Time to check in again with the Outerra project, an engine that's currently being developed that threatens to make video games more awesome. How dare it.
The last time we checked in, things were on a planetary scale. This time, let's close in, look at some grass. Which may sound boring, but when it's done this lavishly and looks this good, and is procedurally-generated to boot (dropping in "bald" patches and changing the density and elevation), it's super interesting.
Those of a more technical persuasion can read the finer details below.
So much of what makes zombie survival mod DayZ so enjoyable to play is in the intangibles. You can't sum it up in bullet-points, or just say "it's fun", you need to experience a night in the dark with no food or water, on the run from both the living and the dead, to really get a handle on things.
Or you could watch this clip. Because for every epic 12-hour survival tale you'll have, you'll have another experience just like this one.
Jak & Daxter cosplay. I don't know why there's a lady in Jak & Daxter cosplay this week, but I don't care. I applaud her for it.
I also applaud the Team Fortress 2 squad you'll see in the gallery, because they realise it's not the guns or the outfits that are the most important things in TF2 cosplay. It's the hats.
To see the larger pics in all their glory (or so you can save them as wallpaper), right-click on the "expand" icon on the main image above and select "open in new tab".
Fancy Pants is a look at the world of cosplay (costume play), where people dress up as their favorite video game characters. Sometimes it works! Sometimes it...yeah.
If this video is real - and given its shoddy quality, that's no guarantee - It would appear the BBC have some issues using Google Image Search.
For a piece on Amnesty and the United Nations Security Council's response to events in Syria last week, it seems the BBC's production crew needed a graphic for the international body. So they went to Google. And got...well, what they thought was the logo for the UN's Security Council (which doesn't really have one), but which in fact is the logo of the United Nations Space Command, humanity's protectors in the Halo universe.
Whoops.
This clip ran late last week; any British readers manage to see it live?
UPDATE - OK, so readers are telling me it did indeed air on BBC 1 last Thursday, during the News at One.
First shown off at this year's Toy Fair, there'll soon be a line of action figures based not just on Halo, but on the Halo gear your little Xbox 360 avatars can wear.
Which should make these all kinds of awkward, but the end result is surprisingly endearing. The ones that are clearly avatars, I could take 'em or leave 'em, but the ones that just look like cute little Spartans are great.
You might think you love Blade Runner—and if you don't, you should!—but do you love it enough to track down and digitally recreate a prop that most people have never even noticed? This amazing viewer did.
The recently resurfaced magazine covers, approximating the dystopian pop cultural glossies of LA in 2019, range from creepy to sublime: there's Moni, the tech mag. Horn looks like a copy of Cosmo you'd find in the Tyrell Corporation lobby—"THE COSMIC ORGASM"—and then there's Dorgon Magazine, which is just wonderful gibberish. The attention to detail that went into designing these covers is astounding, considering they appear only as infinitesimal items in otherwise enormous sets. The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal found newly drafted versions of the covers, digitally drawn by a Blade Runner fan known only as Kevin. What Madrigal pinned down, with some sleuthing that would make Deckard proud, is amazing:
In this case, clip art from a computer in the early 1980s was used to make magazine covers that were printed and then filmed in a classic movie. These things were forgotten for decades until sometime during or shortly before 2009, someone (Kevin) started to reconstruct them for his friends in an Internet forum about the movie. Some forumgoer used them as a Kindle screensaver; another was going to print them out and frame them, according to a forum posting.
It's a dazzling Internet Möbius strip—an ode to a sci-fi artifacts that never really existed at all. [The Atlantic]
Slow action in North America as the United States takes a break for cookouts on Monday. Mass Effect, Prototype and Arkham City all have notable content drops. Resistance: Burning Skies arrives on PS Vita.
