o/
Burnout Revenge \o/
Fable \o/
The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate destruction \o/
Spider-man 2 O_o
007 Everything or nothing O_o
Unreal Championship 2 O_o
Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow O_o
Otogi \o/
Mercenaries \o/
Tenchu: Return from darkness O_o
Halo \o/
Halo 2 O_o
Metal Slug 3 \o/
Chronicles of Riddick \o/
Ghost recon 2 >_<
Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee O_o
Oddworld: Stranger's wrath \o/
Destroy all humans! O_o
Metal gear solid 2 \o/

Microsoft XBOX360
Perfect Dark Zero O_o
Ghost recon Advanced Warfighter \o/
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion \o/
Dead Rising \o/

XBOX360 Live Arcade
Doom \o/
Geometry Wars O_o
Hexic HD \o/
Outpost Kaloki X \o/
Smash TV \o/
Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 O_o

Sega Dreamcast
Ecco \o/
Floigan Bros O_o
Sonic Adventure \o/
Sonic Adventure 2 O_o
Tech Romancer \o/
Rival Schools 2 \o/
Ooga Booga \o/
Jet Grind Radio \o/
Maken X O_o
Resident Evil Code Veronica \o/
Grandia 2 \o/
Crazy Taxi 2 \o/
Ultimate Fighting Championship \o/
Ikaruga \o/
Psyvariar 2 \o/
Border Down \o/

Windows (Too many to remember, but i try anyway)
Warhammer 40000 Dawn of War + expansions \o/
Beyond good and evil \o/
Warcraft 3 \o/
Baldurs gate 2 \o/
Vampire the masquerade: Bloodlines \o/
System Shock 2 \o/
FEAR \o/
Neverwinter Nights \o/
Silent Hunter 3 \o/
Defcon \o/
Halflife 2 \o/
Sin: Emergence \o/
Thief \o/
Thief 2 \o/
Thief 3 \o/
Deus Ex \o/
Quake 4
GTA San Andreas \o/
Dungeon Siege 2 \o/
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory (yep i got doubles, what's it to ya) \o/
Jagged Alliance 2 \o/
Fallout \o/
Fallout 2 \o/
Fallout Tactics
Leisure suit larry series (all of em) \o/
Space Quest series \o/
Monkey Island series \o/
Grim Fandango \o/
Full Throttle \o/
Wizardry 8 \o/

Game Boy original (my first console!)
TMNT: Fall of the foot clan \o/
Tetris \o/
Heiankyo alien
Ghostbusters 2 (yep) >_<
Zelda: Link's awakening \o/
Super mario land \o/
Super mario land 2 O_o
Terminator 2 >_<
Probotector \o/
Batman \o/
Hunt for the Red October >_<
Tiny Toon Adventures \o/
Nemesis O_o
R-Type \o/
Dr Mario (such a disappointment. This broke my heart) >_<
Battletoads \o/

Scary videogame moments

2006-11-01T09:44:00.000+01:00

Inspired by GameSpy's Scariest moments in gaming feature, (with which i mostly disagreed by the way), i wanted to do a list of my own. I have a huge thing for horror and sci-fi, so it would only be proper ;P

Fair warning is due; tharr will be spoilers.

So here goes, i no particular order

Marathon (MacOS): Running into the Hulks in The Rose
Hulks appear in one level, a long, rambling one shaped like a rose, taking place amidst a slaughter of civilians. The end of the level, running through the "petals", is in almost complete darkness. Then you start running into these gigantic things that will *mash* you if you even come close. Something Dark Corners of the Earth really did well was the sense that there's nothing scary about something you can destroy. What's truly scary is helplessness under stress and the resulting panic, and taking down a Hulk would take 3+ rockets, which was just unheard of. You'd be backpedalling, emptying all your ammo reserves, and they'd still keep coming.

Check out Craig Mullins' awesome digital painting of a Hulk
Call of Cthulhu (xbox): Escaping the Shoggoth
On the topic of running away from things, i haven't played an escape sequence more tense than this. The Hotel escape is one thing, but the Shoggoth *crushing* the air duct you're desperately crawling through, without having even seen the damn thing yet is something mindblowing. CoC:DCOTE consistently terrifies the player by offering glimpses from the monster's point of view, coupled with noises, slowly ramping music, and a well learned understanding of the fragility of the player character. Running away is one thing, running away with a broken leg is another altogether. This game makes the player feel like a soft piece of meat in a meat packing factory, and the howling blubbering almost liquid Shoggoth promptly treats you like one. Vile, vile stuff.
Project Zero 2 (xbox, ps2): Broken neck lady
Hoo boy. I play this in the first person mode on the xbox, and out of the blue catching a screaming woman falling through your peripheral vision, impacting with a sickening crunch is one thing, but having her twist and bend towards you upside down on the floor, her neck at a completely uncool angle was simply mindbending. Naturally, as with all things Project Zero, the horror wears off after the first couple of times, but the kind of mind rape these games inflict on a player in their set piece confrontations are completely unmatched within the genre. To me, the broken neck lady stands out as the most horrifying of Project Zero 2.
Resident Evil (gamecube): Lisa Trevor
A mutated, malevolent little abused girl hellbent on absorbing other people so she won't ever be alone again. I don't know if there's anything else i need to say here. I like two kinds of monsters: The unfeeling, illogical Lovecraftian horror that bends reality and simply doesn't make sense (Shoggoth, Giger's Alien, Giant freaking insects), and the perversion of nature into something that makes no sense (Zombies, Slither's egg sack mutation etc). It is important that monsters make no sense to me, i don't know why. I don't find muscles and teeth scary O_o. The player gets to know Lisa through the diary of herself and her father, Trevor, who never tell explicitly what's going on, only that it's all very wrong. When you finally meet Lisa, you want to leave leave leave leave leave, at the same time as you feel
bad for her. Vicious.
F.E.A.R (pc): Finally meeting Alma
I was so sick and tired of the little scary girl motif by the time i played FEAR that i really wasn't very frightened by her. Boo-moments, sure, but not truly creeped out. Too much Grudge, Ring, K-horror ripoff X, i just couldn't dig it. But all through the game you know she's holed up somewhere. You know she's not dead, you know she's tormented, and you know she has something intimate to do with you. So what's the small girl? It sure isn't what Alma truly is, and this anticipation pays off in *spades* at the end of the game, which is one of the most chilling sequences i have ever played.

Think a small girl insta-murdering nondescript marines is bad? How about everyone but you promptly shutting down, standing around like mannequins, as the decaying half-corpse of the world's most vengeful psychic mother figure really wants you back where you belong; with her, forever. This was nervous laugh inducing to the extreme. My girlfriend must've thought i was out of my mind.
Thief (pc): The Bonehoard
Thief trashed my nerves hard with its sound work. This game stands out today as an excellent example of how fantastic sound can more than counter for lackluster graphics. Eric Brodius is a god damn genius.

I know most consider Return to the Cathedral to be the most terrifying mission of them all, but to me, Down in the Bonehoard stands as the most memorably creepy, with its horrors going beyond the merely visceral.

The Bonehoard has the player explore undead-infested tombs, looking for the Horn of Quintus, heard eerily playing a solemn tune far off in the distance. Creeping among enormous pillars as undead shamble all around you, following your ears to find your prize. Panicking in the Bonehoard is not an option, or you'd find yourself under attack by more dead than you can handle.

This level imbues the player with the sense that Garrett really isn't supposed to be there, that he's all alone, and that he keeps going deeper and deeper, further away from civilisation and home. The loneliness is only compounded by the lack of human opposition. If Garrett dies here, noone will ever know, noone will ever find him, and he might end up among the walking dead. I found this experience incredibly bleak.
Project Zero 3 (ps2): Existing
This game mortifies me. I'll freely admit to this, i can't even play it. I've reached a point where i'm not sure if i'm even getting any kind of entertainment from it, i can barely move down a corridor without being either weirded out or otherwise psychologically impeded. I feel like a retard playing it. I suppose at some point i'll just get over myself like i did with PZ2, but right now, it's kind of just sitting there waiting for that moment. The sound design and art direction is mindblowing, and challenges the player to make his or her own conclusions, not only in terms of the storyline, but also in terms of what's under that sheet over there. I'm a huge fan of the craftsmanship here, but it's borderline unplayable for me.
Silent Hill (PS): Having ears
Another game that rises above the opposition through sound, Akira Yamaoka's work on the original SH is so far ahead of his subsequent efforts it almost makes me angry. This is a soundtrack that can make *crossing a bridge* terrifying, and stands shoulder to shoulder with the best dark industrial ambient can offer. SH2 and 3 rambled off into weirdness and strange pop-rock anthems to the point of self-parody. SH is terrifying in its ALIEN nature alone, and deserves to be played by people who aren't out for stabs of shock, but rather a biting, freezing *cold* of fear that permeates every moment of its gameplay.

