| Just gotta get something off my chest | ||
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Won't be a long post. Has anyone seen the trailer/s for the Longest Yard? I want to know if they've paid the people who made Mean Machine a lot of money because it's almost exactly the same except with American grid-iron and all the goodness thrown out. Same story, same characters, even very similar scenes! The bit with the big dumb crim getting his nose broken for example is a balatent ripoff. Even the quip about it making him look better, only with a different script. And again when the 'pro' main character gets arrested by two cops, he makes fun of one of em but instead of his size it's his ears. I'm just trying to imagine the thinking behind the people who started this movie. Did they think they could do it better? or maybe put some American spin on a very english type of movie? I dunno but I hope it's not a good representation of the creativity in holywood. |
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| OMG OMG OMG | ||
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Just in case you haven't seen it yet, you HAVE to follow this link: http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=56993 Yeah yeah, I'm a total hypocrit. |
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| The Next Generation | ||
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Phrase of the day: Undress your eyes Well it appears the reality engine has been bought out by Epic, the UE3 guys. Apparently there are a few people out there that actually think it's a good thing. Making a great looking game is expensive enough as it is without the cheaper alternatives being bought out. There is something I must admit though. I'd love to see some more innovation in games, it's in my nature but at the same time I'm probably one of the masses who perpetuates conservative games, just look at my last rant about Quake 4. I don't even buy many games and when I do, they're pretty much either from id or valve. So I may be a bit of a hypocrit with the rest of this post. Now and the next few years is going to be a very interesting time for the games industry. Computer graphics have got to a point where they can't add much more gameplay value to a game and they're also starting to really look like pre-rendered CG. There will be a point in the future where adding some new fancy graphical feature or doubling the polycount or texture resolution will have very minimal visual impact and it also won't be cost effective. So what happens to those industries based on this competition? I have no idea what'll happen to ATi and Nvidia if their need to make the next latest and greatest chipset dries up but imagine what could happen to the games. At the recent GDC, it appears many of the professionals in the industry spoke their views about how the industry has gone to shit. You can't innovate too much otherwise you won't get enough funding and this is leading to very conservative games being made. But games do need selling points and an easy way to do that - with enough money - is to make the game have awesome graphics. When the ability to make the game look vastly better than anything else on the market dries up, maybe the publishers will have to turn to providing money for new innovations in games. Developing with great graphics will also eventually become cheaper with engines falling in price and technology maturing so the companies with less budgets (self-funded for instance and hence more ability to innovate) will be able to make games on a more level playing field. There is so much scope for games that aren't being touched by the mainstream. So many themes that could be explored rather than the usual war/sci-fi/fantasy. Just look at the other entertainment mediums with their dramas etc. There's a chance for the whole medium to be redefined from games into something akin to 'interactive art'. Imagine avante gard games where there is no direct aim or story but are rather meant to be more of an experience. For instance, I'd love to see a game that has no visual element at all where sounds make up the environment that you have to interact with and by doing so you also add to the experimental electronica soundtrack. Or a more interesting game would be to create the vision using other stimuli. For instance, there were scientists who did experiments where they stuck patches of electrodes onto the tongues of volunteers which was then connected to a camera. When the volunteers were given control of that camera, they stopped 'feeling' the sensation of the electrodes but rather 'saw' through them. Imagine a game similar to that! What would it look like! |
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| Like a Pheonix | ||
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phrase of the day: tastes like yesterday Whadayaknow, haven't had an update in awhile. Quite surprised there are people out there with the fantasticness to read it. Anyway, last week after coming home from Jimmy's lan (had a ball btw) and I finally get around to setting up the comp again and it doesn't work! Thought the video card had died or something. Turns out it just needed reseating but I've been lazy and hadn't been bothered trying to fix it until now. Surfed the net on my sister's comp yesterday and it appears something exciting has infact happened during my self-induced period of abstinance. There's a new article about Quake 4 in Computer Gaming World with new screenies n stuff! For those who don't know, it is my firm hope it'll be my MP gaming saviour. Despite how much time I spend on the computer I