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| Updates (Jare) | August 17th, 2008 - 21:33 |
| After the Activision Blizzard merger thing, a lot of people have been laid off at Radical Entertainment, but thankfully I'm not one of them. I wish the best of lucks to those who are no longer in the company, and I hope they land on their very capable and knowledgeable feet.
When the final details of the layoffs were announced, I was on holidays in Alaska. It's weird to be hiking, trying to catch sight of a bear or moose, and generally having a great time, while you know that at that precise moment you may be losing your job. The trip was lots of fun, filled with jawdropping vistas, and included many kilometers both walking and driving. Here's Mount McKinley:
Carrier Command is being remade. The 1988 original was fantastic, and I often still refer to it in game design discussions.
The Dark Knight is destroying box office records, and with good reason: it is a fantastic movie and deserves all the success it can get. I also hope it serves as a wake up call to all those studios that insist on filling action movies with childish and puerile crap.
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| Dude, where's my loot? (Jare) | July 15th, 2008 - 00:42 |
| The Diablo 3 announcement got my loot-whore juices flowing again. Loot in WoW is a grind to get, Titan Quest hadn't done it for me, AoC didn't even register, Robokill is nice but small, and I am fighting the urge to buy the Diablo 2 battlechest. But then I remembered that the Too Human demo was coming out soon. Today, in fact.
I like what they were trying to do with the game, I like it a lot. Odd combination of Norse mythology, sci-fi, action-packed combat against hordes of enemies, and the level ding and loot thrill. However I'm left fairly underwhelmed by the execution. Like most of the game, graphics alternate between neat and clunky. Combat needs a lot of getting used to, and I only started to 'get it' by the time I finished the demo. A lot of exploration was taken away from me because, being the methodical type, I like to wipe the place then look around, but here after you kill the boss they teleport you to cutscene world. And the cutscenes range from meh to pretty bad.
People in the forums talk about all sorts of neat gear they found in the demo, but I finished it with half white half green stuff, not very exciting. I died a few times and failed two of the three tests I ran into, whereas other people have breezed through it, so my problems may be partly my fault. Summary: ok game but I doubt I'll buy it.
In other news, I am now officially part of the largest videogame publisher in the world. Sounds great but at the moment it doesn't feel like much. :)
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| Movies and stuff (Jare) | July 5th, 2008 - 20:16 |
| Age of Conan came out, a promising MMO from veterans Funcom. It promised gore, nudity, great graphics and a few twists to the classic MMORPG genre. Even though it delivered in those areas, the game is way too buggy, unfinished and, well, unpolished. I reached level 43 and stopped playing. As a developer, I can endure normal bugs, but there's just not enough variety in the game to make me want to play further. I started playing WoW again, leveling a Hunter so I can enjoy the expansion pack in a few months.
LEGO Indiana Jones is great. More of the same if you have played the previous games, but I love it the humor, the gameplay and the original trilogy. The new movie was decent but rather forgettable.
Blizzard announced Diablo 3. YES!! A while ago I felt the Diablo urge again, so I bought Titan Quest; it was good but I just didn't find the excitement and raw "just one more" quality of Diablo 2. People are debating if the more colourful and cartoony graphics of Diablo 3 are appropriate for the series, but after watching the extensive gameplay video, I couldn't care less. It's at least a couple of years away, but I'm sure the wait will be worth it.
I rarely play Flash games, but Robokill is sort of a Robotron/Diablo little game that's a blast to play.
Pixar did it again with Wall-E. While not the absolute masterpiece that was Ratatouille, it's one of the best animated movies ever made. Kung-Fu Panda was surprisingly good and fun, but it's still not in the same league as Pixar.
Other recent movies: The Incredible Hulk acts like Ang Lee's vision never happened (a wise move), but while an ok action movie, it's nothing special. Iron Man was a lot better in every way.
Last weekend we went camping to Vancouver Island. Wonderful weather, and we even managed to watch Spain win the Euro Cup! Here's a view from Mystic Beach:
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| Movies (Jare) | April 7th, 2008 - 00:09 |
| It's been a while since I updated this, so let's at least recap a few movies I've seen lately. From better to worse:
In Bruges: Unique film full of strange situations and unforgettable characters and dialog. Despite being so weird, it still manages to be very entertaining.
Charlie Wilson's War: interesting characters and excellent dialogs in a very entertaining and thought-provoking movie. Very good acting except for Julia Roberts, who for some reason is not believable at all in her role.
Hotel Rwanda: tense, gripping and immensely enjoyable story, despite the tragic setting. Realistic and free of the melodramatic excesses of similarly-themed movies like Schindler's List.