More coming..

Mortal Kombaaaaat! Threee!

2006-10-31T00:33:00.000+01:00

UMK3 is on live arcade, and i seemed to remember that i liked it once. This in spite of vehemently disliking the recent MK games, and always being a Street Fighter fan (i hear MK fans and SF fans are completely incompatible, might be true).

Let's reiterate, and i'm sorry if i step on any toes:

What the hell happened here?
Did someone put Johnny Cage down on paper and someone else went "yeah, that's the look we're shooting for"? This isn't just up there with Tekken's King, this is *far* beyond comprehension. Look at this guy! His special move is doing the splits, and then punching someone in the nuts. It's like first demonstrating his lack of nuts, and then punishing the opposition for having them. He hates nuts! That's his motivation!
This, is SHAO KAHN. Fear the last boss of the game! He has a grand total of 5 moves:

Running at you.
Jumping at you.
Shooting a green fireball in your general direction.
Kicking you.
Hitting you with a magically appearing hammer.

Through DEFT use of these mighty techniques, he has acquired dominion of the underworld, or whatever the hell MK lore calls that place with all the spirals and rocks.

This is among the worst final boss designs i have ever come across. It *demolishes* Tekken 5's Jinpachi in the cheapness stakes, to the point of mechanical slaughter. This asshole robot will happily spam you with a single cheap move, driving you into the wall with no hope of survival, unless he magically fucks up and lets you get an uppercut in. What the fuck Midway, did you really think this was an incredible design? Did you get up in the morning and look forward to seeing more Shao Kahn concept art, positively DROOLING at the prospect of having this AWESOME character in your game? This is at the same time the Street Fighter boys were making green circular men with red hair not only acceptable but also somewhat popular. I mean come on.
THE BLOCK BUTTON
This was Midway's gift to the beat'em up world? A BUTTON to do what other games spent a joystick direction on? This design made MK Deception almost completely unplayable on the gamecube where Soul Calibur, a much more complicated game, played like a dream. I'm confused as to why an extra button became necessary.
Hahahaha 90s. Purple pants. Rad.
I couldn't possibly write about UMK3 without bringing up Motaro. Not a TERRIBLE boss by MK standards (i mean Goro, come on), but um. It's a horse-cow-man with a cyborg tail. Walking backwards in this case. And backwards is exactly what it is.

Why Tomonobu Itagaki is a Smashing Gent

2006-10-23T09:51:00.000+02:00

1UP: I'm just trying to imagine putting that to good use somewhere else in another game. Like using those waves for water battles in Ninja Gaiden 2. I could see Ryu Hayabusa jumping on top of waves and fighting seaborne enemies or something like that.

TI: I think Ryu Hayabusa would look cooler maybe doing some deep sea fishing.
[TI:]Then I saw them and said, "You can't have fish not do anything!" Of course the guys were like, "Oh god, here he goes again,"

(on the topic of the Ninja Gaiden ghost fish THOSR FUCKERS)
'I looked at the guy who worked on this and I said, "What is this; what's the point?" And he said it was "for atmosphere." I said, "This is an action game. You can't just put something in there for atmosphere that is taking up memory and disc space. You either take it out or make it an enemy and do what I say because this is an action game."'
(On the MGS4 TGS trailer)
So as I was looking at the trailer and when Snake started smoking I thought, "Yes! They have him smoking -- that's great."

*in awe*

Full interview on 1UP

What, Tag's too dangerous?

2006-10-18T23:18:00.000+02:00

(yes i know the formatting here is balls, so what)

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/10/18/no.tag.ap/index.html

Man, i grew up in a neighborhood with 2 gangs of highschool kids fighting among themselves, and screw you if you were a 10 year old who wasn't in family with any of the gang kids. Me and my buddies formed a little gang of our own. Since playing in the parks and such was basically asking for trouble, we had such a tough time finding "safe" places to play, and it's weird to look back at it now and think of how ridiculously unsafe it was.

We built a fort in the woodworks of this bridge:
Among those boarded sections underneath. We'd stock up on candy and coke, sit in our bundle of boards, look at what floated past in the river below, and count through whatever fireworks we'd collected last newyears. We printed out the anarchist cookbook at my dad's office (he was a teacher back then), we'd go to the gas depot to get dry ice for bombs and other such nonsense. When winter came and we didnt dare go under the bridge (we had to do a lot of awkward climbing to get under there), we looked for alternatives nearby.

We found a passage between two buildings that gave us access to the supports under the riverside buildings. I dare say we owned the river for years. We'd go shoplifting, go under the buildings to count our loot.

We found a way to the roof of the old WW2 submarine bunkers at the harbor . I remember buying water melons and other squishy stuff only to bring it up to the roof of Dora and throw it off the building. Splat.

The best fun we had when i was a 2nd and 3rd grader was going to Kristianstèn fortress
At the time they were doing army exercises in the area, and part of the fun was finding a way up the fortess walls and get into the main grounds without being seen. One of the best childhood memories i have was sitting on the walls of that fortress with my then-best-buddy Tor-Egil at a summer night (bright night), and hearing Deathprod playing from scaffolds at the TMV festival. TMV, or Trondheim Mechanical Workshop, was just a bunch of dry docks and artist studios, and they'd throw these ridiculous rock festivals. Deathprod's "Treetop drive", rolling like fucking thunder across town, and me running like a madman from the fortress to TMV to get closer.

Super old picture heh, can't believe that tripod crane was that old. We climbed to the top of it to see the Deathprod show. It was scary and awesome.

At wintertime, all the snow in the school yard would be plowed into these enormous heaps, and of course the kids would play king of the hill on it. It was sheer madness, you had 6th graders tossing 2nd graders on their heads, and not a teacher in sight. The sense of being able to gang up on one of the bigger kids and bringing the fucker down was about as good as it could get.

God what's so wrong with kids feeling LIFE? I asked my mother about how she felt about the things i did when i was lil and she basically said "after a while, i realized it was meaningless to try and stop you, so i tried to ignore it". I'm so happy she did.. I had friends then whose mothers basically held them by their necks, and it always sucked when they couldnt come out to play, and we'd be telling them about what we did later and they'd be so sad about it. I think true motherly love is in guiding your child, not in controlling it. When i overstepped, you better believe i heard about it. When i stole money from my mother when we were in a terrible rut, and she slapped me, you better believe i never stole from my mom again, and you better believe i learned that money has more value than candy and GI Joes (i collected cobras). Parents should know when discipline and "reality" matters and when it doesn't. I'm not saying i turned out wonderfully, but i have nothing but positive memories of my childhood, and if i'm scarred i'm scarred by what i've done to myself, NOT by what i've experienced, and believe me i've fallen and cracked my head open a good few times. My right eyebrow makes no sense at all anymore.

Kids need danger, and pain, and loss. They need all these things because it makes them stronger, and it makes them more compassionate. Kids won't understand what inflicting pain is until they've been inflicted pain upon, and i think a parent's role, AND the educational system's as well, is to comfort, explain and guide. Not judge, control and shove. I feel terrible thinking about kids today, because their parents are under such immense pressure to mold their children, and i think it's creating a lost generation of conforming fools who don't know the first thing about truly having fun on nature's premises, not through toys, not through technology, not even through other people, but through exploring the world, learning and experiencing the pain of fucking up and realizing you're the only one to blame.

Children must learn to be diligent, or they'll come out as spoiled assholes without the ability to fight for what they believe in on other terms than the purely advantageous. They need to do like i did, ride an unfinished custom bike down the steepest road in their home town without knowing it doesn't have any brakes. Be so scared they're moments from pissing and shitting their pants and throwing up all at the same time, and then come out of it with a hard learned lesson. They need bruises and cuts, they need to staple themselves to the table by accident. They need to see their own blood and know what it means.
They have the right to know they're REAL and WHAT's real, and i think it's the parent's role to give their kids that right.

How to get the Defcon soundtrack

2006-10-17T18:37:00.000+02:00

I don't know if this is naughty or not, but i found the Defcon soundtrack so inspiring and beautiful i knew i had to extract it from the game somehow, and seeing it as Introversion apparently aren't too keen on sharing, or even selling(!), i wondered if they'd done the cheapest trick in the book with their .dat files. I was right :)

To get your hands on the glorious soundtrack, simply make a copy of sounds.dat (located in your Defcon install directory), change it's extension to .zip and extract its contents with winzip or winrar. The files are (logically) the largest ones in the archive, and they're all high quality OGGs. If you want them on your iPod or somesuch, it's pretty straightforward to transcode them from ogg to mp3 using winLAME for instance.

