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2000-2005
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Javier Arévalo Baeza
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Page (of 13): 1 ... 11 12 [13]
| Irreversible and Alexander (Jare) | January 17th, 2005 - 20:15 |
| I just watched Irreversible, a truly unique, graphic and brutal french film about (so to speak) violence against women. Only for people with either a strong stomach, or a complete lack thereof, especially if you're a woman. Despite the "shock value" that one may read in the film, it has so much more.
Also watched Alexander which, while overly long and pretentious (european production kicks in), was still worth it.
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| Sabbatical! (Jare) | January 15th, 2005 - 05:24 |
| Well it's finally happening! I'm taking a 6-month sabbatical away from Pyro Studios and work, to replenish my batteries and pursue some things I've been NOT doing for too long. Game development is tough and stressing, and after this many years I feel the drain, so when the opportunity showed up I decided to take it.
Some people are betting after I have relaxed for a few weeks I won't feel up to the task of going "back to the trenches"... All I can say is, I still feel the same passion for games development, so despite the hardships and headaches, expect me back in the summer.
Feel free to post your suggestions and experiences while taking a sabbatical, this could be fun.
On another note, the TV series 24 started running the 4th season, and it's as engaging as ever.
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| Fake Yamauchi interview (Jare) | January 5th, 2005 - 16:05 |
| A Spanish website reprinted a Wired Magazine interview with Hiroshi Yamauchi, retired CEO of Nintendo. It was all a hoax for the Dec 28th, which is Spain's version of April Fools.
http://www.gamerah.com/noticias.php?bias=180#180
It's awesome, outrageous, fun and... yeah I had to be told it was a fake.
By the way, Happy new Year!
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| Everquest 2 (Jare) | December 14th, 2004 - 15:49 |
| I'm enjoying EQ2 a lot more than I expected, being a longtime EQ1 hater. I just had a 5-day streak of powergaming (so to speak) exploring the game. I am even crafting, which I could never force myself to do in previous MMO's!
More details inside, hit "View Replies" to read it.
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| The Incredibles, and more movies (Jare) | November 28th, 2004 - 15:39 |
| Amazing movie, Pixar once again outdoing themselves. Everything in the movie is a joy to see: characters, style, animation, special effects, script, action... It's just too good to describe it in depth here.
Also watched Alien vs. Predator, which was ok, entertaining and forgettable action. Shaun of the Dead was quite funny, too cheap and sitcom-like to be a classic, but an above-average parody.
A few months ago I bought Blood Simple on DVD, but didn't get around to watching it until yesterday. I had already seen it way back when it was released, and my only memory was that I liked it. This time I was downright impressed, it's 100% Coen material. Now if I can lay my hands on the much more mysterious and confusing Barton Fink, I'll have my Coen filmography revision finished.
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| In the news... (Jare) | November 28th, 2004 - 06:19 |
| Apparently, the other night, while a high-profile soccer match was being aired, a gang of 15 guys with automatic weapons dropped by the central storage facility of Toys'R Us in Madrid, and stole close to a million Euros in videogames material: Playstation 2 consoles, GTA: SA, Halo2, etc. Makes you wonder if videogames have the highest value per volume unit among all toys. Then, again, you have to wonder why a kid's toy store are selling GTA: San Andreas.
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| Halo 2 (Jare) | November 20th, 2004 - 09:26 |
| After the Half-Life 2 experience (not finished yet), I'm in love with FPS games again! Halo 2 is probably the most fluid and downright fun shooter I have ever played. Not terribly innovative, but does everything right, and brings an outstanding dual-wielding feature that will most surely become as standard as the WASD keyboard layout. And I thought it was just eye-candy for the masses when I saw that in the videos... Well written script without imposing overly long narrative sections, a perfect design where different gameplay styles blend smoothly, nice array of weapons and enemies, and again a control and aiming implementation that makes the keyboard and mouse almost obsolete.
A couple minor issues with textures and models popping during cutscenes, but who cares? Kudos to Bungie for delivering once again.
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| ...And the Half-Life 2 opinion (Jare) | November 23rd, 2004 - 11:33 |
| To sum it up, I'm disappointed after 5-6 hours with it. It's great to see and play with all the amazing technology tricks shown in the HL2 promo videos; visuals and atmosphere is sometimes brilliant; the gravity gun is a very original and interesting idea. But! In my experience, it just lacks pace and coherence. It starts great, then drives you nuts with an overly long driving sequence, then the whole thing goes to hell when you are thrown into a messy pit of physics puzzles with zombies and a mad guy jumping around. If you hated Max Payne's psychotic dream sequences, you'll probably hate this as well.
If a lesson was contained in HL1, it is that fighting intelligent soldiers in a near-future setting is TONS of fun. Why did they think that a bunch of zombie-like mutants with no AI and a cartoony horror setting were a great idea?
Oh well it can only get better from here. But as far as the "best FPS games ever", my money is still with the likes of Halo, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Painkiller, Medal of Honor and Doom 3. And, of course, the original Half-Life (minus the alien world).
PS: Load times don't help either. The menu in particular is infuriating.
