05.31.07
Posted in Personal at 21:34
My paper is done, and I turned it in yesterday. A whole day before I had to! That’s a first for me, I feel quite ambitious. My fellow students have not hesitated to point out that the grading is in fact completely without consequence so long as we pass, but my ego is a fragile construction, and it must be carefully maintained, lest it crumble into nothing. So I’m crossing my fingers and hoping for good marks on the paper.
Now I have to start studying for film history. It’s a braindead exam, I don’t recall if I’ve complained about it in this space before. It’s pretty much Trivial Pursuit for film geeks, 25 questions were given at the start of the semester and cover everything from the brothers Lumiére to the brothers Wachowski. We draw a question like “German expressionism”, get 30 minutes by ourself to jot down everything we remember on the topic, and then spend 20 minutes relating it all to the professors. It’s boring. It’s useless. It sucks.
So to comfort myself, I ordered an Xbox 360 with Guitar Hero 2. It should be here in 1-2 days, but we’ll see.
- Music: Boston - More Than a Feeling
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05.29.07
Posted in Game news at 20:01
OMG LOOK!!!
It’s Warren Spector’s next game! It has Ninjas! And John Woo will produce a movie tie-in!
Please… can’t breathe… darkness closing in… must… take… anti-fanboyism pills…
- Music: Händel - Messiah: Hallelujah chorus
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05.27.07
Posted in Games, Humour at 17:26
I’ve figured out what makes S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fun to play. It’s because the weapons are huge.
And I don’t mean they’re all omnipotent BFG’s, they’re modelled after real weapons, after all (uh, with a few notable exceptions). I mean they just take up a lot of space on the monitor, making them feel extremely beefy. Examine, if you will, this comparison:
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- Music: Arcade Fire - Keep The Car Running
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05.20.07
Posted in Personal at 18:49
I’ve added Snap Shots to my blog. It’s a thingy that displays preview images of websites I link to if you hover over a link. Try it out in the post below or on the link up there in the first sentence. It’s pretty neat, but you can disable it if you don’t like it. Any feedback about it is appreciated, if you guys don’t like it, I’ll remove it again 
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05.19.07
Posted in Game news at 13:36
StarCraft 2! OMG! FINALLY!
What the Hell took them so long, anyway? Okay, so wait… how many sequels do I have to look forward to now…?
And that’s in addition to Kane & Lynch and Mass Effect, that I probably don’t even have the necessary equipment to play! Not to mention whatever secret new miracle IP Warren Spector is working on with Junction Point!
Anticipation… crushing… soul… can’t… breathe…
- Music: Richard Strauss - Also sprach Zarathustra
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05.18.07
Posted in Game news at 17:06
Likely new Deus Ex game beginning development within the year. I’ve heard, thanks, no need to bring it to my attention. The DX community is fan-frickin’-atical, we know these things before IGN and GameSpot get around to writing about it.
My reaction? Eidos Montreal is a brand new studio, so I have no idea what sort of games they’ll want to make. But it can go two ways:
1) “Invisible War was a step in the right direction, but it wasn’t an all out commercial success, and I think if we streamline some more, we can do well!” (translation: “Let’s clusterfuck the fanbase, guys!”)
2) “Okay Crystal Dynamics did a pretty good job turning the rather dead Tomb Raider franchise around by going back to what made the first game so awesome, while still improving and modernizing the concept here and there. It was a success, and the fans loved it. Let’s ignore IW and see what we can do with the original DX formula.” (translation: “YAY!”)
- Mood: Apprehensive
- Music: Alex Brandon - Deus Ex Theme
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05.16.07
Posted in Games, Personal at 13:38
I backdated this entry so it’ll fit onto the site chronologically. It’s mostly a reminder to myself so next year, I can search back through the archives and remember which presentations I saw in 2007. In a moment I’ll go back to Ep. 1 and add my notes for Tuesday’s lectures. I would like to note that I ended up going to Masaya Matsuura’s talk on Tuesday rather than Aki Järvinen’s. Järvinen’s looked very fascinating, but Matsuura ended his by singing a duet with an Aibo robot dog! Can’t top that. Afterwards, Jesper Juul turned around (he was sitting right next to us) and said to T. L. Taylor: “I heard you’re going to do the same thing tomorrow.” Riiiight… 
I attended the following presentations Wednesday:
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05.15.07
Posted in Personal at 21:14
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05.14.07
Posted in Game design, Personal at 21:22
Tomorrow I attend the Nordic Game conference in Malmö (a portion of Denmark currently occupied by Sweden), where representatives of the entire nordic game industry will convene to discuss matters of digital entertainment and plot the downfall of the great retail chains (okay maybe not that last part). The conference is split across two days with topics categorized into three areas of interest: Production, Development, and Academics.
My plan for Tuesday is to attend the following presentations:
[Edit 05-19-07] Added my notes and some photos.
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05.13.07
Posted in Game design at 15:36
Okay here’s a thought.
If you find yourself writing something about the medium of the video game, be it in a printed article, a paper for school, or on an internet forum, and you haven’t played at least a hundred video games:
STOP. MAKING. GENERALIZATIONS.
I was once told that to say something qualified about movies (specifically in academic circles), you’re expected to have watched at least a thousand of them, so you know what you’re talking about. Apparently, if you’re talking about games, you can say whatever you damn well please as long as you’ve watched a friend play some sports games on his Xbox.
What does Grand Turismo have in common with Neverwinter Nights 2? Pretty much nothing worth mentioning! They’re both video games, that is it. Do not make statements such as “Game designers usually consider the story after everything else has been created”, because you are absolutely guaranteed to be wrong about a huge amount of game designers. Do not say that game developers don’t care about stories when there are people out there, people with big names, who are working their arses off trying to develop new storytelling techniques for games.
So please, unless you are actually a game developer or you are actively engaged in game development communities or at least read a lot about how developers work, and unless you have played at the very least a hundred video games of as many different genres as possible (not just two hundred different Madden games! They’re all the same goddamn game, FFS), please just shut up. Please.
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