Thanks Introversion for a fantastic game AND a fantastic soundtrack. It's kept me company at work for quite some time now :)

Yes yes oh god yes!

2006-10-12T14:27:00.000+02:00

http://www.nintendo.co.jp/wii/accessories/index.html

Look at the AV cables. Do i spot a VGA cable there? Jesus christ, Sony better have this for the PS3 as well. No more freaking VGA box distortion! My life += 50% quality. For the win!

Why Xbox live is a steaming shithole and the end of all enjoyable random online gaming

2006-10-04T01:58:00.000+02:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeQYyAgw4VY

If you havent seen this, in short, it's a testament to the *screaming majority* of players i've encounted on live. I realize voice comms is better than typing for consoles and whatnot, but oh my freaking god, what the fuck?

Nothing makes you more aware of how trashy the kids of the world are turning out. What's up with parents? Buying an xbox for your kid, that's a fire and forget op? Argh.

Parents of the world, get your shit together.

XTREME POWER SHOP

2006-10-02T16:23:00.000+02:00

You want a black tee that says "Power"? You know you do. Nono. You do. Believe me.

http://www.cafeshops.com/xtremepower

Gall bladder removal

2006-09-21T06:06:00.000+02:00

It's been a year or so since my gall bladder was declared "abnormally damaged" (thanks stressful work and genetics) and had to be removed.

I understand that my case was extreme and that i had little choice in the matter.

What i WILL call foul however, was *every fucking doctor i consulted* assuring me that i would feel literally no difference in terms of eating habits unless i "ate a particularly massive christmas dinner". If you're about to undergo this kind of surgery, and some doctor feeds you this bullshit, keep in mind that the resulting sideeffects of the surgery is so different from person to person that there's literally no reliable statistic.

So let me share my eating experiences. These are unpleasant details.

Water, or really any liquid on an empty belly = cramps, pain, possible diarrhea.
Green apples = cramps, pain. Dies out after about 5 minutes.
Ice cream = *guaranteed* cramps and diarrhea within 15 minutes. Depends somewhat on the brand of ice cream; i've had little ish with Haagen Dazs, but other brands will destroy me.
Tough meats = cramps and pain

Alcohol. Beer is a major no-no. Liquor is okay, i've had some issues when a lot of it goes down. Nothing like the absolute, mindblowing agony of the cramps it used to give me when i still had my wrecked gall bladder.

Worst of all, some days just fall apart by the seams. I've had days when i wake up with cramps, get more cramps when i eat, and go to bed hungry at night because i simply can't eat anything. Sometimes this goes on for days.

Don't get me wrong; now is *nothing* compared to the mind shattering debilitating pain of what i used to go through, but don't let any whitecoat tell you you can keep on living like you used to. Today, eating is like a puzzle, and my options can become very very boring at times. Sometimes i wish i could get it all in pill form so i didnt have to think about it. Nothing sucks more than being invited to a dinner and having to turn down the meal because you simply can't take it.

Wii...

2006-09-18T02:51:00.000+02:00

Thought i'd chime in and say the designternet's response to Nintendo's Wii pricing and bundle is a load of pathetic bullshit. Get on the waahmbulance retards, if you don't want it, don't buy it, and if you DO want it, you expected not to have to pay for it? This is Nintendo we're talking about here. IIRC, they've never bundled more than the bare basics. Complaining like a little bitch isn't going to do you any good, so ooh aah, i guess you'll just have to save up the OVERWHELMING amount of FIFTY DOLLARS to be able to afford the thing. How cheap do you have to get?

Now, here's hoping it doesnt blow. Sounds to me like it's got more issues than i was aware of. Still anxious to see it work in a home environment, especially my weird vga-box driven one.

Winter norway

2006-09-17T01:42:00.000+02:00

Soon it'll be here again..

Think frozen concrete, black overcast skies, freezing cold, heated sidewalks melting the snow into a filthy sludge made worse by the sludge sprayed in by passing traffic (because our government insists oslo is a traffic-centric city, thus puts more emphasis on clear roads than clear sidewalks). Think getting up in the morning faced with putting on 4 layers of clothing, and preparing to trudge through the morning rat race, dodging airconditioned public transportation as best you can (doing your best to avoid the few places in wintertime where viruses flourish). Think about junkies and addicts and beggars looking a hundred times sadder than any other time of the year, and think of their desperation pushing the crime rate.

It is bleak, bleak, bleak.

Then again, think spending cold nights with your loved ones, watching a movie you all love, having a cup of warm chocolate. Think of the lazy weekends spent feeling completely fine about staying indoors, tending to your nerdy hobbies. Think about wrapping yourself in a soft blanket friday night. Think about not having to give, pardon me french, a flying piece of crap about fashion, and being allowed to wear the most retarded junk in your wardrobe in the name of keeping warm.

It's like a surreal refuge from everything popular media teaches us about society. As a man, you learn to appreciate female parts other than the curvy ones, as eyes, lips, smiles and nervous laughs take on a whole new dimension of intrigue, and then when it's summer again, walking down the street on a warm day in a tee and shorts, eating gelato with your friends, it's like childhood christmas all over again :)

Norway is a love it or hate it country. It's a safe, quiet and dare i say quaint country that believes it's more than it really is, but it's also filled with people facing the same predicament every year: how to cope with the flux. In a sense, it unites us far more than any flag could. I love this country, for all its agonizing winters, and i think it makes me a better man, or at least a more humble one.

INEXCUSABLE

2006-08-12T18:47:00.000+02:00

Today's culprit: Cheap bosses in fighting games

Nothing screams "we couldn't even bother" like a final boss fight that determinedly breaks the rules of the game up until then. It is well known that Namco have never even bothered balancing their Tekken franchise, with character matchups that aren't just broken, but WILFULLY so. Want to put Anna Williams up against Bryan Fury? Good luck with that, you've got a far-far harder fight ahead of you than if you played Yoshimitsu.

So in terms of balance, Namco have basically handed the gauntlet to the multiplayer gamers, who have to create some kind of unwritten code of honor as to how to play the game, with characters being delegated into "tiers". No wonder Itagaki rips on Tekken.

Namco, you ASSHOLES.

Jinpachi? What in gods name were you thinking? You take an otherwise entirely enjoyable story mode (by fighting game standards), and end it with a big fat cheat? If your boss isn't hard enough, there is a VERY fine line between cheap and challenging, and you take that line and basically LEAP joyfully across it with Jinpachi.

Attack that comes out in less than 5 frames, stuns you for 2 seconds and has no buildup? Check.
*UNBLOCKABLE RANGED ATTACK* in a game that's previously been known to disregard Street Fighter's fireball massive? Check. Does it take 65% health off your bar? Yeap. Is it dodgeable? With great effort, but then another one is coming right after it so why bother.
Character mesh so MESSY that identifying the buildup to a move among it's myriads of useless wavy junk becomes nigh on impossible? Check.
HUGE character mesh, making catching the difference between a high and a medium or a medium or a low attack a complete lottery? Check.

Fighting game developers: If you can't include the last boss of the game as a playable character because you KNOW it's cheap, your design flat out sucks. Last time i saw something this retarded was in Marvel Vs Capcom 2, with a screenfilling multiphase thing that would be better off in Gunstar heroes. Complete bullshit.

Rubbing salt into my wounds, Tekken 5 has a model for unlockables that requires you to play the game for a very, very long time indeed, with the fastest way to moneys being the story mode. Playing through the story mode and having to vomit my way through Jinpachi THIRTY TIMES is about as unpleasant a thought as i can come up with right now.

And Jeff Gerstman, you list "tough final boss fight" as a PRO? Jinpachi isn't challenging, he's a pain in the ass! It's like saying putting needles under your feet makes running a marathon more challenging!

Interesting documentary

2006-08-03T14:04:00.000+02:00

The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream

Interesting documentary. Give it an hour of your life :)

Edit:
Apparently it wasnt allowed to be on google video in the first place. Bah!
Anyway, still worth getting, even paying for. It's a good one.

Wii...

2006-07-03T09:14:00.000+02:00

...has officially grown on me. I don't love it, but i can read it in a sentence and not care all that much. That's high praise from someone that would experience involuntary twitches trying to say it aloud not long ago.

Yet more analysts kick Sony buttocks

2006-07-03T09:10:00.000+02:00

DFC Intelligence: Could Sony go from First to Worst?

This article pretty much sums up every fear i have about Sony's chosen path. It's safe to say that i'm not hugely impressed by them this year. The DFC article brings up the interesting and accurate point that the PlayStation brand has succeeded due to variety, in fact catering to the casual gamer looking for a diverse and off-hand experience rather than the hard core, which kind of puts the PS3 in hot water.

