Month: June 2010

We should

Post author By harold
Post date June 30, 2010

Yep. Also, meth is on the rise in the US and Europe has almost doubled its number of cokeheads. During that time in Chicago last week-end, 54 people shot and 10 dead over drugs, gangs and territory-related topics. I think we should legalize all the drugs right now. We need to stop having a completely corrupted Southern Hemisphere where the most lucrative drugs are produced. Cartels already know that eventually legalization is going to happen, that’s why they’re becoming the state itself by taking care of the streets and social life of entire regions.

Drugs are the biggest BS ever, we should be much less concerned by the “moral” and just try to make people’s life better using drugs or not. It is fucking everywhere and it’s indirectly killing more people than drugs themselves, seriously. It shouldn’t kill anybody except people abusing substances, “legal” or not.

So enough time lost, let’s legalize everything now. Just sayin’.

Me Myself&I

The design of the decade

Post author By harold
Post date June 24, 2010

Tesla Roadster somewhere in Santa Monica, June 2010

It’s not the car in itself. It’s the silent revolution and what goes around it.

Miami Vice!

Like I said on Twitter, it’s a-ma-zing to have such a powerful acceleration while listening to music, not barely hearing it due to a fucking huge combustion engine making the car smelling gas and transforming it as a giant vibrator.

The electric car is like my fanless computer; unless you experience it, you can’t really understand how it changes your life and how as me, you couldn’t wait for it to be widespread because consequences are dramatic (just think about a freeway 100% filled with electric cars: no noise, no smell. Living around would be much less a problem).

The tools to do that from a car to a computer are the same: re-think the all thing, push the efficiency envelope (less maintenance, constant performance), not the performance envelope (more horsepower, more problems). Think Wii. And look at its sales.

Just a nice, snappy, sweet and zen experience. The same applies to biking! Yesterday I rode 20 kms, not the fastest way to go somewhere but it matched car and bus timing except that I workout, it’s silent and that there’s no wait (what traffic, what bus schedule?).

What I try to say is that this design trend toward efficiency, user comfort and overall easiness while truly giving up on parameters (you can’t go far on a bike, electric car; my fanless computer can’t play the heaviest games; your smartphone needs to be charge everyday etc), is on its way everywhere I look.

And I freaking lo-vit.

Audio&Games

E3DS and things

Post author By harold
Post date June 19, 2010

30 minutes in line and then I could have a 20 minutes session playing games and get the Nintenthingy in my hands.

Yeah yeah yeah

3D works. When it does, it’s pretty amazing.

Problems: eye view distance, ambient light are changing the 3D effect from not working at all to outstandingly “real in your face”. Of course you need to look at it straight, no angle are allowed: no spectator can watch around your shoulder if he or she doesn’t want to lose sight.

It worked much better with gameplay than with movies and trailers. I guess the brain is believing in it more when you are moving things around.

Two games who were clearly astounding in 3D: Metal Gear Solid and Nintendogs. It works perfectly with slow gameplay, not so much with fast action.

Overall, I’m not that impressed by the 3D because it doesn’t provide that much to the experience: doing a portable console with touch input was changing the game, doing a motion controlled console was changing the game, doing a portable console with pseudo-3D is nice and cool, but not game changing. For now.

But the 3DS is not just the cool 3D effect. For the rest I love it: the analog pad, new d-pad position is better IMO (big hands, cramps on my DS Lite), the L and R buttons have a better shape and are easier to press and overall I don’t know what hardware is in it but it seems capable of stuffs. Graphically it’s between the PSP and the Gamecube /Wii-ish I would say. The new retractable stylus is great. The sliders are shitty though. I want + – buttons. And sound is much better but we’re coming from far away.

So it’s going to work. People are going to love this little effect (especially while taking pictures), there’s the DS huge compatible library, hardcore gamers will enjoy Nintendo’s old school games, a couple of third parties will be able to do good games too and for the rest it will be showelware, like usual.

I wonder if they updated their gamedev tool chain with this new console because it was pretty damn awful with the DS (at least for the sound and music part).

Anyway.

Except the 3DS what struck me on this second day was that the Kinect Dance Central game and overall how all of the dance games available are enjoyed by people, a lot. It’s like geeks discovering that dance and body expression are fun! That’s cool.

Also, there were these obscure F2P MMOs from Nexon and others running on PCs. I was walking around and was always struck by the flowing of these. It’s not that they’re looking better than console games, but they’re running on high end computers and it’s so fluid it’s beautiful, attractive. It was the same at the IndieCade booth. That’s why I thought about Epic Mickey on better hardware than a Wii. I’m not crazy about having the best hardware possible but when you watch something running at more than 60fps, rock solid, it really catches the attention. I just don’t want it to be only that:

Wow wow wow

Audio&Games

e3 10 and stuff

Post author By harold
Post date June 17, 2010

So Ubisoft lost two of its big name game designers in two months (Clint Hocking and Patrice Désilets, creative directors on the Splinter Cell serie, Far Cry 2, the Assassin’s Creed serie, the Prince of Persia serie yeah, the biggest Ubi games) while Prince of Persia in Hollywood flavor is a disaster? Gotta love the movie/game convergence BS. During that time, it must be sweaty at the Paris Ubi HQ. Don’t worry. Just dance!

