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The Last Post

ipenburg — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 22:36:00 GMT

This is my last post on this platform. I've migrated my content from this platform to a Bricolage implementation which I use to publish some kind of blog to my XS4ALL webspace: http://www.xs4all.nl/~ipenburg/blog/.

Resident Evil 5 demo

ipenburg — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:45:00 GMT

This one was in the category took-longer-to-download-than-to-decide-to-delete. And it was a sub 1GB download. Everything sucked: controls, field of view, AI, characters, environment. Horror-survival? It's more like a nightmare in which you can't properly move when the zombies are after you. And it looks like Metal Gear Solid with some fake Lara hanging around.

Spun

ipenburg — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 03:38:00 GMT

The good thing about Spun is that it grabs your attention when you flick through the channels. The Sopranos does that as well. It's an important part of getting viewers on TV so I think a lot of shows try to have some kind of signature that makes it possible for the audience to recognize what show it is by watching only a single second of the show, independent of what second in the show it is. CSI has that pretty much nailed, so I never have to see more than a single second of it to realize I dont have to stop flicking at that point. But as I said, Jonas Åkerlund manages with a lot of cuts and sunshine and blow-ups to make you instantly think it's something worth watching, at 0:51AM. It's got John Leguizamoberg and Deborah Harry and a Volvo in it, which is cool. But in the end it's not really worth watching a 101 minute videoclip. It's to much a collage of elements I've seen before, some in his earlier work, but then also so the very same that it feels like he just used the same settings in whatever piece of software he's using to create it. Just like Kill Bill it's not really a movie in a story telling sense, but a showreel of cool scenes the director has always wanted to create put together in something that fails at being a movie. If I would make such a movie I'll put something like that scene from some movie where Sean Penn falls smoking a cigarette into a pool in it, and somehow make up some story where that would happen, and bonus points if you'd manage to get Sean Penn to play that role. That's how it looks like these things get together, or rather not. It's an enjoyable genre, but there are better movies that do all that, and more.

Tonight on arte: Sailor et Lula/Wild at Heart. IIRC that's the real deal.

F.E.A.R. 2 demo

ipenburg — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 04:49:00 GMT

I don't know, but I always get the feeling with these type of games that you're not supposed to play them if you've already played Half-Life. Like Half-Life is some secret source only the developers of today's games know about and secretly base all their games on to easily sell them to the unaware masses. Whether it's Bioshock, Alone in the Dark, F.E.A.R., etc., to me it's all the same, or at least not that different from Half-Life to spend yet more hours crouching through dark buildings shooting anything that moves. Spoiler Alert! As usual, you start out of nowhere in some supposedly serious shit, get talked through some objectives, pick up weapons and health along the way, kill mutants, and probably work your way to some endboss. The end. And then on to the multiplayer to see if that makes the purchase worth it, and probably not. Oh, yeah - F.A.E.R. 2 has some slow motion mode. Isn't that just a sign they had to add useless features to pretend it's more than just old crap? The difference between concepts in these games is just very superficial and the interface style hasn't changed much since the '90s either. But what can you expect from creators whose animated 5.1 logo's are all the same? But during the worldwide financial crisis the crisis will be blamed for any disappointing sales for any product, not the fact the product might just suck... So, is development only aimed at gamers who haven't played Half-Life and will in ten years blog about that all the games are to them just like F.E.A.R. 2? I could compare it with the original Wolfenstein, but going from VGA to 720p makes a difference, and I don't see a difference in the step to 1080p for games. I think watching a well mastered Blu-Ray movie in 1080p is stunning, but while 1080p games definitely look nicer than 720p there's just not enough detail available in the game to bring it out in a way that would make it stunning. And once you get fragging you don't have time to notice the details, and adding a slow motion mode is a HD-TV selling solution looking for a problem.

Fake Tilt Shift

ipenburg — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 02:21:00 GMT

Via via I learned some graphic trick with the highest impressive-result/hard-to-do ratio I've experience so far. The hardest part is finding some good images to use, then it's easy as pie using Gimp. Of the almost 4000 images I screened these were the results:

The last one was easy because the original image already looked like it was of a miniature.

Fun & Games

ipenburg — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 06:34:00 GMT

I'm no big gamer. But maybe that makes it even more important to think about what the few games I play should be like. Recent posts on Slashdot and Rakso show that things are complicated.

For me a game should be fun to play. And given there is supposed to be a lot of AI in today's games, shouldn't the game be able to determine if the player is still having fun? Pinball machines are supposed to have some mechanism to determine what kind of player is currently putting money in it and dynamically adjust the difficulty level so both the casual player and the hardcore player are enjoying playing the machine so much that they choose to put more money in it. This optimizes the profitability of the machine since everyone can play and the hardcore player doesn't occupy the machine for hours on one coin to get to a level he enjoys. It doesn't matter how skilled or experienced the player is, he should be having fun for some time and then put some more money into the machine to have some more fun. Most computer games aren't like that. You pay EUR 70 for a game and then the creator doesn't care how much you like it after that. Every player then enters the same learning curve, making it to difficult or to boring for a lot of players. While it could be possible to dynamically adapt the difficulty level to make the game more enjoyable for a wider range of players, the community won't accept it. What if the game server could detect how enjoyable the gameplay for every player in a multiplayer game was, and adjust so enjoyment would be equally spread among the players, or optimized in some way for all players? I think that would only show that gaming isn't much about fun. It's about competition, hierarchies, levels, grinding and investing huge amounts of time to get some feeling of achievement. The industry is driven by players investing in tools to get ahead, and the games aren't supposed to level the playing field. The more a player invests the more "fun" he is entitled to it seems.

