Watch Cocaine being made
Posted by Stephen Waits Sat, 25 Nov 2006 20:09:37 GMT
Seriously. This looks like nasty stuff.
Full length documentaries online
Posted by Stephen Waits Mon, 16 Oct 2006 03:03:05 GMT
TayTV has posted links to 10 documentaries, which they recommend, and are available online - for the moment anyway.
I hope to check a few of them out soon.
E3 goes legit..
Posted by Stephen Waits Mon, 16 Oct 2006 02:28:01 GMT
Yes, I’m happy to see that E3 is coming back next summer in a massively scaled down format.
E3 had turned into a mouth breathing fanboy collective. Good luck getting to see any Nintendo stuff at E3 in the past 5 years. If you did, it means you’re more patient than me, or you had exhibitor access (which I must say is damn nice).
Now E3 will be what it’s supposed to be. Developers, publishers, and media - all by invitation only. This means that all of us lame-o programmers who really have very little business attending in the first place, won’t be able to take 2 or 3 days off on the company because it’s E3. This seems fair, and good, to me. It’s a few more days of actual work improving our products.
Also, maybe it’ll be quieter.
PSP: 2.71 + Demos! and One-Year Video Review..
Posted by Stephen Waits Tue, 06 Jun 2006 15:32:27 GMT
All.. Update your PSP to 2.71. Do it. Then fire up the web browser, go to the PSP home page (Bookmarks -> PSP). Click on the news item about “2.71 Downloadable Demo”. You can download LocoRoco and play it. Yes, this is great! Took them awhile, but wow, it opens up LOTS of opportunity.
Second, Gamespot’s got a video, PSP One Year Later.
Social Dynamics of MMOGs
Posted by Stephen Waits Wed, 24 May 2006 16:08:28 GMT
Here’s a paper on the social dynamics involved inside MMOGs.
Via O’Reilly Radar.
E3 2006
Posted by Stephen Waits Tue, 16 May 2006 17:56:00 GMT
So another E3’s come and gone. I didn’t quite break my record low enthusiasm mark this year. I was slightly more interested than the last few years. I did spend more than two hours on the floor this time around. That’s mostly because I got there before Ralf and HK and then resaw everything with them after they arrived.
My friend Tim managed to get us into the Gears of War playable room. I didn’t play, but both Ralf and HK did. I’m not sure about the gameplay, but I have to say after seeing the live demo, I’m convinced this can be the next Halo – the 360 pusher. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if all of the Halo-buying-mass-market-homos in the world will be able to open their eyes wide enough to see anything other than Halo 27: More of the Same Crap for Wal-Mart Shoppers Everywhere.
MotoGP on the 360 looks great. I think a lot of the next-gen graphics are a little crazy. Everything has incredibly high-contrast edges, so that what should be smooth fields of grass end up looking like a Photoshop experiment gone bad. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should do something everywhere! Producers and Designers please take note of this!
Otherwise it seemed to me that MS had the usual sort of decentralized unfocussed booth we’ve become accustomed to seeing from them.
PS3 had more playable games than I expected. I liked Warhawk and will definitely play it - though it clearly had some issues. Gran Turismo HD looked really good, even if it’s just a hi-res version of more of the same. The PS3 F1 game looked fantastic, but didn’t play so well. Madden looked like a bad joke.
Sony needs to seriously do some crowd/fluid dynamic simulations on their booth design. The relentless MGS trailer was always causing the entire PS3 area to be swamped. If you were interested in the PS3, but not MGS, you would find yourself in a mass of people staring up at a giant screen – all of them perfectly in your way of just getting close to one of the PS3 titles. You could wait in line to go upstairs, but nobody waits in lines do they?
Wii. As of now, non-existant for me. Nintendo, being highly fanboy-driven, has always had the most packed booth at E3. I think this always added to their hype-level, in a good way. This year they closed the booth down, and you had to stand in line to get in. No. I’m certain they’ll have 2 or 3 truly great games on the platform some day.
PSP had a decent showing; many more games than I’d expected. Some looked great. However, this show was about PS3 and Wii.
DS Lite looks cool. I’ve wanted one for awhile and it was nice to see it in the flesh. I still think touch and dual screens (and Wiimote) are completely gimmicky; however, I want to play Brain Whatever it’s called and Animal Crossing.
Kids. I saw kids at the show again. WTF. There’s already enough of us idiots who work in the industry but don’t really need to be there packed onto the floor.
As were were trying to escape the lunacy of the floor, heading toward the doors, Michael Madsen grabbed my arm and told me to take a picture of him with a fan. I didn’t realize who it was at the time, and thought to myself, fuck you. Then his son or whoever was with him said, “it’s ok, I’ll take it”. But MM reiterated, “no, I want him to take it”, pointing at me for no logical reason other than unbalanced brain chemistry. Ralf says, “it’s ok, he’s doing it”, talking about the kid, and we left. About 15 feet later we realized who he was. Whatever.
I really enjoyed hanging out with Tim, Ralf, and HK. We weren’t able to connect with Jeppe for some reason, but I’m sure I’ll see him soon enough.
