2 posts tagged “playstation2”

"Are we there yet?" yelled the kids in unison. I shook my vision clear and look out towards the vast desert road which stretched before me and my sweat-covered steering wheel. I study the road surface once more - it seemed a little more detailed and potholed than before. "Are we there yet?" once more echoed through my ears as I looked up and stared at the skyline. I was sure that was a different sky. Out of curiosity, I turned the wheel to move into the other lane. Yep, it felt a lot more smoother than it did - I was surprised at this fact considering I had been on this road now for over two years. "Are we there yet?". I stared into the horizon and saw nothing but the curvature of the earth, although the cacti appeared to pop into existance a lot less now. "Are we there yet?"

Welcome to the world of videogame development.

Wheelman's development has been the longest I've worked on any videogame (just over 2 years) - and considering this is my first AAA title, should I really be surprised? Over the past nine years of development, I've had a maximum of eighteen months as a limit and psychologically used this as a yardstick to pace myself like one would normally do when running a marathon. So imagine when you finish those arduous 26.2 miles only to be told there's an extra 8 miles to go. You'd have energy left, but you definitely wouldn't feel like you have prepared for this surprise. Again, I shouldn't be surprised. Myself and a determined core of the studio have crunched on Wheelman for over a year - a year of hard work, late-night takeaway meals and not much time to paint that exotic mural up in my front room. I'm kind of lucky that I don't have a physical relationship as I know it would be in tatters now. Me staggering back home in a zombie-like trance only to find the missus waiting for me with a "Where have you been?" look. I'd mumble something before crashing out to bed.

It's been longer for a lot of the studio though - three years of development. It's been a long journey, though it feels like we're almost done. The car will get to its destination and the kids will eventually stop yelling that cliched question. I booted up an old build of the game from last year, and it's insane the amount of progress we have achieved in getting the game where it is now - we have much, much better handling; our version of Barcelona is looking more alive; we have complete missions with an almost sultry level of polish and attention to detail. I still enjoy taking a perfectly decent car and heaping huge amounts of virtual damage onto it. At this stage, we're now finishing up on things - killing bugs, fixing graphical glitches and finding every opportunity to play new builds. I think a fair majority of us want the game to succeed and to do well for Midway - I know I want it to. We are mostly gamers who know what irritates us and what makes us happy when we engage in our pastime when we get a spare moment. There's been a very active e-mail Feedback mailing list where there are daily opinions, points raised and a healthy result of hopefully making our game even better.

My tasks now on my "Burndown" list are mostly optimisation and making parts of the UI even smaller and more programmer-friendly. As this is my first title where I'm using Scaleform and Flash CS3 for the front end work, it's been... interesting. What I do know is that using Flash for anything precise and developer friendly is an impossibility. Take this nugget of unjoy for instance - our in-game map is split up into many, many square pieces which helps with memory and frame rate. Now Flash CS3 has some alarming habits, but one of these is forgetting about integer numbers. So imagine all of these squares are laid out on a grid. It's all very precise - 280x280 pixel pieces on integer (non-decimal) co-ordinates. Flash magically does something with these pieces so when you load up the scene, sometimes you'll get pieces which are 279.9x280.1. Not only that, but their positions have also been slightly altered. The result? Noticable gaps in my map. I've been trying to combat this, and a lot of work the other day was spent adding a pixel buffer around the piece so when these pieces overlapped, it would mean no seams. Optimisation has also become something of a chore as Flash sometimes does some very strange things with vertices - and not just that - deleting whole portions of the map when I delete one vertex. It's maddening to say the least. I'm ever hopeful we get the new CS4 with all the stuff which should have been put into Flash CS3 for the next project.