Read it. It's good for your brain.

Kickass warhammer trailer

2006-06-26T22:50:00.000+02:00

DIGICPICTURES:WARHAMMER:INTRO

JOY! Saw the game at E3, didnt totally blow me away, but at least the CG is hot, non? :)

Sunjammer site coming up soons

2006-06-26T22:49:00.000+02:00

http://sunjammer.doomsday.no

Nothing there yet but whee. At least i have a domain eh? :P

Guitar hero baby

2006-06-19T11:42:00.000+02:00

I had an epiphany this weekend.

I am, in many of my friends opinion, a complete and utter nerd about games. I'll agree. It's reached the point where people will *call me up* as they're in a store trying to make a choice and they need pointers. It's reached the point where people at work consider me gaming press. I spend way more money than i should on games at the heavy expense of my social life at times.

I guess the main bullet point here is that i play and enjoy much, much games across much platforms.

There was this Dance Dance Revolution kick here a couple of years back, where most of my buddies would go to arcades to compete for scores and to prove themselves physically. It's a good bit of exercise for sure, and i always thought it was a fun thing to watch (sometimes ridiculous to watch), but i could never once get into it. It's so hard getting into a game like that with an audience, so the DDR craze never caught me up, and as such i never thought i'd get into a rythm action game for real.

Last night, i played Guitar hero on Hard and Expert, which is, for the uninitiated, the point where the game A) Stops giving you breaks, B) makes you move your hand as well as your fingers to reach the unholy Fifth Button and C) decreases the resolution of the grid you're supposed to be following so you get very little warning. I've had the fear of GOD put into me by Bad Religion's Infected, to the point where i actually had to use my vaunted Star Power merely for SURVIVAL. I'd come out of that song, which is just chords over and over again, forcing you to make very fast and precise movements, with an aching wrist and a little finger desperately wanting out, but last night it all just CLICKED.

Of all the games i play these days, Guitar Hero is the only one to consistently bring me honest JOY. It never ONCE fails to put a wide stupid grin on my face, i laugh out loud at least once every five minutes, and sometimes it makes me feel like i can do the impossible by instinct. I can't think of higher praise for a game; this is exactly what i want from games. Not guitar licks, not heavy metal, not a big stupid controller, but unabridged escapist JOY. If i need to push buttons on a big clunky plastic guitar to get there, sign me up for TWO.

I'm so geared up for the sequel right now, even though Iron Man still destroys me. But i'll get there with practise, and it'll feel like i successfully landed on the moon. Again and again.

Review: Sin Episodes: Emergence

2006-05-18T12:50:00.000+02:00

I'm one of those crazy people that really, really enjoyed the original Sin, in spite of its crazy bugs, terrible script and retarded characters, or perhaps because of. Sin, as with most of Ritual's games, has an air of audacity to it that i always found deeply refreshing, with its giant chested antagonists and wisecracking beefcake jerk protagonist. Even the annoying hacker kid somehow lent the experience a coherence that many "smarter" games can only dream to match.
So naturally, i've been excited out of my mind about Emergence.

What was i hoping to see?

* Hacking into people's bank accounts to steal their cash.
* Bizarre one-liners and bad jokes from mr John Blade, aka The Most Notoriously Unsympathetic Protagonist In History.
* T&A across the board.
* Some needlessly complex interaction to frustrate the hell out of me.
* Some kind of retarded mutant that makes no sense and has all kinds of muscles.

What did i get?

A pretty, quiet, polished shooter that was over about as fast as i expected it to be, but contained only cruel teases as to the greatness of Sin's mindshattering retardation. I have MILES of goodwill as far as Sin and Ritual goes. I think Ritual are mad testosterone-fuelled artist geniuses that are in sore need of technology help, and are necessary in the ecosystem of the game industry much like defecation is necessary to the human digestive system. Ritual have always represented catharsis at its purest (though sometimes at it's most flawed) with their unapologetically derivative but sparklingly polished creations. I still look at their Heavy Metal FAKK game and consider it a work of art, even though it plays like a cactus in the small intestine. Sin was and still is their magnum opus, sporting impressive levels of interaction, visceral combat, levels packed with set piece battles and more idiotic action movie dialogue than both Bad Boys movies put together. Emergence brings only a morsel of this vision with it.

I might as well get down with the stuff i liked.

Emergence looks as coherent as any Ritual game before it, with one particularly impressive climb up a skyscraper as a standout. Freeport really looks like a town you want to explore or at least blow up good. In terms of creativity it's not a mind shattering experience, but it looks together, tight and makes sense, and i liked it a lot. This coherence extends to everything, colors, uniforms, weapon designs, menus, dialogue.. Freeport is as realized as any game world, and i'm looking forward to more of it.

The weapons, although there are only 3, really do their work very well. The gunplay is always visceral and fast paced, and Emergence marks the return of The Single Most Awesome Handgun In The History Of Ridiculously Huge Handguns. This thing looks *insane* and takes heads off left and right. Emergence sports a headshot effect that never ceases to amuse, and blowing off heads at a distance with the handgun always made me smile. Most enemies, although there aren't many of them, die in creative ways that are always visceral and sometimes utterly hilarious, which is 50% of what makes a shooter experience right there. The limited arsenal holds together just fine for the duration of this experience, and i didn't find myself missing any more. Having only 3 to switch between keeps the action fast and tight, and i liked it a lot.

Now for the rough edges...

Motormouth Blade keeps his mouth shut for the entire adventure (!!!!), and leaves the wisecracking to his largely uninteresting partner, Jessica. Her delivery is flat, and she keeps putting you in situations of terrible danger for the sake of her own pet peeve with the main antagonist of this episode, a drug dealer type named Radek. As a result, i kept wanting to kick her face in, or at least hoped Blade would tell her to shut her yap even ONCE. But no. Ever the silent feller. Freeman can be a silent protagonist because his character is in his ESSENCE, being intellectual rebellion. John Blade is no intellectual; he's an ass-kicker and a name-taker. His rebellion is about fist against face and spitting on corpses, a rebellion against what is socially acceptable. For episode 2, i hope Ritual let this guy speak up, because his wisecracking bs is ESSENTIAL to the Sin experience.

Worse is the detachment you feel from the storyline. Emergence is a game that demands prior knowledge of the Sin universe, and as such is really really hard to get into if you don't have it fresh in mind. The story, being the beginning episode of i don't know what, is shallow and simple, taking you through a short lived chase after this Radek guy, who i have no real reason to want dead other than Jessica's constant bantering about how big of an a-hole he is. So the real reason to fight is simply that everyone apparently wants you dead, and that's not good enough by my book. I felt detached throughout, and it became more about gameplay than experiencing a game world.

Emergence is a game that has the spirit but lacks the soul, and most importantly it lacks the insane audacity and over the top action movie feel Sin'98 had in spades. John Blade's silence is the biggest culprit here. Here's a character that's pretty damn hard to like from the beginning, and when all he ever says is "come in jessica, what's up jessica, come in JC" etc, what are we supposed to feel for him? John Blade MUST SPEAK, lest he become generic. And generic is the last thing Emergence needs.

Was it worth the 20 bucks? I think so. It's a solid shooter experience that's thoroughly enjoyable purely on the merits of its visceral shooty nature and coherent art direction. Is it worth another 20 for episode 2? I hope so, because i will be paying.

Massive huge E3 picture post

2006-05-13T03:59:00.000+02:00

By massive i mean the pictures are huge, since i'm too lazy to do thumbnails. Also most of the pictures are meaningless junk, youll find better elsewhere. But i found this stuff interesting though.
A new dragons lair, whut? I like the "full game with/without deaths" menu thing. Who the hell would play dragons lair without the deaths, they're the entire point of the game!

Best game at E3. Easy.

Totally stoked about this one. Gradius colection for psp = rad.

The FEAR expansion has a minigun in it that totally blows shit up good. Awesome,

The lightgun attachment for the Wii

The Wii classic controller.Note that it connects to the Wii remote by the expansion slot, meaning you'll have the remote hanging off it as you use it. Kind of weird.

The Wii booth had people on a roundtable spinning trying to look cool and controlled. It was really weird and kind of creepy.

The Wii hardware. It is so sexy! Note the control bar on the left, which you'll be placing in front of or on top of your tv. The Wii's motion control calibrates to that bar rather than your tv, so there's going to be some kind of software calibration when you first start up your console. I guess itll be some kind of "point at the four crosses" test.

Wow those "normal people" sure look like they're having fun!

I thought this was interesting; the Neverwinter nights 2 editor lets you paint terrain freehand. Bybye tiles, bybye #1 pet peeve about NWN.