Example. Levels that are dark. Fun would be to accept that it's hard to see in the dark and it requires a different approach then a daylight level. But the competition element makes players adjust the gamma of their screen so the darkness isn't a disadvantage for them. And since they suspect the other players are doing that as well - or just have a more advantageous gamma setting as default - it's not considered cheating. What if the game could detect based on their behaviour that players are seeing more than they are supposed to and make it even darker for them, and leveling the playing field so differences in gamma settings don't make the game more "fun" for the player with the most advantegous gamma setting? Then it would be harder to sell advanced graphics cards that do increase the visual experience of a game but don't give an advantage in the gameplay. You'd have a 120fps WHUXGA display, but still get fragged by a 25fps XGA player because the game is trying to make playing fun for each player. I don't think the player with the 120fps WHUXGA display would appreciate that, and since that's the player probably spending most on games, that's the kind of player the game developers are targetting.

It works the same in some sports. Boxing isn't just about Valuev beating everyone. There are other classes so there is more fun for everyone. And while Ferrari would like to win/buy every race by investing insane amounts of money, I quit watching Formula 1 when it was nothing more than watching Michael Schumacher drive in position 1 for about 70 laps. Not fun and a waste of a nice sunday afternoon. Americans have realized that it's not very entertaining to have some billionaire buy the best players and put them in one unbeatable team. They have created rules that prevent that from happening, while Europeans have some of the best soccer players not even playing because some billionaires can affort to keep them on their bench instead of entertaining the public in another team.

Competition shouldn't be the goal, being entertaining and fun to play should be the goal of games.

MediaTomb, Playstation 3 and Last.fm

ipenburg — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 00:56:00 GMT

And an iBook. What's it worth to loose some more cables in the room? The easy way was to get a piece of Airtunes hardware to just stream music from iTunes to an amp. But since I don't have my music stored as mp3 or some Apple friendly format, at some point iTunes refused to stream or share oggs. That makes Airtunes pretty worthless, and a solution should involve transcoding. On the hardware side my Sony Bravia is already hooked up to my amp, my Playstation is HDMI hooked up to my Sony Bravia and the Playstation is connected to my iBook via WiFi (Linksys OpenWRT). The hardware is there, only some open source software needed to fix things. That means installing MediaTomb on the iBook, configured to transcode the oggs to PCM streams the Playstation can understand. Some tuning with buffers and nice to get it to stream smoothly and it works. And as a bonus I've written a transcode perl script that sits between MediaTomb and ffmpeg and submits the scrobble to my last.fm profile when MediaTomb plays an ogg. And via the optical digital out on the Playstation I can record playlists on my MiniDisc recorder. Who needs optical out on an iBook?

Durch die Nacht mit ...

ipenburg — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 11:10:00 GMT

Miranda July. On arte.tv. Arte is the only not completely german channel I can get via DVB-T. It's half french, so that doesn't help either, but anyway. The rest is all german and the only dutch thing I still watch is Gamekings.tv. (Where Boris is almost on the enthousiastic passionate level of Boudewijn Buch).

GTA IV Liberty City Minute

ipenburg — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Yes, it's possible to complete the GTA IV story in 30 hours or less. I did it in 15 and a half. First I was afraid I would end up beginning the last mission with less than one hour left and then screw that up so bad that those 30 hours were completely wasted, but keeping a schedule the extrapolation soon showed 20 hours was realistic. The approach is that you do nothing but the story, skip every cutscene, skip though every phonecall and do everything by taxi and skip the ride:

Miles on foot: 33.67
Miles by car: 125.33
Miles swam: 0.03
Miles by bike: 12.74
Miles by helicopter: 10.23
Miles by boat: 8.38
Miles by train: 0.00
Miles as a taxi passenger: 380.78
Taxis hailed: 95
Bowling time played: 00:00:01

Which means you don't have a clue what the story is about or where you are, and sometimes you get out of the taxi at your destination just to watch someone escape while your trying to steal your taxi to start the chase. With a limit of 30 hours there is enough slack to screw up some of the longer missions in their end. I missed the ramp, but then found out in the current game you don't have to repeat the whole chase from the beginning of the mission. But there are still some missions that involve driving to some far away place (no taxi allowed), taking out a bunch of bad guys, driving to another far away place, taking out more bad guys and then try to lose Babylon. It all adds up when failing those, but nowhere near 30 hours.

GTA Parisian Life?

ipenburg — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 13:51:00 GMT

I'm not the first to call GTA IV picaresque. But watching Godard's Week-end again after playing GTA IV makes you wonder how litte has changed since 1967. Week-end could be a mission in GTA IV if it wasn't set in the 60s french countryside.