Ham Sandwich...
Here's a little snippet from a review of ‘Carve’:
“Where the sound design ultimately falls flat is, once again, in terms of the game's characters, who will occasionally throw you a bit of cheesy, ham-fisted dialogue when you're racing. (Thankfully, the only character who ever talks to you is your teammate.) Furthermore, each character only has a few, meaningless lines. However, the repetition of dialogue occurs surprisingly often, so you'll end up hearing the same lines at least three or four times per race, if not more. Maybe if the voice acting weren't terrible, this might be less of an issue--but this is not the case.”
Well – you can’t win em’ all. I have to say, I was playing a demo of the game the other day and I did get the same line thrown at me 4 times in a row. And I’m like thinking – why did I write four variations of EVERYTHING for that game.
Nevermind.
In other crimes against games design I have to take issue with ‘007: Everything Or Nothing’ and (sad to say) ‘I-Ninja’.
The 007 game is driving me crazy. I think I’ll be taking it back to the store tomorrow. Now that is one ‘ham-fisted’ game. The targeting on the walk around mode is appalling. I seem to keep dieing because I’m standing too close to an enemy and simply can’t lock on. The driving sections are equally frustration. The paths seem designed to send you scraping again every wall – and that bit where you’re meant to ‘get under the train’, fucking awful. Basically if you don’t catch the train up in time – you fall off a cliff – game over. Sick.
I-Ninja on the otherhand I was really enjoying, until that robot-boxing bit.
1: It’s boring. 2: It’s too hard. 3: It gets even harder when the defence system 'fails'.
I’ve tried a whole bunch of times to get past it but to no avail. Took it back to Blockbuster feeling mighty peeved. Shame – cos I know the rest of the game is probably great, and the guys who made it are great. They should have knocked that boss on the head though.
Nic.
And when in dreaming I did wake...
I died in my dream last night. I didn’t think this was supposed to happen!!!
I was in a restaurant in New York. It was weird cos it was kind of like a building within a building. Anyway – I got stabbed in the neck with a piece of silverware (was a nice restaurant).
Once I 'died' I had a kind of out of body experience and sat around watching the aftermath for a while before waking my self up.
See – even in my sleep I kinda knew the rules about death and dreams. What does it all mean (besides avoiding New York New York)?
Nic.
Meet my army of a thousand robots!!!
I’m in love. I want one of these NOW! No – I want a WHOLE ARMY OF THESE GUYS to help me TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!! I can’t believe it's only going to cost $80.
You can find movies of the Robosapien in action
HERE.
Nic.
FartBone...
Yay! I got my smartphone back. Boo! They lost all my settings.
So I decided to mess with the phone a bit. Haven’t done thins since I first got it but here’s my new ‘skin’. I call it ‘Pink Girl’.
But you see the cool thing about ‘Pink Girl’, and what you can’t tell from the picture is… it plays a load of ripped sounds from Metal Gear Solid!!! How cool. When someone calls me – it now plays the codec sound. When I get a txt it plays the “!” sound.
God I’m sad…
Nic.
Itz da bomb – GDC!
Cool. I just got the new ‘Nitro Microphone Underground’ CD. You probably know by now that I’m partial to a bit of ‘nip-hop’ and NMU are my favs. Very cool new CD. Check them out.
I also just spent $800 on a GDC pass (thank you weak dollar!!!). Never been to the Games Developer Conference before. Figured this year it’s probably a good idea to attend. If the current job leads fall through, I’ll prostitute myself on the show floor. If I become gainfully employed, I’ll go just for the info and fun.
Now I just need to find a place to stay and a flight...
Nic.
And the award for best texture map in an interactive entertainment product goes to...
I feel I should write something about the BAFTA’s. Didn’t watch them this year – but did catch the E! ‘live from the red carpet’ thing with jungle Jenny. Ya see – I went to the BAFTA’s a couple of years ago, and was a judge last year.
Don’t get too excited – it was the Interactive BAFTA’s, and it also marked the first (and last) time in my life I have ever been ‘blind drunk’. The wine was flowing I’ll tell you. And all down my throat if my somewhat splintered memory of the evening serves me well. If it wasn’t for Jamie getting me back to his pad – I’ve got no idea how I would have survived the evening!!!
So was the I-BAFTA’s as glitzy as the normal BAFTA? Hell – no.
Maybe one day they will be. Maybe in 12 years time when we’re all PS4’d out and mocap/facap/body scanning means that there will be A-List actors playing characters in games and actually giving performances within compelling stories. At the moment I can’t see them lining the streets to get the autograph of the lead designer on ‘action game x’. Then again there are some strange people out there...
Nic.
A trip in the Blame!
It’s a good job the UK street prices of ‘E’ is around the price of a pint cos I might need some to work out what the hell is going on in the mange/anime ‘Blame!’.