It does annoy me sometimes when things don't work the way they should - or have been designed to work. A myriad of crashes have lost so many man hours on this planet. Imagine if we had no crashes on the computers we work on - we'd be living on the fucking moon by now. Speaking of crashes, I think my Xbox 360 has finally bitten the bullet. It's now freezing up a few minutes into playing a game (from boot-up) and now I'm resigned to the fact that I've become another casualty of Microsoft's Biggest Fuck-up Ever. A lot of the guys in the studio have suffered the same fate of 360 death and know only too well of the horrible procedure of getting a coffin from UPS to cart away that white box which offered so much including the always-constant fear that its innards would implode with badly-vented heat and break the hearts of many, many gamers. It is heart-breaking because the machine is such a damn attractive beast with a vast wealth of great games, but let down by some shonky manufacturing. I suppose I've got a fair amount of play out of it, but I've had a fair amount of play out of my PlayStation2 for a much more impressive number of years. In fact, I bought the thing on the first year of my career in the games industry and it's still working fine. I'm going to phone Xbox Support tomorrow and it's going to break my heart.

So the PS2 and Wii (and possibly the Dreamcast I'll never sell) will get dusted off and given some loving. I've also ventured into PC Gaming again and bought some fine bargains from PC World including the fancy-schmancy Unreal Tournament III Special Edition for a tenner. I've got the thing already on the 360, but alas - 360 won't work no more. I enjoyed it very much with joypad, but we know the keyboard and mouse are the natural home for any self-respecting FPS, right? Plus those 18 hours of UnrealEd video tutorials have sold it to me. Midway as a company have invested heavily in the Unreal Engine and I do use UnrealEd for stuff, but only for exporting, checking and the like. It'll be good to get a lot more pro-active with it for the next project.

I think the problem with working so hard and long on something is not having time to learn new skills and expanding my circle of artistic knowledge and experience. As you may have figured out, I want to take a wall in my flat and turn it into a super-sexy mural. I've got the design in my head and I really want to start work on it, but coming home now means rationing time so I get enough out of the hour or so I have around to do things before the inevitable drifting off to bed. Of course, when Wheelman is all done and wrapped up, time will become a lot more available for me as we revert back to the regular working day. That's going to be a very exciting day because I'll be able to explode with ideas and creativity: I'll become a man on an artistic mission. One of my first missions is to work on getting a more fancy-pants finished version of my video for Chris Merritt's Cult of Karl tune. Chris (who has recently revamped his site with lots of goodness) has been in contact with me and loved my animatic (click on that to grab it!) though I feel a bit crappy for not working on the finished thing due to a lack of time. I made time for that animatic - lunch breaks included, but not had the chance to fully go through with, well, any animated music promo. It's been my dream to finish at least one animated music promo before I shift this mortal coil.

Now this may sound all very dramatic and all, but recently Shynola's Gideon Baws sadly passed away. He was 33 - my age. From what I can gather, he suffered an accidental blow to the head earlier in the day and later on in the day he died from an aneurysm. It just shows you how sometimes life can be so short, so every day has to be lived and enjoyed. Shynola have produced some of the greatest music promos ever - and in tribute of Gideon's passing, I present to you some of Shynola's best. R.I.P.

Plus the classic Go With The Flow promo featuring the Queens of the Stone Age which can't be embedded because Universal are a bunch of arses.

Rather frustratingly the demise of my 360 couldn't have come at a worse time. There's many, many new games out on the horizon ready to be grabbed and played. Dead Space looks positively astounding in its execution and the fact it's an EA game which isn't really what you'd normally expect from EA - kudos to them for that. I've not seen any advertisements for Coca Cola in those previews yet, so there is hope. Fable 2 is coming out soon, as is Gears of War 2. Oh, and Fallout 3 - although since I can't enjoy it on my 360, I'm seriously tempted to play the thing on my PC. Saints Row 2 is getting a lot of praise from gaming forums, and yet I can't sample its goodness. What I will say from the looks of it is that it's what GTA4 could have been - the developers of Saints Row 2 appear to remember games should be fun and not all dramatic and po-faced. God bless them. Here's a slice of fun, fun, fun!