Tim and I had scheduled a 40 or 50 mile bicycle ride for the Saturday after the show. I planned it all out. Of course that fucker flaked on me. I’ll see him this coming Friday where I can give him more shit about it, but he should consider this his public flogging!
Finally, I spent the 4:30 hours on Amtrak (about 2:15 each way) watching Long Way Round which I’d ripped onto my PSP the night before. Not many people know what this is.. but it rocks. It was a seven part TV series where Ewan McGregor and his best mate Charley rode their motorcycles from London to NYC – only they went the “Long Way Round”. It was fantastic. I got through 6 of the 7 episodes on the train and watched the last one at home. Highly recommended!
There you have it.. My E3 ‘06. Not sure there’s any reason for me to go to E3 any more, so this may have been my last – at least for awhile.
Daglow at Women in Games Conference
Posted by Stephen Waits Sat, 06 May 2006 21:08:22 GMT
Gamasutra is running an article on the WIGI which features a few pics of Daglow. He says:
Daglow sees things in terms of his team. “As a studio head, you have a sense of who’s hurting at any given time, just as you walk around the studio.” Sometimes it will be coincidental. One team member recently lost a parent. “That’s a hurt you can’t do anything about. You feel it, but you can’t do anything about it.” Daglow admitted. But when the team is hurting from the level of effort that’s being put into a project, “That’s something that you feel. And it gets me right in here.”
MMO Boggle
Posted by Stephen Waits Mon, 20 Mar 2006 04:58:24 GMT
Ajax-powered Boggle played against… the entire Internet….
Via O’Reilly Radar.
Another small Lisp
Posted by Stephen Waits Thu, 16 Mar 2006 17:03:26 GMT
In digging around Hedgehog, I found a mention of Pico Lisp. I don’t know if either meet my needs, but I’m definitely interested.
A bunch of free PC games
Posted by Stephen Waits Sun, 05 Mar 2006 16:51:53 GMT
Mr. Gnome, from Greece, has compiled a nice list of free games on his blog. They’re mostly older games, like the original GTA and GTA 2 and other retro games.
Via reddit.
Collection of Fluid Dynamics Papers and Videos
Posted by Stephen Waits Sun, 05 Mar 2006 05:06:46 GMT
Check out Ron Fedkiw’s Page over at Stanford for a fantastic catalog of FD papers and videos. I seem to recall going to a talk of his at SIGGRAPH a few years ago. Bedazzling.
PEER Group Formed
Posted by Stephen Waits Tue, 14 Feb 2006 15:49:28 GMT
PEER, Professional Electronic Entertainment Recruiters, is a group of recruiters set to establish ethical standards in the video game industry. David Musgrove, my own personal top recruiter, is president! Read about it on arstechnica.
HL2 Rube Goldberg
Posted by Stephen Waits Mon, 13 Feb 2006 16:22:16 GMT
A bit of machinima of a Rube Goldberg device done in Half Life 2.
Averaging Gradius
Posted by Stephen Waits Fri, 03 Feb 2006 16:41:42 GMT
This guy took video from 15 different plays of Gradius, and stacked them into one video. The point of it was to look at “how different player handle similar situations in a video game”. Why choose Gradius? It’s pretty obvious:
Gradius, an auto-scrolling shoot’em up, is programmed so that the stage automatically scrolls at a fixed rate. With the stage constant, that allows us to compare how the player interacts with the AI and how, retroactively, the AI responds to that.
He goes on to include some details about how he produced the video. Check it out.
WoW done Google Map style
Posted by Stephen Waits Mon, 30 Jan 2006 03:09:22 GMT
Wow! These AJAX maps of the World Of Warcarft are incredibly impressive. Nicely done.
Via reddit.
Wow.. Mario 64 owned.
Posted by Stephen Waits Mon, 09 Jan 2006 03:26:47 GMT
I was entranced by this video of a guy beating Mario 64 in 16 minutes. It’s “tool assisted” (described at the info page), but that takes nothing away; it’s an impressive feat!
There’s also a torrent for the AVI version on the main info page (direct linking discouraged).
Flight Simulator X
Posted by Stephen Waits Fri, 06 Jan 2006 01:31:00 GMT
My friend Ralf pointed me to some screenshots and an intervew about Flight Simulator X - MicroSoft’s upcoming flight sim. Looks incredible!
MotoGP Media
Posted by Stephen Waits Tue, 20 Dec 2005 18:44:00 GMT
Two links from my friend Ralfie: A MotoGP highlight reel (looks to be a few seasons old) and Screenshots from the upcoming Xbox 360 version of MotoGP 2006.
Best and Worst, 2005
Posted by Stephen Waits Tue, 20 Dec 2005 15:50:14 GMT
A few Best and Worst lists that showed up in my browsing today:
- Cinematical’s Ten Best Films of the Year
- Ebert’s Best 10 Movies of 2005
- Rotten Tomatoes: Bombs to the Bomb Worst of 2005
- Top Yahoo! Searches (via ars technica)
- MetaCritic’s Top Games of 2005 via Joystiq