March 2009
20:19 - 26/03/2009 - Dreamfall
Just played through Dreamfall: The Longest Journey over the last couple of days, not playing a little bit at a time you understand, pretty much constantly there's over 20 hours of gameplay I'd guess, and wow. One of the best entertainment experiences I've ever had, kind of game that illustrates what video games can and could be, and makes you forget about the games people praise as good because of the incredible level of polish and remember that there's no substitute for substance for a memorable experience. Enough non-specific praise though, it's basically an interactive story, the actual game part, the combat and the sleath was laughable and badly implimented (and should have just been discarded) but it doesn't matter, because the plot and characters were so compelling you didn't care. So if you ever wanted to lose yourself in a game the same way you can lose yourself in a good book I'd recommend it to you, despite the graphics aging a little now (it being a 2006 game) it is still quite beautiful, shows you what can happen when people with real artistic skill (rather than nerds trying their best) get involved in creating a game environments.
Of course if you're a 'gamer' it's quite possible you'll hate this, what with it actually resembling real life in your interaction with the game world (rather than some combat god absolved of all sins, past present and future) but if that's all you ever want from a game you're probably one of the people that eat up Holywood action films and call it good cinema (although I'm not denying they can be an entertaining distraction) so meh. The PC version should come with a requirement of a gamepad though, it was so balantly designed for dual analogue sticks (controlling camera and movement together) and a 4 button interface, that trying to use a keyboard and mouse is horrifically painful but as soon as you plug a gamepad in it's intuative and fairly enjoyable. In fact much more enjoyable to play than The Longest Journey because I didn't get RSI from playing but could lie back and play in comfort, so much so I'm wondering if for some genres of games (not FPS or RTS obviously) it might be better for everyone (i.e. PC gamers as well as console gamers) to design it with a game pad in mind.
Zoë the main character is going through a quarter life crisis as we enter the game and so I liked her immediately, but now I'm going to have to wait for several years before they bring out a sequel and I can find out what's going happen, god damn cliffhanger endings. Although TLJ universe has never been one for happily ever after, it embraces the reality of mortality in a way so many stories refuse to because they want to make you feel happy. Not that it tries to make you depressed or give you "DEATH IS BAD" triple underlined like some people swinging to the opposite end of that particular spectrum do in their stories. It again did a good job of taking up a philosophical stance that's similar to what a lot of gamers / geeks / scientists and liberals probably think but without falling into what it - I guess - regards as those Philosophies pitfalls and miscomprehensions and I think I agree for the most part, so I guess it's doing it's job there. I could probably talk for hours about this stuff and I haven't even mentioned the genius dabs of humour throughout, but I won't I'll just leave it there. Get Dreamfall, even if you haven't played the longest journey, and if you don't enjoy it there's something wrong with you, use a gamepad though seriously.
18:20 - 22/03/2009 - Shinies
This was the kind of lighting I was planning on having in the original conception of ZeroG, high contrast, now if only I had some spaceship models to use... or an editor I could use to make them (I've had a go with all the freeware model editors and I've never encountered a less intuative set of interfaces ever, my guess is the first model editor used this system and everyone since has copied it because "that's how it's done", very tempted to try and make my own based on the Worldcraft / Hammer editor interface).
Best thing about the newest 24 series. FBI Agent Rene Walker, her character is several levels of awesome through the first half, hopefully they'll keep it up for the second half. Good decision by the writers, Jack's rather desensitised to the moral greyness after six series of being proved right repeatedly. Oh and yeah, eye candy.
02:05 - 15/03/2009 - Confession
Listening to Tiesto - Close to You
I have a confession to make, I've been playing WoW, again. I leveled up my rogue and then a warlock and did some of the new end game content with guildies from the last expansion, I also collected a lot of pvp (player versus player) gear for the lock and then made every enchant and gem on it stamina so ended up with a warlock with an insane amount of health (24K+ unbuffed for anyone that plays WoW). Quite funny really, good fun to pvp with on account of just not dying, I'm guessing that annoys the alliance players. As is usually the case though, I'm using WoW as a distraction. I'm not achieving anything in real life at this moment and with the recession and my lack of experience in the specifics of any technical field I'm worried about being able to get a job challenging enough to not make me want stick forks in my eyes from boredom. Also most of my friends are down south, sooo tackle both the feeling of uselessness and the loneliness; WoW. The problem, as always, is world of warcraft is far too good a time sink and there's enough detail and complextion to statisfy the bit of my brain that would otherwise be making me learn something useful and so my coding work suffers, and also disturbingly it statisfys most of the bit that needs social interaction. I'm now wondering if it's time to go 'cold turkey' on it once more.
I've not been on a complete binge though I've been doing some more work on my lighting program and done some more reading on the DirectX API and also a 3rd party sound library. In working on my lighting and meshes program I've figured out it's never going to be immpressive enough to turn into anything I'd want to put on my portfolio so I should probably work on something else or get on with integrating it into ZeroG. For the something else I'm thinking perhaps a simple media player to get to grips with this 3rd party sound library, I may perhaps steal the name from my mIRC script media player, Ely Media Player. Ely: "The first, tiniest inkling that something, somewhere has gone terribly wrong".
I even created an anonymous blog one evening, presumably so I had somewhere to 'QQ' - as WoW players would put it - about being depressed where it couldn't possibly have any bearing on say, getting a job. However I don't really have any desire to share anything more personal than I would here if I weren't getting paranoid and it seems I want something of an audience for what I do write about and you can hardly post a link to your friends of an anonymous blog! So I deleted it again. Although the idea of creating an online persona that couldn't easily be linked to me still seems like it might be a bit of fun escapism, also sounds like something you should talk to a psychiatrist about.
A final thought, wow, Sigourney Weaver is actually really hot in the original Alien film, and unrelated to this specifically the original Alien film is growing on me as a stand alone film so much so I may actually rate it above Aliens now. Although the latter definately has the shooting monsters and explosions in it's favour, as well as a more developed universe (as in more fully fleshed out with detail), which people rip off to this day. The less developed universe, leaving it to your imagination after detatching yourself from the francise, is actually one of the reasons I think I liked the original film more on this re-watching. That and I wasn't scared half to death this time.