... or the Street Figther Years...
Capcom has put together a short mini series/documentary about the 90's pop culture as part of their promotion for their new Street Fighter game. Here's everything from Wayne's World to Basic Instinct and Kriss Kross. Nostalgic and really worth watching!
Swiiing!
Part One:
Part Two:
Part Three:
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Mainstream gaming
I was just surfing around the net today when I started watching some of the older Zero Puntuation game reviews. One of the videos is the review of Braid, one of the better games released last year, despite it beeing a 2D platform game. Now the reason I bring this up is because isn't because of the game review itself, but he makes some really interesting points about the game industry and where it's heading. I just couldn't agree more with what he's saying.
Now I agree that a game shouldn't hide or excuse gameplay, story elements or anything because it's trying to be "artsy", I also agree that all games should have closure. There's nothing more unsatisfactionary than spending days playing a game and then having it all ending with some weird, ununderstandable or completly open ending.
"It's open for interpertation" my ass..
Open endings are okay though as long as there's a sequal coming up, but there should still be some closure and ending to make the player happy and satisfied. I've played a few games that have just dropped that and gone for a completly open ending. The whole game ends up like a waste of time.. It's like canceling your favourite TV series mid season or your favourite movie 20 minutes before the end.
Anyways, what I really wanted to talk about was the part that games are becoming more and more action oriented.
I've taken Resident Evil as an example here. The first game in the series was great! You start out by entering an old mansion out in nowhere. The house appears empty and the atmosphere is just really spooky. You know something isn't right, you're constantly on guard, expecting something horrible to show up around the next corner - and still it often manages to scare the bejezus out of you when you least expect it. The story is simple, but interesting. The puzzles are good and actually requires some thinking. Wow.. A word that developers seems to steer away from these days.
The newly released Resident Evil 5 continue the series and proves my inital point. Now it's not a bad game at all, but it's just not scary... it's not very atmospheric or claustrophobic either, even the puzzles are a cakewalk. The game setting is out in daylight and you're shooting at hordes of angry people coming towards you. The scariest thing that happens is having to reload or running out of ammo.
But as I said, it's not a crappy game as it is. It's fun and enteratining - as a game should be! It's just that could have been any game. It could've been "John Doe, action hero extreme" .. All the elements which made the original so great has been swapped for a pure action killing spree, just milking off the franchise name.
Another example is the Neverwinter Night series. Good games, but I constanly get the feeling that I'm fighting horeds of monsters that has been put in there solely as a time consumption and to keep me from progressing the story too fast. Those are the parts of the game that makes me quit and do something else.
On the other hand I guess I have to respect that maybe most gamers like the action parts better than the story parts.. I dunno, but I hope to see more games like Braid in the future. I am posivite about the gaming future as well! Because as more and more people start to play games and the few really big production companies keeps buying up the medium sized companies I'm sure there will be a demand and a marked for small, orignal indie games. We're already seeing some of this today :)
Now I agree that a game shouldn't hide or excuse gameplay, story elements or anything because it's trying to be "artsy", I also agree that all games should have closure. There's nothing more unsatisfactionary than spending days playing a game and then having it all ending with some weird, ununderstandable or completly open ending.
"It's open for interpertation" my ass..
Open endings are okay though as long as there's a sequal coming up, but there should still be some closure and ending to make the player happy and satisfied. I've played a few games that have just dropped that and gone for a completly open ending. The whole game ends up like a waste of time.. It's like canceling your favourite TV series mid season or your favourite movie 20 minutes before the end.
Anyways, what I really wanted to talk about was the part that games are becoming more and more action oriented.
I've taken Resident Evil as an example here. The first game in the series was great! You start out by entering an old mansion out in nowhere. The house appears empty and the atmosphere is just really spooky. You know something isn't right, you're constantly on guard, expecting something horrible to show up around the next corner - and still it often manages to scare the bejezus out of you when you least expect it. The story is simple, but interesting. The puzzles are good and actually requires some thinking. Wow.. A word that developers seems to steer away from these days.