These dudes kept getting in my way: This is a god damn vintage R-type arcade cabinet, and i wanted to play so bad! Instead i have to fight sweaty large men to just get a simple shot of the screen, to no avail. Damn you guys! DAMN YOU!!!11

Finally for now, a shot of just how influential WoW has been on MMORPG interfaces. I think this game is called "vanguard" or something. The UI looks *identical* to wow's.

Dark Messiah boss fight

2006-05-13T03:30:00.000+02:00

Like i said, this game is the bomb. I know this video blows, but hopefully it gives you a sense of the chaos and danger this game instils in you. It's xvid sans audio, VLC should play it just fine.

darkmessiah_boss.avi

E3 report part 1

2006-05-12T02:44:00.000+02:00

Second day at E3 is over for me, so i thought it might be an idea to actually pretend i was there to report (which i wasn't).
So, stuff i've found interesting.

Seeing the Fallout 3 poster at Bethesda. I thought i was dead and gone to heaven. No manner of heckling the Bethesda dudes for a copy of the poster would do though.. Curses, it looks so good!
Heavenly sword playable on PS3. I knew this game was beautiful but it plays really good, kind of like God of war, and the lead character is one of the best female character designs i've ever seen i think. A few odd things, like her dramatic running animation coupled with her relatively slow movement speed looked kind of stupid, but nowhere near as bad as the underwater running of Lost Planet.

Terrible cell phone video
Warhawk on the PS3. This game looks unbelievable, and the tilt control is really fun. I think Sony did right in stealing that idea.

Another terrible cell phone video focusing on the tilt control
God of war 2 actually looking better than God of war. How the hell is that even possible? It looks possibly even more brutal and more ass-holy than the first one. Def gonna have to keep tabs on this one.
Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. This game is.. Let's just say it looks so rad i watched the demo SIX TIMES in a row. The hand to hand combat looks so hard core, the demo guy was kicking enemies into spikes, pushing them into fire, shooting them in the ass with fire arrows throwing them off cliffs, stabbing them in the face, chest, cutting off heads (with a super cool slow motion effect) and fighting huge monsters that really interact with the world to get at you, crawling through tunnels, throwing away rocks you're hiding under, and finally taking your sword to the hilt through the face. I am beyond impressed. It looks amazing, if i could preorder now i would.
Rayman for Wii. I saw a bunch and played a bunch of demos in the Wii booth that made the controller seem needlessly complex and awkward, which is pretty much exactly the opposite of what Nintendo want the controller to do. Michel Ansel is helming a Rayman for Wii though, and from the trailer i can say the following: It looks hot, next gen style, and the controls really take the wii controller for real. There will be no sitting in your couch with your wiimote on your lap for this one, this game is going to animate people something fierce. Just to run you have to move the nunchuck and wiimote up and down alternately, like you would move your arms when you run for real. Basically each of your hands corresponds to each of Rayman's hands, and it looks fun as hell.
Excite Truck. Most of the Wii demos were, frankly, dog ugly. Excite truck is really fast, looks very slick, and controls wonderfully by tilting the wiimote. It is an *excellent* game, make no mistake about that.
Virtual console for Wii. I played a perfectly emulated Super mario world. Then i hit a button, went through an apple front-row like interface and loaded up a perfectly emulated Sonic the hedgehog. This is *hot*
The shy korean girl handing out swagbags at the Shooro stand, trying to look interesting next to the absolutely retarded spectacle of the Fatal1ty stand, a stand so unbelievably stupid and wack it boggles the imagination. "Who's the greatest gamer in the world! Who's the greatest!" Fuck you, for what? For being good at Quake 4 multiplayer? Suddenly i don't want the gamer nomer to my name anymore. Anyhow this girl was super cute and didn't understand a word i said to her. Compared to the terrible booth babes getting in my face with junk i don't want, a shy girl that doesn't know what the hell she's doing there is total attraction.
Chatting with the art director on Sin Episodes, which i am downloading as i type by the way. That game plays good, if a little jittery at times, but their vision is solid and the environments look totally beautiful. Their vision for this game and how they intend to evolve the game with each episode is really sound stuff, like keeping online stats of how players do, and use those statistics to better the next episode.
The absolute HILARITY of people struggling with the bullshit controls on Red steel. Not only does Red Steel look like a damn DOG, but it controls HORRIBLY. The sword fighting sucks, the shooting is jittery, and you have to aim at the edges of the screen to turn. That game needs so much polish to even be remotely presentable.

Check it out
Dawn of war expansion. Even the Tau look good, and i always thought they were such a boring race. They're also expanding the single player game into this whole Risk type game where you fight for a world map, reinforce regions and build armies. It looks super good, and hopefully the balance will be better this time around as well.
Table tennis on the X360 is a GREAT game. I'll just leave it at that.
That pirate MMORPG i can never remember the name for because it sounds and looks so much like pirates of the caribbean. It looks shit hot. I'll get into that.

Ran out of stuff. I'll hopefully find some more junk to write about by tomorrow, get some photography going. I'd still like to get into the Assassins' creed booth, but i think i may have to kill to get in there. Same with supreme commander. Whats with hiding all this cool stuff from me :(

Nuff said

2006-05-11T19:24:00.000+02:00

E3 prelude

2006-05-06T01:56:00.000+02:00

Coming up is E3, and i'm going for my first time. Flight's out on monday, so i'm trying my best to plan ahead; i have no real idea what E3 is like, so i think i may be acting like a beheaded chicken for a good bit of it.

I've been invited to a few parties, euro game developer stuff apparently. Considering i'm a slightly above average flash developer, i'm not sure if i should feel honored or terrified :) One thing is certain though: There will be drinkery. I have a secret wish to perhaps make a complete and utter nuisance out of myself at every opportunity, like breakdancing extremely poorly in front of everyone. I feel it may bring me joy.

What am i excited about this E3? It's tough, because frankly there isn't much. I'm sure there's something i've missed out on, but this next gen junk isn't exciting to me in the least. What do we have in store anyway, better graphics, same junky third person cameras, bigger budgets, same junky characters and gameplay contrivances; you know there's something wack when the biggest thing aside from hardware announcements is playable God of war 2. Yawn.

So Wii then. I want to see people use those crazy controllers and enjoying it. I'm sure the lines will be interstellar, so i'm more keen on just watching someone play. Red steel, god i hope that's more than a Time crisis with swords. Nintendo needs to impress this time around, i hope they can pull it off.

I thought the DS Lite was going to be available in the US during E3, but it appears i have been boned. I was hoping to pick up a few before coming home.. Perhaps that was a little optimistic :)

I'll be taking pictures and hopefully doing some day to day blogging over there. If there's anything in particular you'd like me to check out (since i can't put my finger on something other than Wii i'd like to really check out), leave it in a comment :)

Vril + Thule madness

2006-05-01T05:09:00.000+02:00

Finally found time to wiki Vril and Thule. If you're unfamiliar with the terms, the Vril and Thule Gesellschaft (society) were occultist secret societies that included and served as advisors for prominent nazi leaders. We look at Indiana Jones and laugh at it, but then you look up Ahnenerbe and realize just what kind of crazy these fools were.

I find the stories about Vril in particular fanciful to where it becomes delightful; The Vril society was apparently something of an inner circle, a big boys club within the already naughty Thule society, and most importantly (for me), they were technologists and considered their work science.

These were people that believed they could build flying saucers that could occupy space in any way its pilot should require it to, meaning flight, invisibility, teleportation, you name it. Where did they get this knowledge from you ask? Why from aryan aliens on Alpha tauri, 93 light years away of course! As hilarious of an idea as "aryan aliens" is, apparently they built one of these devices under the moniker JFM, or Jenseitsflugmaschine (other world flying machine) that underwent some form of testing:

"Two years of channeled flight research was performed with the JFM until 1924 when the machine was hurriedly dismantled for reasons unknown and moved to Augsburg where it eventually was placed in storage at Messerschmitt's facility."

I find this absolutely hilarious.

All this madness leads me to conclude that nazi germany is what happens when artists are given uninhibited power. Fucking crazy artists.

Anywho, interesting reading:
Vril
Thule
JFM

Wii!

2006-04-30T00:49:00.000+02:00

Haha, how can i NOT bring this up. Everyone else is.

My heart is telling me Nintendo is pulling our leg, and i'll be delighted at some new name at E3, but my stomach is telling me they're not fucking around.

I can't say i like the name, and i have yet to see a SINGLE positive opinion of it. I also haven't read any japanese feedback on the name, which is odd. You'd think we'd hear "the japanese like it" or something.

In the end it hardly matters. It only takes a picture of the unit to make me fall in love all over again.