actually don't play games much anymore and the lan last weekend made me realise that I was missing out on something. The article has a few interesting new insights into the new rendition of the greatest game IP ever made. From a perspective like mine who doesn't really mind what the Raven guys do with the SP, one of the important bits of knowledge is that the MP is apparently going to not have vehicles. This is very much in keeping with the quake style of multiplay and in a day where every big MP FPS game and their dog has vehicles in it, it's an interesting move. There are two parts of me actually conflicting with this for some reason. The rational parts is going "This is a great thing! Vehicles are not suited to the Quake gameplay" but another and smaller part of me is also going "What a bummer. Vehicles in the D3 engine could be really fun". Hopefully some good mods will come out. It's good they're trying to be true to the spirit of Quake but it's also important to bring something new and innovative into the mix, otherwise it'll just be Quake 3 with better graphics. The inherent nature of new and innovative things is you can't know what they'll be, which is a bummer. Another thing inherent with the nature of good innovations is they're bloody hard to make, doubly so if you're trying to stick to the Quake formula. Jump pads in Quake 3 for instance was a good new thing. I'm not really sure how innovative they were but they added a new type of movement to the game that doesn't compromise the core values of it. So essentially I've got a bad feeling Quake 4 isn't going to be anything surprisingly new, especially when we're not hearing the developers raving about their 'innovative new thing'. The article also mentions upgradeable weapons that can increase clip sizes et cetera. Hopefully these things will be like the vehicles and only in SP. Reloading and weapon upgrades will only add elements to the MP game that aren't needed and I'm a minimalist by nature. While also surfing last night, I read a lengthy forum debate on the Raven forums about whether there should be alternate fire modes. The idea isn't inherently bad in itself, however you again have to ask yourself if they're needed. The Quake style of play revolves itself around a small set of well defined weapons that are each mostly useful to only certain situations and hence the play is based around choosing the best weapon for that situation and also determining said situations (by movement, knowledge of the map and predicting the other player/s for instance). If you have more weapons and try to keep them balanced, you'll end up having more than 1 or 2 weapons that are optimal for the different situations unless you change the amount of situations you have (by changing the gameplay, like adding vehicles for instance) which will lead to what some people like to call a 'washing out' of the gameplay. Quake is about focus on the control of a small number of elements rather than the unfocussing of many elements. Alternate fire shouldn't be in Quake because it's not needed unless you want for example only 3 guns to choose from with alt-fire instead of just normally 6, which is a bit pointless. On a similar note, the article also shows a concept drawing of the rail-gun! Looks freakin awesome. |
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| The ultimate job | ||
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Phrase of the day: forty is my forte The human brain likes to see patterns within chaos. It's the whole premise around theoretical physics. And there is a kind of irony that stems from this. Theoretical physicists now have to spend years learning some of the most complicated and convoluted maths around so they can come up with equations that a child could understand. It seems to me that theoretical physics requires more than being a good mathematician. The greatest discoveries came from the creativity of the physicist, which is also kind of ironic seeing as it's probably the second driest subject you could do. There's some wierd assumption here though, which probably also comes from our belief in an order amongst the chaos. Is there any particular reason why there should be an ultimately simple fundamental theory of everything? It's because we see a trend and we've been following our instincts since physics began. Complexities emerge from simple systems all the time. It's everywhere in science, infact that's how we've split up the sciences, by different levels of complexity. But maybe we've imposed this trend on ourselves, been moulded by our predispositions. Not taking my own advice just now, look at the basic sciences; biology stems from chemisty which stems from physics but then we have a gap to mathematics. Sure physics uses mathematics but it does not arise as a consequence of it. Perhaps that's where to look for the fundamental theory of everything. I can visualise the universe as a set of say, 11 dimensional vectors or something and the universe the way we see it stemming from the interactions of those vectors as patterns. Time may not be important, just some arbitrary thing our minds have imposed on what we see around us. Instead, time could just be the amount of steps or interactions it takes to reach another pattern, and the steps themselves would not need a set amount of 'time' to take place because the steps define the time. It could very well be a perfectly static universe that doesn't actually change. Anyway, just some thoughts inspired by the essay 'The power of staring' by Michio Kaku in the latest NewScientist. |
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