The newly released Resident Evil 5 continue the series and proves my inital point. Now it's not a bad game at all, but it's just not scary... it's not very atmospheric or claustrophobic either, even the puzzles are a cakewalk. The game setting is out in daylight and you're shooting at hordes of angry people coming towards you. The scariest thing that happens is having to reload or running out of ammo.
But as I said, it's not a crappy game as it is. It's fun and enteratining - as a game should be! It's just that could have been any game. It could've been "John Doe, action hero extreme" .. All the elements which made the original so great has been swapped for a pure action killing spree, just milking off the franchise name.
Another example is the Neverwinter Night series. Good games, but I constanly get the feeling that I'm fighting horeds of monsters that has been put in there solely as a time consumption and to keep me from progressing the story too fast. Those are the parts of the game that makes me quit and do something else.
On the other hand I guess I have to respect that maybe most gamers like the action parts better than the story parts.. I dunno, but I hope to see more games like Braid in the future. I am posivite about the gaming future as well! Because as more and more people start to play games and the few really big production companies keeps buying up the medium sized companies I'm sure there will be a demand and a marked for small, orignal indie games. We're already seeing some of this today :)
Friday, February 27, 2009
Updated portfolio!
I finally got some time to collect some renders from my projects over the last year and uploaded them to my temporary online portfolio. There's a mix of both professional work related and private projects, and some WiP's there as well to fill up the space.
As always I appreciate crits and comments to improve my skills :)
Click here to go to my Online Portefolio! (Site's in Norwegian, but I guess everyone should be able to figure this one out ;))
As always I appreciate crits and comments to improve my skills :)
Click here to go to my Online Portefolio! (Site's in Norwegian, but I guess everyone should be able to figure this one out ;))
The NRKBeta Doctrine
I found and copied the English part from this article on NRKbeta.no. Written by Øyvind Solstad on March 2008. NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting) is a the largest national TV station in Norway
Some weeks ago NRK - Norwegian Broadcasting put up one of the most popular shows in Norway on bittorrent. For free, with no DRM, no country restrictions. It has been a huge success and so far about 100 000 episodes have been downloaded by our readers! After being featured on boingboing and digg, Eirik Solheim of NRK was interviewed by the German website Tagesschau:
Some weeks ago NRK - Norwegian Broadcasting put up one of the most popular shows in Norway on bittorrent. For free, with no DRM, no country restrictions. It has been a huge success and so far about 100 000 episodes have been downloaded by our readers! After being featured on boingboing and digg, Eirik Solheim of NRK was interviewed by the German website Tagesschau:
If you want control of your content you need to lock it down in a vault and never show it to anyone. We gave up control of our content the day we started broadcasting. For years our most popular content have been available on BitTorrent and on sites like YouTube anyway. DRM doesn't work. The only way to control your content is to be the best provider of it. If people want it on YouTube then you should publish it on YouTube or in a system that give the same experience. If people want it on BitTorrent then you should provide that. If you do it right people will come to your official publish point and you'll end up with more control.
Tjervaag calls this “The NRKbeta doctrine”:
I hereby coin the NRKbeta Doctrine: The only way to control your content is to be the best provider of it.
Yesterday we saw that the creators of South Park has understood the NRKbeta doctrine! Now you can see all episodes of South Park at southparkstudios.com. Why go somewhere else when you can see everything South Park on the South Park website?
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
What about the user?
This is probably close to swearing in the church since I work in an ad agency, but I've always been one of those people who wants functionality and customization before design. So understandably I've honestly never been an Apple fanboy. Not that I have anything against Apple, or atleast I'm trying to convince myself that's the case :)
There's no denying Apple has come up with some cool and new products lately and is certainly getting alot more attention than before. The first time someone at work brought his brand new iPod Touch I was astonished. Right there and then it was everything I wanted in a gadget! So I bought one myself. Then a year later I got a iPhone 3G which supposedly had everything missing on the iPod. Now my opinions about Apple has changed a lot the last year. They're pushing technology and boundaries, but there's still one very big issue with them. User control! - Or rather the lack of it..
As soon as I sat down with iTunes I felt like Apple took away my rights as a user to control my own bought gadgets and files. For starters, why am i forced to use iTunes in the first place? Ideally the phone should pop up as a disk drive which you could freely copy files to and from. My 4-5(?) year old Sony Ericsson does this without blinking. Connect it and a new disk drive pops up with easily recognised folders like "Games", "Music", "Documents" on it.