Monday
• The Binding of Isaac: The Wrath of the Lamb (PC)
Tuesday
• Mass Effect 3: Rebellion Pack (XBLA, PC)
• Prototype 2: Excessive Force Pack (XBLA, PSN)
• Batman: Arkham City - Harley Quinn's Revenge (PC, PSN, XBLA)
• Resistance: Burning Skies (PS Vita)
• Atelier Meruru: The Apprentice of Arland (PS3)
• Deer Drive Legends 3D (3DS)
Wednesday
• Sega Vintage Collection: Streets of Rage (XBLA)
• Sega Vintage Collection: Golden Axe (XBLA)
• Mad Riders (XBLA)
Saturday evenings, either by design or accident, is when the biggest "holy shit?!" moments go down at Blip Festival. Last night, day two of Blip Fest 2012, continued the traditional and then some.
That video above is Omodaka. The multimedia powerhouse is one of two acts that festival organizers said were absolutely do-not-miss.
Omodaka graced the stage of Blip Festival Tokyo last year, and can be somewhat described at a witches' brew of DS Lite, Game Boy Color, PSP, and super kawaii videos, all masterfully orchestrated by a mysterious individuals donning a theater mask and kimono. But honestly, that's barely scratching the surface.
One of the best things about Blip Festival is the foreign talent they bring to American soil. And Omodaka's set, which essentially combines traditional Kabuki Theater and beloved Japanese chiptunes atheistic, can easily be considered a bold new step forward for the medium.
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The second must-see act at Blip Fest 2012 was Josh Davis, aka Bit Shifter, longtime friend to Nullsleep and co-founder of the modern chiptune scene. Bit Shifter completely tore the house down with his dance your ass off set.
If Merriam-Webster ever gets around to defining chiptunes, they need only have a picture (or preferably video) of Bit Shifter. He's basically the guy that most every 8-bit musician aspires to be, period. If Davis was to play the same exact set as did at the very first Blip, six years ago, there we be zero complaints. But of course, Bit Shifter is better than that.
His set this time was punctuated with a great deal of singing. The plan originally was to have vocals for every single song, according to Davis afterward, but he wasn't able to properly prepare in time. It's understandable, given the Herculean challenges behind the scenes when it comes to putting Blip together.
Instead, half the set was singing, and half the set was some of standards (along with a cover of a BSK song). Again, no complaints here.
But Blip is not over yet; tonight is the final night. If you're near Gramercy Park in Manhattan, stop by and witness its conclusion first hand. Tickets may be purchased here.
No sports video game—no video game, I'd argue—is as harangued as Madden NFL. Read any forum thread, read the comments to any story, including this one, and the list of gamer demands for the upcoming release is quite long and quite detailed. "New music" doesn't appear in any of it.
Why, then, is Madden NFL 13 getting a new broadcast theme this year?
"Sure, it's a good question," Matt Bialosuknia acknowledges, before preparing an answer. "We have really pushed the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 to the highest visual fidelity that we can. Especially this year. I feel like our audio has come up short, or was sort of underinvested.
"For me," says Bialosuknia, the game's chief audio producer, "it adds the additional layer of 'wow' and overall immersion into Madden that hasn't really been there."
What he really means is that Madden's new theme, which you can hear at left, isn't necessarily a feature unto itself. I'd be shocked if a new music suite drove a single purchase decision for a title that sells in the millions at launch. It's simply a component—but a very key one—of an upgrade to the broadcast-style presentation of a game that needed it, desperately, after what was produced last year.
Following Madden NFL 12, the series required a comprehensive retrenchment in commentary and presentation. What the game had done right in 2010 was washed out by the failure to fully integrate a new commentary engine. Those pre-game runout animations touted last year were, in hindsight, a means of partially masking the dead air and repetition you then heard from Gus Johnson and Cris Collinsworth from the coin toss onward. Bialosuknia, in his second year of running the game's audio, admitted that Madden needed a broadcast overhaul, and it got it—notably in bringing CBS' real-life A-team of Jim Nantz and Phil Simms.
And if Madden is bringing them in so it may be taken more seriously, it couldn't put them on the screen with the old package of graphics and themes. I'm not sure exactly how long the current opening—which is very brief—has been around, but its opening horns are very obligatory, and hardly distinctive. It feels like the opening to a video game, not to a football game, and in simulation sports, broadcast immersion is extremely important—it's a huge component of NBA 2K's wide acceptance.