The Descent: reasonably standard survival horror movie that actually works quite well. It takes place inside a giant but oppressive cavern, which adds a lot of atmosphere. Lots of nice details made me very interested in the writer / director's next movie (but see below).
No Country For Old Men: at times surprising, funny, thrilling, but also boring, pointless, artificial.
Superhero Movie: a spoof movie that's actually decent! Not as good as the classics (Airplane, Top Secret, Naked Gun, Hot Shots) and too focused on Spiderman, but certainly not as bad as most movies of this style coming out in recent years.
I Am Legend: Not too bad, not too good either. As many horror/action movies, the concept and setting in the first half are quite interesting, but once the monsters show up it's a steep downhill.
There Will Be Blood: Lots of hype for this movie, and many people love it. I found it pretentious, messy, and ultimately boring. Characters are neither interesting nor believable (which is a serious problem in a character study movie), and the story it tells is for the most part forgettable.
Doomsday: From the same director / writer as The Descent. This... thing tries to recapture the essence of 80's action films like Escape From New York and Mad Max (the 2nd & 3rd). I was never a big fan of those movies, so perhaps there's something here to be enjoyed, but I don't know what it is. Ok, Rhona Mitra looks beautiful, like Kate Beckinsale in Underworld. Guess who's going to star in Underworld 3?
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| Evil Spam (Jare) | March 28th, 2008 - 19:35 |
| Spammers have caught up with the site. For now I have disabled anonymous posting, a more permanent solution will come soon. And hopefully more interesting news.
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| Devil May Cry 4 (Jare) | February 14th, 2008 - 01:13 |
| It's out, and it's fantastic! Finishing the game is relatively easy even for old farts like me, but the point of the game is killing with style, variety and effectiveness. The game's biggest flaw is that it repeats a lot of content, but it doesn't feel too repetitive to me because it's the fun of fighting that matters.
They pulled off a tough feat when more than half of the game is played with a new character instead of our beloved Dante, and that character doesn't suck! Still, as fun as Nero is to play, it was great to get back to Dante and his insane array of guns, swords and one liners.
In other news, we're crunching for the last push in Prototype so don't expect frequent updates here. :)
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| Rez HD (Jare) | January 30th, 2008 - 23:03 |
| The wonderful Rez is back on XBox Live, and it looks and sounds absolutely glorious. Even though the game has an hypnotic and relaxing quality, my right thumb hurts, and with Devil May Cry 4 next week that's just the beginning. :)
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| Political commentary in FPS games? No thanks (Jare) | January 26th, 2008 - 17:04 |
| A few monhts ago in Gamasutra, Harvey Smith described the intriguing elements of social and political subversion in his shooter Blacksite: Area 51. The game apparently turned out to be crap, but I never got to try it. Now Gamasutra again introduces us to another contender for "politically conscious FPS games" in the form of Turning Point: Fall of Liberty. From the horrible demo just released, this game is even worse. I'm all for making games more interesting with complex themes and narratives, but the game doesn't have to suck in order to deliver them!
Ah well, the demo for Devil May Cry 4 more than made up for the bad taste. It plays essentially like the other DMC games (1 and 3; 2 was an aberration), and looks beautiful, crisp and smooth. It may not be innovative, but I won't say no to more of a good thing.
Edit: Check this amazing DMC4 demo run. I don't know how he does half the things he does.
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| Catfight! (Jare) | January 19th, 2008 - 22:53 |
| Ok, this is funny, or sad, probably both. John Romero attacks and Mike Wilson responds. I never had much respect for either guy's public antics, and this doesn't help, but who cares.
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| Cloverfield (Jare) | January 19th, 2008 - 22:57 |
| JJ Abram's latest baby is here, after months of speculation generated by last summer's trailer and an Internet viral campaign. It's basically a Godzilla-like monster movie shown through the eyes of a guy's camcorder. There are many reports of people feeling sick and even throwing up thanks to the savage shaky-cam work. I certainly saw way more people getting up and out of the theater than in any other movie I remember (except for Vatel, but that's a different story).
I liked the movie and had a great time. I don't consider it a great movie by any standards: the plot and writing was crap, the acting was basic at best, and a good quarter of the movie (the beginning) was uninteresting and downright boring. However, the action was intense, the visual style (once you accept the shakycam) worked very well, and the ending was satisfying.
That said, I can't wait for the shakycam fad to pass. It can add to the atmosphere of a movie (see also United 93), but I'd like it to be the exception rather than the norm. Most of the time, when I watch a movie, I want to see what's actually going on.
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| Merry Xmas! (Jare) | December 30th, 2007 - 15:36 |
| And a happy New Year to everyone!