And why can I only copy files from one computer? If I one day want to transfer some music from my work computer it tells me I have to format the phone first. I can only guess it's a form of copy protection, but in my opinion it's certainly not Apple's job to tell me what I can copy and not. Besides what happened to the good ol' "innocent untill proven otherwise"?
Even just making a ring tone from a song I have requires a bunch of steps in and out of iTunes, including renaming file extentions to trick iTunes. I can't even share files with friends via bluetooth. I've never come across any other phone that won't let me do these basic things.
I'm just scratching the surface here and of course I can always jailbreak/hack the phone to get around many of these problems, but that's not the point. My whole point is that even though Apple is doing a lot of things right these days, they should really take their customers seriously and open up their products, not put in a whole bunch of restrictions on the end user. User-friendlyness and user-protection (from viruses and adware) does not have to go hand in hand with user restrictions!
There's no denying Apple has come up with some cool and new products lately and is certainly getting alot more attention than before. The first time someone at work brought his brand new iPod Touch I was astonished. Right there and then it was everything I wanted in a gadget! So I bought one myself. Then a year later I got a iPhone 3G which supposedly had everything missing on the iPod. Now my opinions about Apple has changed a lot the last year. They're pushing technology and boundaries, but there's still one very big issue with them. User control! - Or rather the lack of it..
As soon as I sat down with iTunes I felt like Apple took away my rights as a user to control my own bought gadgets and files. For starters, why am i forced to use iTunes in the first place? Ideally the phone should pop up as a disk drive which you could freely copy files to and from. My 4-5(?) year old Sony Ericsson does this without blinking. Connect it and a new disk drive pops up with easily recognised folders like "Games", "Music", "Documents" on it.
And why can I only copy files from one computer? If I one day want to transfer some music from my work computer it tells me I have to format the phone first. I can only guess it's a form of copy protection, but in my opinion it's certainly not Apple's job to tell me what I can copy and not. Besides what happened to the good ol' "innocent untill proven otherwise"?
Even just making a ring tone from a song I have requires a bunch of steps in and out of iTunes, including renaming file extentions to trick iTunes. I can't even share files with friends via bluetooth. I've never come across any other phone that won't let me do these basic things.
I'm just scratching the surface here and of course I can always jailbreak/hack the phone to get around many of these problems, but that's not the point. My whole point is that even though Apple is doing a lot of things right these days, they should really take their customers seriously and open up their products, not put in a whole bunch of restrictions on the end user. User-friendlyness and user-protection (from viruses and adware) does not have to go hand in hand with user restrictions!
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Pico 3D engine
A friend of mine just tipped me about this.
A bunch of still active demoscene folks have just released their tool Pico, a real time 3D engine for Maya. This is the guys behind Linger in Shadows which is available for download on the PSN. The tool is completly What You See Is What You Get and it can export your animation as stand alone files for distribution. Allthough the latter is still a bit buggy according to their page.
As an 3D artist who grew up with the demoscene and going to LAN parties before they became all about gaming this is something I've wanted for a long time and this just looks incredible impressive! Something I'm definitively gonna try out.
A bunch of still active demoscene folks have just released their tool Pico, a real time 3D engine for Maya. This is the guys behind Linger in Shadows which is available for download on the PSN. The tool is completly What You See Is What You Get and it can export your animation as stand alone files for distribution. Allthough the latter is still a bit buggy according to their page.
As an 3D artist who grew up with the demoscene and going to LAN parties before they became all about gaming this is something I've wanted for a long time and this just looks incredible impressive! Something I'm definitively gonna try out.
What are the features of pico?Check out this sample video or visit their homepage here.
Except of having a possibility to preview your work in realtime and build interactive content you can have control over features like:
- soft shadows
- translucency
- depth of field
- normal mapping, cone step displacement mapping
- screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO)
- HDR imaging
- OpenEXR rendering
- lots of post processing effects
- easy user interface, much faster and robust than traditional maya hypershader
Thursday, January 15, 2009
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