I'm not sure how I feel about the main Madden theme just yet. It is distinct, but it doesn't stick to the beat in the middle, and that requires you to actively listen to it. When you do follow, the song's melody does open up. I'm more a fan of the between-quarters transition EA Sports has shown us. But in both cases, the music strives to meet the demands of America's most telegenic sport, which carries event-quality expectations, not just something you flip on to see who's playing.
The difficulty is that four major American networks have an NFL broadcast, and therefore its own theme, all of which are recognizable if not iconic to longtime football fans. Though EA Sports has a relationship with ESPN to use its broadcast package and branding, ESPN gets one game a week, on Monday. And really, picking any single network, even Nantz and Simms' native CBS, would break immersion. Football fans know the American Football Conference is on CBS, and the National is on Fox. ESPN and NBC get spotlight games. Madden has to act as a fifth network, evocative of all of them. Music plays a big role in that.
Bialosuknia tapped Colin O'Malley, a composer with experience both in video game soundtracks and in scoring a PBS documentary. He also composed the latest suite of original music in NCAA Football, made at the same studio as Madden, so he had familiarity with what video game audio producers wanted from him. Bialosuknia's team forwarded O'Malley samples of songs they wanted to inspire this fictitious broadcast. With the exception of Monday Night Football, an update of a melody used for more than 30 years, everything sounds like an action film, which is why Madden's theme does, too.
"I think we went for energy, excitement, and speed and drama," Bialosuknia said. "There's a sense of strugle. The really strong rhythmic melody really brings that across. For all of us, listening to it over and over again, it still never fails to psych people up. To me, that's what the song really needed to do."
O'Malley's first take was, substantially, what you hear in that final cut above. O'Malley was also asked to score several pieces of transitory music—going into a timeout or halftime or between quarters (as in the video at left)—and the suite of menu music that will replace the EA Trax selection of popular songs, which cost a lot of money to license and became aggravatingly repetitive.
There were revisions and re-revisions and adjustments to O'Malley's first stab at the Madden anthem. But, Bialosuknia said, Madden had an ambition of opening to a theme that would become recognizable if hummed, like all the U.S. networks' are. O'Malley hit the target very early, he said.
"We looked at it in the context of the Madden that we're building, but we always had an eye toward the horizon," Bialosuknia said. "W didn't want to have a theme and have it change every year. Our idea was to create this theme and hope that it stuck, and is embraced, and that it carries forward. I think from what we've read so far, it has.
"The comments on it," he adds, "seem quite pleased."
Nearly 20 years ago, three household names in Nintendo gaming took a shot at drawing Kirby inside the official strategy guide for Kirby's Adventure. Masahiro Sakurai, the game's creator (and creator of the Super Smash Bros. series); Shigeru Miyamoto, who really needs no introduction, and Satoru Iwata, who doesn't either, unless you don't know who Nintendo's current CEO is.
At the time, Iwata was simply the producer for Kirby's Adventure. He'd also worked on titles such as Balloon Fight. All three drew the titular Kirby.
Iwata's business and programming background probably explains the details, or lack thereof, in his attempt. The creative backgrounds of Sakurai and Miyamoto are quite apparent in theirs. It's an interesting look at three critical figures in that company's history, especially in modern day.
The HAL that is referenced on Kirby's fan in Miyamoto's drawing is for HAL Laboratory, a Nintendo subsidiary that has produced the Kirby series (and exists to this day). And yes, it is named for the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Slow action in North America as the United States takes a break for cookouts on Monday. Mass Effect, Prototype and Arkham City all have notable content drops. Resistance: Burning Skies arrives on PS Vita.
No sports video game—no video game, I'd argue—is as harangued as Madden NFL. Read any forum thread, read the comments to any story, including this one, and the list of gamer demands for the upcoming release is quite long and quite detailed. "New music" doesn't appear in any of it.
Nearly 20 years ago, three household names in Nintendo gaming took a shot at drawing Kirby inside the official strategy guide for Kirby's Adventure. Masahiro Sakurai, the game's creator (and creator of the Super Smash Bros. series); Shigeru Miyamoto, who really needs no introduction, and Satoru Iwata, who doesn't either, unless you don't know who Nintendo's current CEO is.