Knifehandchop points out that the reactions aren't just along the lines of "that's dumb", but more like outright rage and fury. He goes on to point out that Nintendo fans have had to protect nintendo from its mistakes for forever, and that we're upset because once again Nintendo have made us do their publicity for them, aside from simply looking cool on their own for once.
I totally agree. I hope nintendo pulls a Sony/PS3-controller and gives us some affectionate understanding.

But there's just so much wrong here.. As far as i know the Wii name hasn't even been trademarked yet, which is pretty weird. You wouldn't announce that shit without having a solid copyright and patent for it, or peeps would be registering domains and junk across the board to steal your cash.

This smells fishy to da max.

World of warcraft has issues

2006-04-10T01:24:00.000+02:00

I know. Obvious to pretty much anyone who play the game regularly. However i'd like to discuss some issues with WoW's infrastructure, and touch on why i can't seem to get hooked on it at all.

Everyone's familiar with the queuing issue, when realms started choking and Blizzard were forced to implement the population full status, effectively denying any new players.
At the same time, Blizzard has realized that to keep the players that are filling up these servers, they need to supply more high-level content.

In the first bout, this resulted in the battlegrounds and improved honor point system, supposedly incentive to keep PvP where it belonged.

Secondly, the intensified raid focus, leading to huge sprawling and admittedly epic quests that have given some players their best experiences with the game.

Third, the expansion pack, providing a whole new high level world of sorts, as well as new character races.

All of these enhancements have, paired with the barring of new players to full realms, in my mind at least, effectively doomed the game to an endless cycle of creating new realms, and endlessly enhancing high level content. As a gamer who has always been quite happy being around the half-way mark with x number of level 30 characters, this ensures my experience with WoW is a solo affair. I'll elaborate.

The last time i played WoW, i played on Neptulon, lazily pushing a character up to level 20, before i realized i was bored to shit with the experience of endlessly "killing stuff while being on an irc with more advanced smileys". Recently, having seen a number of patches and updates to the game, i figured i'd give it another go. I found that Neptulon was now a full realm, but my character was still intact. The problem is, everyone else on the server is levels 50 through 60, meaning every single area i could safely go to was populated by exactly nobody, leading to an incredibly lonely experience. In the same way, why would a level 60 reroll on a server to go through the same lonely junk i was? In this way, the low/mid level content is completely wasted, and the server is dependant on high level content to keep its appeal. It doesn't help that so much low/mid content almost requires a group, meaning if anyone wishes to go through said lonely grind, they'll have to do so against terrifying odds. Not cool.

So this gets me thinking.. Where is WoW heading? What is even the point of the low level questing anymore? New players are barred the full experience, veterans stay for their buddies and the prestige of the PvP. What made WoW so amazing to me was its genuine *content*, it's hand made feel and its willingness to really make you care about its world. All this is essentially forfeit now, to keep a hard core group of dedicated players.

In the same way, the increased focus on gigantic raids has excluded a great number of players on inferior hardware, who could handle the game normally but feel the utter pain of 1fps when they join a large raid; WoW's technology can't *handle* the raid sizes required in some cases. Some players who were drawn to WoW for it's scalability, that they could actually get it to run and look good on their old rigs, these players are effectively excluded from a great deal of the content.

Going around alone on Neptulon, grinding my way through yada-quest after blabla-quest, trying to reach a point where i can actually SEE all these players that are filling up this realm, it's hard not to quit the damn thing and play a game that actually offers an experience on its own without the assistance of lol-ing powergamers. What good is an MMORPG that bars the general public from enjoying it?

Actually, without the people, what good are MMORPGs at all? What can developers do to ensure that their game doesn't reach critical mass like WoW is rapidly approaching and instead have an organic, open appeal that isn't limited to those who are the most dedicated?

As much as i loathe Second Life's presentation and weird reliance on real money, i believe they are touching on something WoW is missing sorely: the player's ability to manifest. This lack of reality and consequence to the player's actions pulls the rug from underneath the game's suspension of disbelief. An example of Blizzard's disdain of this is the addition of the instant quest text of a recent patch, which lets players breeze through quests paying no heed to the carefully written briefings. This caters *only* to the veterans who want to get through quests again to quickly level. All this builds on the feeling that everything you do is meaningless other than the quest reward and XP, and that's a fallacy that made me leave AO back when, and get into WoW in the first place. I wanted a single player calibre experience with my friends, and for a long time i got just that.

I want WoW to give me an experience other than levelling and chatting with strangers. Is this too much to ask?

Less emo, more mario

2006-03-20T03:01:00.000+01:00

Ok so i'm looking at these videos of New Super Mario Bros for the DS, and i'm passably excited. Mario platformers are cool and all but i always had a softer spot for Ninja Gaiden and Contra.

However..

With all the media this game has gotten, how come nobody makes a stronger point out of the game's wifi two-player co-op? This marks, in my experience, the first time ever i will play a twoplayer coop platformer where the camera is a non-issue! Do you realize just how rad this is? You can have platformer levels where one player literally takes a completely different path, and both players have to solve problems on their end to assist the player on the other. You could have a super mario world type map where two players make independent progress, until they both go for the same level, and they both work together for the duration of it.

Jesus, let's not stop there. Let's think 4-player co-op platforming! I realise how non-cool it sounds to separate, but i like the sense that okay, we're facing a big circle of levels on the map, both paths ending at the same castle, but we'll need to unlock the castle gates by pressing buttons in levels diametrically opposite. So we split up, and rejoin at the castle to reap our rewards. It's co-op on a more epic and dynamic scale, and i have the hots for it.

New Super Mario Bros just made it to my must buy list. Jeez.

Day one

2006-03-13T19:37:00.000+01:00

Effects:

Stomach aches and indigestion
Heart flutter
An intense urge to clean/redecorate
A complete lack of interest in eating, in spite of hunger pangs, probably connected to #1
Constant sense of cold
Tightness of the throat, making for somewhat strangled speech
Missing of deadlines at work

I'll keep logging as it runs its course. I think this is the zenith, though i'm scared it might be a slow burn to the nadir

Jeez..

2006-03-11T03:13:00.000+01:00

The past few posts have been about the most inane uninteresting shit imaginable. Sometimes my inner geek just takes over. Oh who am i kidding. I'm a complete nerd.

Anywho, now is where i randomly brief you on the somewhat strange things i hereby COMMAND YOU to start doing.

When at the grocery store, randomly pick up an item from one segment of the store and place it in the least logical place for it. Examples being kitty litter in the meat counter, a cheap plastic toy in the fruit counter.. You get the idea. It's more satisfying than you'd think. Thank you forced entropy.
Pay extra attention to the small things you do. Your mannerisms. Exaggerate them. Notice in particular how you handle your cell phone, or your credit card. Devise ways to exaggerate these meaningless motions. Add flair. Then perfect it. Create a needless skill for yourself to use in daily life, and often.
Take the subway, tram, bus, whatever to the last stop. Just get on, don't get off until you must. Then take it back. As you travel, pay attention to the passing of time and the landscape around you. Pay attention to where you are, and how you are continuously transposed with no effort on your part.

I've got more on my mind but i can't properly construct the words in my sleepy head right now. There's something about the imagination and brute force i'd like to describe but my brain is mush. 'Tah.

Games games!

2006-02-20T00:39:00.000+01:00

To bust myself out of my currently notorious depressions, i spent some money on games! What a surprise huh ;) I picked up Mark Ecko's Getting Up : Contents under pressure (A title that's actually worse than Peter Jackson's King Kong the official game of the movie, simply because there's no reason for the extra fat) and Kirby Canvas Curse for the DS (which is titled Kirby Power Paintbrush in Europe. How lame).

Initial impressions are mixed. Kirby plays astonishingly well, so well in fact that my non-gamer sister played it equally well as me within moments of her first try (and her first encounter with the DS too, what the hell). If you're not familiar with the concept, it's a stylus-driven platformer, where you have little direct control of the character, but instead interact with the world around him by either tapping things or drawing lines. These lines can serve as paths for him to follow (going by the direction you drew the line), or as walls to keep him from danger, blocking bullets, lasers, fires, you name it. The game is no lightweight platformer by any standard, though it sounds like a tech demo. It actually gets pretty hectic, and every time i've died in it i've felt like it was my own fault. Wohoo! So much fun.

That Mark Ecko game thing is a really weird experience. I'm only halfway through it so i don't feel like i have the right to any real opinions yet, but it's an incredibly slow-paced game of prince of persia style jumping around and taking your time to do graffiti. The graff is beautiful, the storyline and world is surprisingly coherent, and RJ2D is responsible for most of the soundtrack, which is to say it's very very good. I'm unsure about the controls, which tend to be unresponsive and somewhat contrived, which is too bad because they were obviously designed with ease in mind. I guess it's a credit to the game that it made me want to do graff again.