It´s good to be in Spain for a couple of weeks, see the family, friends, and of course have plenty of tapas and fun.
Yesterday I went to watch Michael Clayton, an excellent directorial debut by writer Tony Gilroy. He was clearly influenced by producer Steven Soderbergh's style: slow pace, complex storytelling and heavy emphasis on character development. One of the best movies this year.
Another film I watched today was 1955's The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell, a dramatized documentary about one of the visionaries in the early days of US Air Forces, who in the 1920's predicted things like Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, aircraft carriers or airplanes breaking the sound barrier. Funny bit from the credits: actor Will Wright plays the role of Admiral Sims.
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| Sound effects (Jare) | December 16th, 2007 - 14:01 |
| A few days ago Dr Petter released a little tool to generate simple sound effects for hobby game developers. "An MS Paint for sound effects…" as he puts it himself. It's certainly no SoundForge, but lots of fun to play with, and more than capable for many quick projects.
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| Passage (Jare) | December 5th, 2007 - 00:24 |
| Ok, this is really cool. Passage is a sort of artsy-fartsy game that's supposed to make you think and all that, rather than entertain.
Jokes aside, it is a really interesting experiment. It's not pretty, it's not even fun, but it certainly touches some of the ways in which a game can speak about us, both the author and the players. You should play it without reading any instructions, just... well, like creator Jason Roher says, fire it up and play it. And then, if you are like me, be completely unable to get it, read the Creator's Statement, and think about it.
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| I guess I welcome our new Activision Blizzard overlords (Jare) | December 3rd, 2007 - 10:05 |
| It's been a snowy weekend here in Vancouver, with little expectations in the way of fun or surprises. However, Vivendi Games (who owns my current employer Radical Entertainment) and Activision decided to stir things up a bit by announcing a merger of both companies and naming / branding the result "Activision Blizzard." I'll spare you the "better name suggestion" comment and jokes.
Maybe they cooked it all up in 2 days just to piss off John Riccitello? Nah, he actually said "I think there will be more consolidation to come" so he still ok. Although he will surely make downplay the "we're bigger than EA" message that surrounds the merger press release.
I guess tomorrow will be an interesting Monday at work, with lots of chatter and a few corporate emails about this. Kelly Zmak has so far been very communicative and open (within reason) about the business aspects of Radical. Other than a certain sense of being downplayed (along with other wholly-owned development studios) in the press releases in favor of the 80000-lb gorilla that is Blizzard, I don't expect the new situation to affect our day-to-day life for quite a long time. A bigger muscle behind Prototype, but more games to compete with for marketing attention.
Meanwhile, Activision have put up a specific website to describe the merger; that's pretty neat, even though it's full of predictably corporate language. Both that site and Vivendi's should be hosting a webcast tomorrow morning.
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| Montreal Games Summit (Jare) | November 29th, 2007 - 21:57 |
| Some good stuff coming from there, but from all the coverage I have had access to, this talk by Jonathan Blow is the most interesting (and complete - audio and slides included). A bit incomplete in the sense that it doesn't address the need for commercial games to work as commercial products, but commercial viability is not his point anyway.
For some time I have held the belief that games have a hard time as meaningful forms of expression, because the kind of activity and instant-to-instant attention they require tends to overwhelm the mind and distract from what could be meaningful in them. Cutscenes and narrative are hailed by some as the answer, since they are aspects of the game experience where the player is not (necessarily) bombarded with that level of activity, and is more receptive to messages and ideas. However, these tend to be times where the game stops being a game and becomes something else, a purely narrative experience where the player is turned into a spectator, one anxiously deprived of interactive capabilities.
Portal, Bioshock or Half Life (and other games before them) break the mold a bit by rarely coming to a full stop. You can listen to the audio recordings, computer speech or feel the chaos around you while you are moving, exploring or figuring out what's coming next. In Shadow of the Colossus, you have long periods of riding where your mind is free to think about the land and what happened to leave it so barren. But these moments are still not using the power of interaction and player agency.
I think he does a great disservice to World of Warcraft by focusing on a limited set of aspects of that game, and completely ignoring the amount of player-to-player interaction, player-created goals, and encouragement of exploration. If you play WoW as a single-player game and see other people simply as means to achieve your own goals, then yeah, all you have is a very addictive but unfulfilling experience. But if you don't restrict yourself like that, you have access many aspects of human nature: greed, friendship, despair, organization, envy, curiosity, and even conscious self-expression through role-playing. You could say that those are the same experiences you can get with real-life social activities. But, as he says of poetry vs movies vs music, they are all capable of providing interestingly different flavours of the same thing.