Edit: The game seems to improve after the first half is done and you get the bugbait.
Edit II: The second half is definitely much better, up until the end.
Edit III: The retail game includes SecuROM copy protection AND still requires you to activate? That just doesn't make any sense. I can only guess that nobody at Vivendi were using their brains this year... SecuROM costs money per unit, creates problems for some people with bad/old drives, annoys players by requiring the CD, and in this case does nothing at all to prevent piracy. It's a loss / loss situation.
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| Classes, Half-Life 2 (Jare) | November 13th, 2004 - 10:25 |
| Yesterday I gave my first session for the Master Course on Videogame development at the UCM. 4 hours describing and discussing the evolution of Spain's game development industry, as well as a number of personal experiences throughout those years. It was great! I was afraid people would be bored or that I'd run out of material for such a long session. As usual, unfounded fears: the students enjoyed it, asked tons of questions until we were forced out of the classroom (including the satisfying classic "when are you coming again for another session?", yay!), and I had managed to follow the timeline with only minor deviations.
Exhausted head and mouth, but good times.
Another awesome "making of" article at Gamespot, this time about Half-Life 2. You get the clear feeling that he already prepared and wrote another one for last year. :)
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6112889/index.html
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| World Of Warcraft (Jare) | November 5th, 2004 - 19:30 |
| Finally started playing the stress test / open beta. My first impression is that it's a polished and pretty DAoC set in the Warcraft universe. If I actually have the patience to progress my char and see the high-level game, I'll have more things to say, .
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| Random bits... (Jare) | November 4th, 2004 - 16:38 |
| Check this out! The worst part is, that image IS the poster shown at http://www.starwars.com :
http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=1193002
I watched the movie Spartan again, and I loved every bit of it again.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas smashed every record for sales during the first weekend, and easily competes with any major blockbuster movie. Crisis? What crisis? Well... Longtime developer Argonaut (of Starglider fame) went bankrupt, which is not good news.
Bush won, the rest of the world lost.
BCN Party'04 rocked in true demoscene spirit. I was also supposed to participate in a roundtable at Art Futura that same weekend (they paid for my trip), but the session time was changed and I found out too late. :(
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| Praetorians 1.05 patch (Jare) | October 22nd, 2004 - 07:47 |
| Fileplanet download
Basically, it fixes the bug with troops becoming invulnerable after splitting them. It includes the 1.04 fixes as well, so you can apply it directly to a fresh install of the game (any language, including eastern versions). It is not officially supported, but I'm very confident that it works.
My big thanks to all the people who helped with this, and those who had the patience to wait this long. Better late than never I guess! :)
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| Half Life 2 went gold? (Jare) | October 18th, 2004 - 11:46 |
| And I still own that 3-year old piece of crap PC. I hope the game really is so good that I finally find an excuse to upgrade.
It will be interesting to see how the whole deal with Steam sales vs. retail goes... especially with the "preload" trick that Valve pulled off: removing the pains of having to wait for the download while other people are already playing, means that more people will be willing to go the Steam route. Will that be a significant number?
Will be a busy end of year with Dawn of War, Fable, HL2, Halo 2 and San Andreas (plus Metroid Prime 2 if you are a Gamecuber).
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| Fable (Jare) | October 16th, 2004 - 20:15 |
| I started playing Fable on the XBox. It looks great so far: varied, beautiful and polished. My only complaints are some control issues and the usually crappy cutscenes consisting of little more than slow dialogue.
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| Strange day... (Jare) | October 15th, 2004 - 12:21 |
| Now for something completely different. Since a few days ago, some people have decided to use our parking spots at the office. Different people each time, this wednesday it was a police car that invaded our space! (Our offices are located near a police station)
Today there were two cars, so after the usual process of asking around with no results, I simply moved my car to block the exit of our area of the garage, and left a note to come upstairs if someone needed to exit. I specifically left out my name to make things more embarrassing for them.
Sure, a few hours later while I was having lunch, a guy showed up at the door, looking unsure who to ask. My boss walked up to him, and the dude started saying something about a car blocking the exit while he produced a police ID from his wallet, surely expecting to intimidate.
My boss looked at him and said "So what?" The guy lost his arrogance, and was informed that I'd be back in 30 minutes or he could go get me at the restaurant. He sat down and waited, and was very polite and ashamed when I arrived and unblocked the way.
The other offender showed up an hour later, very impolite and defensive.
Some people just have no respect for others. When it is the police authority that behaves like that, you just wonder who you really need protection from. Anyway, this event provided for tons of jokes all through the day.
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| More pics (Jare) | October 14th, 2004 - 16:47 |
| Feels good to be slowly populating the Gallery with more photos.
My up and coming plans regarding this weblog system is to remove the requirement to register in order to write a comment. Who knows, maybe some day someone will bother replying to a post. :)
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| Welcome! (Jare) | October 11th, 2004 - 19:43 |
| This is the weblog system I have written for my site. Please don't abuse it. :) It supports a number of phpBB tags like [b], [i], [u], [img] and such. Give it a try and tell me what you think!
The old archives are still available here.
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