I have 6 volumes of the manga – again (like ‘Alive’) all in Japanese. I thought it looked great but didn’t have a clue what the hell it was about. I’ve also downloaded the ‘mangareactor’ translation of the books. Still don’t know what it is about. Now I’ve grabbed the Anime. I’m even more clueless about it all.
All I know is it’s cool – weird – and I think it’s great.
Nic.
Alive-alive-o....
It’s been a while since I blogged. Been a little more busy than usual. I’m taking interviews at the moment to try and become ‘a useful member of society’ again after taking the second half of 2003 ‘off’.
To be honest, it’s taken me this long to work out if I really want to enter the big bad world of games once more. I resisted initially, but the pull is too great. It’s what I know, it’s what I do, it’s what I love.
After taking a break I think I’m more into games than I have been in years. It’s also been a great opportunity to sit back and take a fresh look at the industry and the kinds of game consumers what to play. I guess being at one company for so long I became blinkered. The blinkers are now off – and I know the kinds of projects I should be pursuing.
What else? Watched another film by Kitamura (Versus, Azumi) called ‘Alive’. Great movie – maybe my fav film of his. It’s based on a manga that for some reason I own (I used to buy a lot of those little books from the Japanese book shop at O.C.). I’ve never really understood what was going on in it until I watched the film.
It starts off a little like ‘Cube’ and then goes crazy. Love this movie.
Talking of Kitamura – I’ve been going a little Metal Gear Solid crazy. Kitamura is directing the new cutscenes for MGS: Twin Snakes that is out next month. In preparation I’ve been replaying the original and I just picked up a copy of ‘Substance’ + guide from Ebay. Bought it up mainly for the second disk with all the making of stuff on it. Very nicely put together it is too.
So everything in the house has decided to break. My heating is still playing up, my smartphone decided to stop being so smart, my laser printer has lost it’s mind, and my Sky + box started playing up. They’ve just come and replaced it – so I’ve lost all the programs I’ve recorded (in other word all the ‘Iron Chefs’). Damn it.
I’m out,
Nic.
Enough already...
At the risk of sounding like a room building broken record, here are some more pics of the Mario room – this time version 3. Basically has the accuracy of the first with the gained knowledge of the second.
I think I’ve pretty much worked through my ‘issues’ with the package and now love it.
Nic.
Steel clad woks at noon...
I’m probably 16,00000,2000,200200,05050065657,57775750 to the power of 9 years out of date here – but I just found my fav show (beside Queer Eye). IRON CHEF!
It’s like ‘Ready, Steady, Cook’ (afternoon TV’s finest show - surely) on acid. If you’re in the UK – checkout ‘Challenge TV’ channel 121 (I know – I never watch it either) @ 7pm. Japanese (and Chinese) chefs battle it out against the clock to cook the most amazing ‘things’ I’ve ever seen. Wonderful stuff!!!! God I’m going to miss UK TV...
Nic.
U-Turn...
I take everything back. The problems I found with SketchUP last night were simply down to me not reading the manual (and watching the tutorials). Had a second pop at the Mario room (much less precise might I add).
This one was built in about 25 minutes and was really to test out all the ‘inference’ stuff and the duplication stuff.
Nic.
Axes of evil...
Okay - I got the solution for one out of the 2 problems stated below. Seems the 'Axes' tool is no longer on the tool bar - but I've found it now and it works a treat. Also discovered how to assign keys for commands I use a lot. I better be quick though cos my trial is going to run out soon... :(
Nic.
Further adventures in the third dimension...
I’m continuing my messing with a package called SketchUP. Decided to build another room from a videogame classic, this time Mario 64. It was interesting this one because it took me a lot longer that I anticipated (about an hour).
A couple of things slowed me down. Working in anything but 90 degree line snaps is infuriating. You can build into the scene these 'guide lines' to help you orientate on a new axis - but that’s really time consuming. I ended up rotating the whole model 45 degrees and back. Not a great solution – but it worked.
The other snag involved duplication and positioning. As you may have guessed I only built half the room then copied it and flipped it to make a whole room. No problems until it came to positioning the duplicate so it snapped and matched up with the original. What a pain. It still isn’t matched up properly.
Generally I have to say that I hate the 3D move in SketchUP. It’s too ‘free’ and I haven’t found an easy way to snap to an axis. Makes me long for Maya handles.
I’ll dig out the manual and have a look and see if I can find a solution to these problems – but they really did slow me down. I’ll probably try building in the same room in Maya and UnrealEd – see how they compare for speed and ease. I figure I could have probably knocked this up in worldcraft in about 10 minutes. Hmmmmm.
Nic.
Nic.
Meat product...
Well – it took eight months but I got my first pieces of spam on the medulla corp accounts today. Good job I invested in a spam killer back at the old job. I guess it’s time to dig it out.
Nic.