I'll recommend them both so far simply because you're unlikely to find similar experiences anywhere else. Neither is a gamer's game mind you. If you're of the Ninja Gaiden or Halo or even Ikaruga school of gamer, you may not find them as interesting as i did.

GameSpy... Again...

2006-02-13T06:55:00.000+01:00

Who the hell FUNDS these idiots? Off the top of my head i can't think of a single reason GameSpy exists as a games site. The quality of writing is bad in ways i can't even begin to describe, the design and visual profile is bloated and irregular, and again. I can't BELIEVE the shittitude of the journalism. The reviews are inane and superficial, always averaging into that comfortable "it's bad but NOT BAD ENOUGH FOR BUYING HEY" area that ambivalent industry-driven bullshit sites enjoy.

An example; Will Tuttle's article on David Jaffe's talk at DICE06. The entire talk was about embracing innovation, breaking out of sequel patterns (which is really a fallacy of the movie industry) and in putting more focus on individual talent rather than studio names (Itagaki took this to heart years ago buddy). He also calls on reviewers to stop being so damn respectful and start calling out games in previews, level proper ballsy criticism (and i agree). However, Will "brains" Tuttle ends the article with this clear evidence that he got Jaffe's point: "OK, David, I'm taking my chance to push you now: make a sequel to God of War. Soon."

Tard.

Read Gamespot for news, Eurogamer for reviews.

Ghost racer

2006-02-07T13:11:00.000+01:00

Trackmania Nations is the first Trackmania title i've tried out (because hey, it's free). It's really made me want to check out Trackmania Sunrise. The graphics are clean, the sense of weight is solid, and for some weird reason the try-and-try-and-try-again gameplay somehow works. It's frustrating at times, but since you're always racing against a ghost of your previous best race, it somehow feels less frustrating and more like a true challenge of honor.

Trackmania challenges our ability to be consistently good, to master something. If racing little cars on bizarre stunt tracks is a bit banal, the sense of finally mastering a track is exceptional.

Highly highly recommended.

Galciv

2006-02-02T00:40:00.000+01:00

http://www.galciv2.com/
Jesus christ just finish it already! I want to play it so bad! :(

Starforce. Again.

2006-01-31T19:16:00.000+01:00

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/31/starforce_threatens_.html

Am i the only one that think starforce ought to fire their PR manager? This is probably the worst PR a developer can get; it portrays them as boisterous, cowardly and illegitimate. It's tempting to say they seem wilfully corrupt.

Star-force, as copy protection, is true evidence that "by all means necessary" doesn't apply to customer relations. I've had more shit with starforce games than any other i own, ranging from complete dysfunction to serious annoyance (The 4 minute boot time for Splintercell chaos theory for instance). I'm confused as to what publishers believe they are achieving with this, because frankly, now, i wish i hadn't bought Splintercell PC and gone for the XBOX version.

It sucks installing a game and discovering starforce. At the very least these games need a big effin starforce logo on the box that tells you it's in there, because it's a huge detractor from the software.

Starforce is the best copy protection out there, but it's "best" in the same way that cutting off your hand might save your arm from gangrene.

Spam avant garde

2006-01-30T09:23:00.000+01:00

I know i'm sounding like a broken record right now, but look at this:

"usefull start borrow
by reply type
somewhere put work
use look buy
Be sleep reply
him sing cancel
must want cough
must wakeup watch
sleep travel hear
An make finish
open think rain"

Now how does something like that occur

More spam

2006-01-21T05:21:00.000+01:00

"Your nickname 1s a tortoise because of being so slow and late. Be a
cheetah with Replica Classic watches.
Cool watches are not fantasy anymore, with invention of Replica Classic
watches they became reality."

It's almost poetry isn't it

Ok, so

2006-01-20T22:34:00.000+01:00

This fell into my mailbox today. I hope you enjoy it as much as i did:

"Sperm@m@x is your key to @mazing chicks.
When you cum with Spermamax, your bed looks
11ke a little is1and drowning in the 0cean 0f your sperm.
You want a girl, then try Spermamax.
You want a boy, then try Spermamax,
you want twins, then try Spermamax."

I dunno about you, but i'm definitely getting Spermamax.

Some game recommendations

2005-12-30T03:13:00.000+01:00

King Kong (xbox, x360, ps2, gc)
Gunstar Super Heroes (gba)
Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow (ds)
Meteos (ds)
Burnout Legends (psp)
Mario Kart DS (ds obviously)

I know a bunch of these aren't recent, but they are just about devouring my time these days. It's nice to see the idea of a highscore hasnt been lost yet. Driving games have this inherently what
with the whole best lap thing, but action games have a tendency of losing it. Back in the deezy you'd be scored by the number of enemies you destroyed. Recent games rather score you by the skill with which you complete the section. King Kong scores you by number of shots vs number of hits vs number of kills, which makes you want to return to chapters after completion just to see how much better you can do. It's a tiny thing that makes a game last longer.

Meteos owns my sleep. I DREAM of this game. I had my time with Lumines, but Meteos... I think it somehow actually restructures your neurons in the shape of colored blocks arranged in sets of 3, so when they fire off they'll take other neurons with them and form combos. Every single morning, when i'm dozing, the image of dragging blocks into rows to turn them into rocket engines is like right in front of my eyes. It's uncanny. Haven't had this kind of weird obsession since Chu Chu Rocket on my Dreamcast.

Both Gunstar Super Heroes and Dawn of Sorrow really nail the sidescroller formula. You've got 2 buttons for about a dozen actions. Gunstar Heroes in particular has an uppercut, a flying kick, a jump, a drop kick, a drill kick and a sliding kick mapped to the A-button alone, and it never feels like too much. I wasnt part of the Sega Genesis days, what with the Sparkster games and the Gunstar Heroes whatnot, but i can totally see what it's all about. GSH is everything i wanted Astro Boy to be. Whatever Treasure was on when they did Astro Boy, it's all out of their system now. Total raditude.

Burnout Legends, as much as the PSP pisses me off, is really a lot of fun multiplayer. I remember being pissed off about the splitscreen demolishing the gameplay on my xbox, but handheld, networked, its glitch free and a ton of fun. At work it's grown to be a matter of honor. I'm ALMOST at the top of the ladder right now ;D

Mario Kart DS is a rockstar of a game. This is no "handheld version of a mario kart game". It's a legitimate evolution of the mario kart franchise. A true sequel. It fixes what i didnt like about double dash, and as awkward as it has been getting online to work (since i live in Norway and whatnot), when it does work it's got a really strange feeling to it.
My friend code should you care:

025830
821539

40 year old virgin

2005-12-22T19:36:00.000+01:00

It's a good movie, really. Actually it's pretty awesome, fantastically clever writing for what it is (being a crude grown up American Pie). It really nails The Guy as well, which is wonderful to see. Recommended to the max.

I need to say it has a weird outcome though.. I have issues with this guy giving up pretty much everything that makes him him, just to have sex. Sex isn't worth loss of personality thanks much. Not now, not ever, was never, won't ever be. The one part of the movie that drops into TRUE immaturity is the bit where finally having sex is some kind of serendipitous epiphany that changes everything. Without getting overly intricate, being a male virgin is about insecurities, and that is all. The epiphany is about realising the stupidity of that insecurity over something as superfluous as a fuck.

The film closes on a philsophical nerve that pretty much reduces the Andy character into a big happy nothing for a moment of simple release, and it frustrated me.

Then again, it's a movie that starts out with a guy trying to take a leak with a hardon. Perhaps philosophy isn't what its all about ;)

Kong!

2005-12-20T11:28:00.000+01:00

Saw King Kong yesterday. Meh.

It really hurts to say this. I really like Peter Jackson's work, he has an excellent eye for entertainment, and when he nails it he nails it. King Kong the game was bad ass. I was totally stoked to see the movie after that short but dense experience. King Kong the movie however is almost an exact opposite of the game. The game takes the best parts of the film, makes them even denser, and then plays that out over what is essentially a fairly short game. The movie takes maybe 45 minutes of awesome footage and spreads that out over more than 3 hours, interleaving it with melodrama and slowmo shots.

There are outstanding scenes in King Kong the movie, but there's just so much dead time it's easy to forget all about them. Both me and my girl were totally stoked to see it, and both left the theatre tired and a little put off.