*yawn*

Kinect. Well if commercials are trying to sell it this way, uh. It’s creepy! It feels so me-too product four years later with the launch lineup and its seven sports games out of fifteen… For what I saw live, you look a little bit like an ass in front of the TV waving your arms. And I hear about lag issues. And no price announced. And people hijacking the voice command in the future.

It sounds like a nightmare for MS.

The 360 Slim. Good move, not surprising looking at how it worked well for Sony and Nintendo (DS and PS3, the Wii was perfect and the PSPGO was something wrong), but so late: first time I thought MS needed this slim factor so bad was in September 2007. June 2010 it happens but the upgrade seems sort of obvious for a console known for making a fucking damn noise. It’s not what I would like to show in my living room but it’s dark and small so you can hide it easily. I don’t see it selling Kinect hardware.

New Old Zelda. New Old Kirby, New Old Donkey. Silent Hill 8, Portal 2, Final Fantasy XIV… New Old Mortal Kombat, New Old Splatterhouse jeez I’m overwhelmed with innovation.

Child of Eden. It seems awesome for sure but what strikes me is that the concept is almost ten years old (Rez, 2001) and that it’s the same game designer for both games. It feels like we could have had so much more of that since years while publishers were thinking that this is a niche game. Guitar Hero and a desperate need of a killer app for a new device pushed them to go on the music-abstract-visuals game road despite the fact that thousands of people across the world wanted more of that Rez experience, even with a gamepad. Anyway.

Warren Spector’s Epic Mickey. Again, it’s a veteran who’s stealing the show. The ambiance seems great, it’s actually the game that captured my attention the most at the Los Angeles Convention Center. It doesn’t seem to revolutionize anything but it’s pretty dreamy and I love that. Also there’s this how-to-hack-the-system feel to solve problems in the game, like Deus Ex you know? Multiple choices. I just wish it would be available on PCs so that it would be at 100fps on a three years old laptop. PCs seriously need these weird inputs that are Wiimote like devices and camera technology. Camspace, application to use any webcam as input is getting better, but it’s not here yet.

Also, thatgamecompany’s next game has leaked. Seems dreamy. I love dreamy.

Journey. This picture screams Shadow of the Colossus so hard.

Tomorrow, 3DS test damnit.

Me Myself&I

Starvation

Post author By harold
Post date June 9, 2010

Does the Internet Make You Dumber?

I thought about that article writing on Akira, when I had to wait years before being able to watch it again. I had to go to the Fnac store to read and workout the heavy 12 manga volumes edition, month after month, to get my Neo Tokyo fix.

I had to squeeze my memory so bad to remember a maximum of what I saw of the movie. Because of the lack of information I was daydreaming about it, wondering the story over and over again.

What would have it been if I could have watched this movie anytime I wanted to during these early years? I wouldn’t have workout my memory, neither my imagination or my body by standing up hours in a back aisle of a book store. I would have jumped –I guess- to “yeah, give me some more weirdness, more blood, more sex” anime because at ten you just want to see the limits. And there’s hundreds of these. I would have done that without moving from my bedroom, my chair.

So this article rings a bell for sure. Limited knowledge access makes you work more. You have access to a few things and you learn to focus on it, instead of being hit by multiple things all the time, reducing your will to estimate, making you lazy. You are no more surprised by almost any YouTube video. You watch so many in a day, a week, a month that it’s not as extraordinary as it used to be. By over stimulating your brain, your brain becomes numb.

It’s not really a bad thing to have a lot of information if you can filter and search it. It is a great skill and makes you smarter. But it requires effort against the stream, it means being ready to say no to your brain, trying to prioritize this constant flow of data chunks. I over load sometimes, more often than ever.

For people growing up with internet –90s born people- I’m not sure how you would learn to do that except with information starvation. Is it too late?

Crazy! Now More in Real Life Than Eva!

Me Myself&I

Akira

Post author By harold
Post date June 8, 2010

Around May and June, each year since then I sort of think about it. I alway have a quick feeling about this time, the time I saw this movie which would totally and absolutely change my perception of stories and narration.

It was out May 8th, 1991 in France. I must have seen it during the Ascension stuff, my parents were on a weekend trip and my cousin was pre-teen sitting me . I was 10, I was hitting my 20th+ hour of detention (I was chatty and my voice was moving into the get-busted bass frequencies) and knew that this weekend was the only way to see it because of course, my parents wouldn’t have let me do that if they had known about the punition thing, probably would have sent me to the shrink for wanting to see that Akira thing. Thankfully my cousin signed up the detention paper and allowed me to go to the theater.