I loved his description of games development being poorer as a result of being done as series of problems to solve or squash. It's all too true, especially for a problem-solver kind of developer like myself. :)
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| XNA 2.0 Beta (Jare) | November 24th, 2007 - 23:13 |
| The beta is out, so I dusted off my test project and checked it out.
The transition was fairly painless, and the great news is that it works with Visual Studio 2005. No more of that Express crap! (to be fair, VC# Express is quite good for the price)
I was curious about the Content Pipeline stuff since I had never touched it before, so I set out to prepare a custom Model processor that would extract more detailed material parameters from the source art, including a property to specify a specific fx shader / effect. There are better ways to do that if your 3D package has HLSL integration and a good .X exporter, but that was not the point.
All was well until I figured I needed to debug my custom processor. Hm... how do I do that? Read the comments for the gory details.
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| Here's to old times (Jare) | November 24th, 2007 - 00:07 |
| It's been 20 years since my brother Juan Carlos and I developed our first commercial game, Stardust. It was a fairly straightforward vertical shoot'em up game, where you flew your ship over massive space stations.
The original idea from Jose Manuel Muñoz was quite different. When he saw our Uridium-inspired graphics concepts, he envisioned a game where battleships would duel in space. The player would be in control of one of them, and was able to configure the weapons and shield to optimize the performance of the spaceship in combat.
Back then we had no idea what he was talking about. :) What he described sounded nothing like the kind of games we were playing, so we simply pushed our more mainstream design and used his ideas to build and tune the station's weapons and moving platform defenses.
A few years ago, Hikoza T Ohkubo released a fantastic freeware arena shooter called Warning Forever. The idea is to destroy progressively tougher boss spaceships with evolving weapon and hull configurations. Earlier this year, another boss-based shooter called Fraxy came out and became a cult success. Sean Chan just released the Warning Forever-inspired RTS game Battleships Forever. It is a really great game and deserves the best of lucks in the IGF competition next year.
I imagine Jose Manuel seeing these games and thinking "We should have been making these games back in 1987!". If so, then yeah man, we should have; I'm not sure how the poor ZX Spectrum would have handled, but hey. :) Another idea I remember him and Javier Cano discussing was about a game where you would have to save dozens of little guys from buildings on fire... again, I couldn't even imagine how to make a game out of that, but a few years later, some bedroom coder in the UK came up with Lemmings.
So, in the 20th anniversary of Stardust's release, I want to say a big THANK YOU to Jose Manuel Muñoz and Javier Cano. You guys took Juan Carlos and I, a couple of aspiring programmers, and created two game developers for life.
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| Mario Galaxy (Jare) | November 17th, 2007 - 23:20 |
| It is absolutely incredible. So much charm, creativity, humor, polish and attention to detail. After playing this, you will never again wonder why you bought a Wii.
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| Thank you GPG and some PS3 impressions (Jare) | November 11th, 2007 - 12:16 |
| Gas Powered Games have released a patch that removes the SecuROM copy protection crap from Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance. The game was released this week, so the patch has taken less than 4 days to arrive. Another game to add to the neverending pile!
I also bought a PS3. I knew I would get one sooner or later, and with the recent price discounts and Ratchet & Clank now out, there just wasn't any reason to delay the inevitable. R&C is fantastic: smooth, beautiful, fun, varied and uncomplicated. In a way it's disappointing, because it feels pretty much the same as the PS2 original when it came out. This once again confirms Jason Rubin's idea that graphics are going to get better but not really add anything new to games.
After the XBox Live experience, the PS Store seems incredibly limited and amateurish in comparison. A crisp but ugly interface, very few demos available, the installation process for these demos can take between 5 and 10 minutes, and it has already crashed once.
I checked out the Heavenly Sword demo, and now think that Zero Punctuation's review was way too positive. Which might explain why the PS3 built-in web browser is unable to play it.
Another let down was the demo for Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. This game sounds great on paper: Tomb Raider-style gameplay, great production and graphics, state of the art animation technology, well written story and characters. I didn't see any of that in the demo. Animation in particular looked extremely poor to me, with things like very visible (and I mean VERY) skidding. A nice touch was the way the t-shirt wrinkles as the character moves, but I'll be damned if I'm going to pay $70 for THAT.
At least I can fill a coupon and get 5 free Blue-Ray movies. Edit: or install Yellow Dog Linux on it. In fact I'm typing this from there.
One final note: why do so many recent console games have such bad tearing? I've been looking forward to Switchball (now available on XBox Live) since I saw it at the IGF (2 years ago?), and I was ready to pay the 800 MS points, but the tearing in the demo turned me off instantly.
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