The film's screenplay suffers immensely. Whenever there is not spectacle, and Naomi Watts has to say more than "Aieeee!", the writing falls flat. It speaks volumes that the best lines of the film are by Kong (who emotes more effectively than anyone in the cast). It doesnt help that the film CONSUMES characters. It creates a bunch, introduces them deftly, then completely discards them with no fanfare. The now infamous spider-pit scene (made far better by its restraint in the soundtrack department, THAT caught my eye more than any bugs) has a couple of guys croak that i didnt even realise were there. The most moving death of that entire scene is the guy that simply fell down and died. It doesnt help that the movie spends 2 hours acquainting you with the Venture's crew, only to forget about them completely once the movie goes back to New York (literally. They are never mentioned again). A potentially interesting plot point, capitalized on in the game, is the Skull Island natives, who make for a sinister presence throughout the game. In the movie, after an intense introduction, they are again completely forgotten and never discussed.

It's not a crap movie by any standard, and as a spectacle, well you probably won't ever see t-rexes get curbed in any other movie to come. It's just so long. It's hard to accept its campy creature-feature nature when it spends so much time with its characters delivering flat lines. There aren't even any memorable one-liners here, which leads me to believe the Ring trilogy and its lovely dialogue was far more Tolkien's work than the screenwriters have given credit for.

Final verdict? Hard to say. Disappointed? Kind of. Impressed? Very. Funny how that juxtaposition works out isn't it.

The thoughts i left the theatre with were basically these:

There is no blood in the film at all, in spite of all the carnage.
Cool ape, shame about the unrealistic girl. When are movies like this just going to understand that they're CG cartoons and that greenscreening people into them are what ruins the suspension of disbelief? We've flipped the coin, rear-projection effects looked fake and the people looked real. Now the people look fake and the CGI looks real. Strange stuff.
What's up with the boring deaths? On a scale of 1-10 on the entertaining movie death scale, falling off cliffs, getting crushed and being swatted aside are all low ones, and that's pretty much 90% of the deaths in the film right there! Come on Peter, there better be more interesting footage on the DVD...

My final verdict on the PSP

2005-12-19T16:03:00.000+01:00

It's taken me a while, and it's been pretty tough. On one hand, i adore being able to play Burnout on the go. I adore the screen, which is just beautiful. The weight of it is comfortable. In the end however, using a PSP hurts.

The controls are terrible. Just terrible. I felt less pain using a NES controller (remember that brick, with the hard angled corners cutting into your hands?). I actually felt more comfortable using the black and white buttons on the first terrible incarnation of the Xbox controller.

The analog stick does things to my long-fingered hands i have a hard time figuring out. It really just hurts my hands a lot. The angle my wrist is at, the angle my elbow is at. The way i have to cradle the PSP to still maintain a grip of the analog stick. It works for the first few minutes, but a 20 minute Burnout multiplayer tournament just wreaks havoc on my wrist. I have more wrist pains now than i have had ever since i first started using a keyboard. How's that for carpal tunnel syndrome.

Before you give me the fanboy stamp, let me remind you i own this thing, and have paid for 4 games for it. I really gave it a long, hard go. I feel wowed at one moment. But then i return to my DS for another Mario Kart race, or another game of Meteos, and i realise just how fucked up Sony's take on the handheld really is.

The DS *DOMINATES* the PSP in the usability stakes. Better dpad by far. Better analog control with the touch screen (really!). The face buttons suffer a bit because of their tiny surface area, but they still feel more responsive. Perhaps it is because i just spent more time with it? I don't know. I DO know that the DS hasn't hurt my hands, not once. Nothing akin to the screwdriver-through-the-wrist-and-thumb treatment the PSP puts me through.

It's a frustrating conclusion to reach. For one, it means i probably bought my last PSP game, at least until Rockman Rockman is out, or a game that effectively uses the terrible dpad well in some way. It's pretty wack that a dpad-controller racer somehow plays more elegantly than an analog-enabled one, and that just speaks volumes of the inadequacies of the PSP.

My final, bombastic conclusion? The PSP is a complete failure as a handheld gaming device. It might fare better as a portable movie viewer kajigger if you're willing to overlook the ghosting. A gaming device that won't let you play games without cramps and anguish is a poor design by default. I'm sure it works fine for some people, but for me, it just doesnt, and i dont have weird crinkled tentacled hands. I have gamer hands. I've been playing games since i was very very small indeed. That Sony failed to do extensive enough testing of their initial design just speaks to their lack of understanding for the format.

Cool screen, shit controls. REAL shit controls.

The funniest thing, and the most provocative, is the total lack of criticism people display for this designer brick. Friends go "When are the good PSP games coming around?". I tell them "Get a DS, it's got tons and is cheaper, the PSP is agony incarnate". What do i get? "Are you selling yours?"

I'm sorry guys, you know who you are, but STILL wanting a PSP after its monumental failures and STILL ignoring the raditude of the DS, AT THE SAME TIME as you diss the industry's disregard for gameplay over better graphics; I couldn't do a better job of invalidating your opinion. It's frustrating. Please, play games on an expensive brick, youll doom us all.

Anyone got ideas to turn my opinion around? Ways to hold the thing and effectively use the analog stick without cramping up? Fixes for the horror-pad? I'm all ears.

hmmm

2005-12-15T14:20:00.000+01:00

Happy slapping..?

2005-12-15T02:54:00.000+01:00

This UK happy slapping bullshit sounds so stupid i'm having a hard time believing there are fucktards out there capable of coming up with it. Apparently it's a very real thing, which leads me, once again, to point to the UK as the pinnacle of irony. For a place that used to ship criminal elements to Australia, you'd think it was the other way around. I felt safer in Brooklyn in the middle of the night than i did daytime in London. It is also the one place i have never once seen a native girl i found remotely attractive. Just thought i'd mention that while i'm panning an entire country ;)

What's up with the UK? Idiot kids, ugly girls and terrible music.
Someone save them!

PSP first impression

2005-12-15T02:29:00.000+01:00

As a super cool gesture, everyone at work got a PSP for christmas. I wouldn't have gotten one otherwise, since Sony pricing in norway is prohibitively high (we're talking $90 USD for a PSP game), but now that i have the hardware there's really no excuse not to get involved.

I've previously stated that i totally dig the DS. I've also stated that i'm not a fan of the PSP. Now that i've spent extended time with it, i'm slightly warmer, but the hardware has a few very serious issues that are directly detrimental to gameplay. These issues are so severe, i expect Sony to adress them in a future update to the PSP, hopefully soon.

First of all, analog control on the PSP is clever but awkward and not as smooth as it needs to be, leading to oversteer in Burnout and Wipeout. A LOT of oversteer, even after lots of practise.

Actually it leeds to oversteer in everything not expecting you to ram hard in a direction. It needs a larger range of movement sorely, and a surface with more friction. It's tempting to tape something to the analog pad to make my thumb stick better.

Second, the analog pad is placed so low on the device (lower left corner) that there are two choices for operating it: Keeping your wrists to the sides of the device, letting you "push" the pad with your thumb rather than drag it, and thus forcing you to keep the device at arm's length for it to be comfy (making the gorgeous screen super tiny), or holding it like a joypad, bending your thumb painfully to reach down.
Either way, something suffers, be it the gameplay, your eyes or your thumb.

The worst offender by far is the dpad. I'm in NO way adverse to the PS/PS2 dual shock style digital pad, which i have considered the best dpad on the market for fighting games for a long long time. On the PS2, the dpad is placed in such a way as to hide the majority of the pad under a plastic covering, leaving the four cardinal directions protuding from the controller, giving an impression of 4 buttons rather than one rocker.

The PSP mimics this design, but the dpad's profile is very low, making the impression of 4 buttons more of a reality. Hitting diagonals becomes a huge issue, even with my pancake thumbs. Simple things like scrolling the map diagonally in Metal Gear Acid becomes an exercise, because you have to place the knuckle on left and the tip of the thumb on up. You can't just rock between directions. So far i haven't faced this issue full on, because most games tend to support the analog pad and the pad is at the very least servicable, but for every action that requires digital motion there's a moment of arrgh.

When i first realised this issue it was with disbelief. I have no idea how Sony could jump for an unconventional control device like the analog pad (which is more like a sliding plate) without putting proper care into designing their dpad solution. For a developer of a system known for its bad ass fighting games, how on earth are Sony expecting a Tekken or Soul Calibur to work on a handheld that can't even scroll a static map diagonally without causing anguish?

Capcom are pretty aware of the issue, and probably have been ever since Darkstalkers chronicles.
It's a solution,
but i'd rather have a PSP sans problem.

There's a ton of good to be said for the PSP's hardware, but something is seriously wrong when the control input mechanisms of a games console from a seasoned developer are so completely and utterly overlooked.. Perhaps i'm jaded, owning every Gameboy system to date and the DS, but i love the games i own for my PSP (especially Burnout Legends, which is just amazing multiplayer), and being denied their full awesomeness because someone at Sony failed to do their homework is less than outstanding.

So Sony, fix your controls, THEN try justifying a $90 game price for me, because right now every single purchase actually makes me feel stupid.