Pretty awful French poster version but at 10, you think it’s badass!

I was with my best friend and his mom, a bit late. The movie had already started but it couldn’t matter less. Of course when we saw Kaneda we thought out loud “it’s him, Akira!” and then we stopped talking until the end because it was so fucking disturbing, dreamy, violent, amazing, eerie. It was like a kick in the balls with fingers in the eyes and a punch in the stomach all together.

At this time and a few years earlier I was digging Heroic Fantasy stuff. I had my LOTR collection, I had read all the Knights of the Round Table stories I could put my hands on, I was totally into Guillaume d’Orange and could name any part of a medieval castle and explain what it was meant for. Epic.

All of this stuff was being severely damaged with this Japanese masterpiece. Suddenly, my culture and entertainment bubble seemed so freaking old and totally uncool compared to this movie, Dragon Ball on TV (which was getting crazier and crazier, Freezer battle) and Street Fighter II being out. Like, light-years old. Swords arrows magic and helmets were so ridiculous compared to fire balls, laser beam satellites and powerful psyche it wasn’t even funny. Tintin, Spirou, Comics Superheroes, US cartoons (really I mean, really?) were all so inexistent all of sudden. As a child your imagination gets stimulated by everything. I was overwhelmed by stuff I had never thought of before, this mix of realness with unreal in every way (narration, design, themes) stimulating my imagination to much higher levels. So much more nuances. Japan seemed like the Land of Superior Brains. It started ten years of mangas and anime being my primary culture food aside of computer games.

Best 2 Wheels Design Eva, that is all.

I would have to wait three or four years –remember kids, no internet- before having Akira on tape and watch it again in the family couch. It was end of May start of June too.

Anyway, it was a deep experience that no “real movie” except maybe some Lynch’s matched ever. When Terminator 2 loudly came out this same 1991 year, it didn’t impress me. It couldn’t man. At all.

Since then I always have thought about this warm end of May day I’ve been hit by the power of imagination, big time.

Holy shit I want to watch it now.

Audio&Games

I want my shareware back

Post author By harold
Post date June 2, 2010

Why would we have app stores when we have Internet, why would we go for that? (Google is doing a web store, even Asus is doing one for netbooks).

How Apogee Software, Epic Megagames and ID could make at the peak of the shareware business, 100,000$ a month by selling and sending floppy discs to much less gamers that we have today?

Why would we go to support one, probably not compatible with nothing in 6 years platform when we have around 200 million computers sold each year around the world?

It wasn’t the finest way to market it but anyway, shareware made ID Software a huge independent success.

According to GameSetWatch, Jason Rohrer made 43 000$ in less than a month with his last game with crazy ideas stuffed in it, Sleep Is Death sold 14$ the two copies. No DRM No middle-person Cross-platform Open Source. Jason gets 100% of this money.

I want the Shareware back. I want medium sized games, not 40 hours or 5 minutes ones, nor 1 minute Flash loading game or 2.5 Gb to download/uncompress before hitting Start. I want my money to go entirely into the pockets of the developers (AAA games? At best 10% cut for the developer, almost as shitty as music deals) because I love their game. Because I know they’re hard to do and that they deserve it.

I want developers to trust me and that even if their games are pirated, they’re so good that it’s not that much a problem (ID during the 90s PopCap during the 00s). I want them to go for it like PopCap did:

K: One thing that certainly stands out now is that pretty much all of our early games that went on to be big hits — I can clearly remember every one of them having somebody who had stood up before and said, "There’s no way this thing is gonna sell."

I remember someone saying that about Bookworm because they said, "You know, word games just don’t sell. They never sell." I remember someone saying that about Zuma because they said, "This thing’s like an action arcade game. That’s not gonna sell."

And I remember someone saying that about Bejeweled; they said, "There’s no skill here! That’s not even a game. It’s not gonna sell." And yeah, I think Plants vs. Zombies, someone said something to that effect: "This is too weird; it’s too hardcore."

BF: "It’s like a strategy game."

JK: Yeah. So if someone says it’s not gonna sell, that’s probably a good sign.

I want game developers all over the intertubes, I don’t need a GateKeeper, even when they do a good job. I have friends and social medias, they share and I’ll go to any .com or whatever dot something is providing a good experience, some good games to download or stream. And I’ll be way to proud to share it too. We even have QR Code (licence free) to make apps installation a breeze on mobile platform. Why the hell would we want to share our hard-earned revenue and being treated like lemmings?

This console generation has been a disaster (it was absolutely planned) in a lot of ways. I urge developers to start their business and aim to computers which are making them free, while making money. Yeah, not that much consoles or phones if you want to be more than a one-hit-wonder-with-five-iteration-of-it before being sold to a big publisher and die in its hands (IW anyone?).

It happened, it has existed. I don’t see why it couldn’t be possible for the next decade. Or if it can’t be done this way, I’d like to know why…