Christmas is coming and I have many credit-crunch-busting ways to grab presents for people. I think all the hoo-ha about the collapse of the World Economy is something which we engineered as human beings. Imagine how unphased we'd be if we lived in, I dunno, the Isle of Man? They've got their own monetary system going on there so I'm sure it's all business as usual. I am a great believer in karma, so the imminent demise of Iceland isn't all that of a surprise. Regular readers of this blog will have gotten that little joke, but feel free to find Icelandic references in past posts and put two and two together! There's the hoo-ha of "negative equity". Bullshit. I'm glad I bought this place and feel happier because of it. Those who fear the values of their homes decrease are possibly those fly-by-night types who jump from house to house in the same way I used to when I rented. Whatever happened to a sense of stability? A rock to build from? A lot of things which wind people up are constructs by - people! It's all very much a human race doing itself an injustice. Me? I'm happy to live every day as it comes although I know now that my Christmas present for this year will be the heating of this flat during the Winter months. Nothing really tangible, but could be the thing which saves me from a very uncomfortable time.

In other news, Charlie Brooker's Dead Set is soon to make a showing on E4. This is a genuinely exciting concept for me and one Charlie probably has been thinking about for some time - a zombie outbreak with the main characters of the series being trapped inside the Big Brother house! Even more astounding is that Davina McCall becomes a zombie - and a pretty impressive one from early reports. The show will begin on the 27th for 5 days with the finale being on - yep, you guessed it - Halloween! Check out the trailer here. ("Embedding disabled by request" are words which fill me with woe.)

Harry Hill is back! Harry could be considered the less vitrolic version of Charlie Brooker as he is also a commenter of what comes out of Satan's Googlebox, but there's definitely a touch of the surreal. All three parts of the first episode can be now viewed via the constant magic of YouTube. I'm also enjoying Stephen Fry's America - although there was a shaky start in the first episode, the second episode delivered in a lot more ways. He has also recently revamped his website to 2.0 and that includes a stalker-ish Twitter feed. He's currently poncing about Africa eyeing up lions! I also took advantage of Virgin's current 1p rentals and I have to say that Rambo was pretty impressive popcorn-munching brainless action, though Be Kind Rewind? What the hell happened, Michel Gondry? You suddenly run out of creative juice or something? Ghostbusters remake? Funny, yep. Not much else really did it for me compared to the heart, soul and sheer creativity found in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I even felt cheated out of spending a penny on it. It goes to show you that not all film directors are guaranteed to be awesome all of the time (I'm looking at you, George Lucas). Here's the only good bit of Be Kind Rewind...

Oh, and the camouflage bit.

Well, there's not much else to talk about. 40 minutes until bedtime and it's getting a bit colder in Chez Pick. I bought some more bits and pieces from a workmate and good friend of mine who is going on a dizzying journey around the world - and I probably mentioned in an earlier post, but I promised him a place to stay here when he comes back. He helped me a great deal when I was kicked out by my evil ex-landlord from Iceland (aha!) so I am more than happy to return the favour. It'll be good to have someone knocking about this place, but this is happening next year - actually when Wheelman should be out on shelves for all to grab - so it's also a deadline for me to make this place a bit more habitable. At the moment there's still a bit of a bare bones quality here which I need to shake off somewhat. I do enjoy coming back here though after walking back from work in the dead of night. Nothing but the startled sight of bunnies pelting back into their holes, sleeping truckers in their curtained cabs and the reminder that my lousy eyeballs aren't doing me any favours when confronted with the exaggerated glare of many light sources.

Here's hoping that soon the walk back will be a less nocturnal journey!

Oh, almost forgot. Consolevania's back!

Photo Credit.

I'm glad I woke up for work today, I really, really am. After the news that Rez HD is coming to the Xbox 360, I had an inkling and checked out our PartnerNet. This is the closed Xbox Live Arcade network which is like peering into the future - game developers across the globe chuck stuff on there for other devs to download and play to death. It's quite, quite special to be able to do this. Lo and behold! Rez HD! To download! I'm the world's biggest Rez fan - I even have the Rez Trance Vibrator in my personal possession as well as the original Dreamcast version (a promo copy no less) and the PS2 version. This was quite a find for a slow Wednesday.

Like Rez. Except MORE.

As it says. Imagine Rez but in beautiful HD running at a silky smooth frame rate and you're halfway there. Add achievements, leaderboards and the like and it adds to an already brilliant experience. The download is pretty small (around 111Mb) for what you're getting - one of Sega's greatest moments in gaming where they were getting their very talented satellite studios like United Game Artists and Smilebit producing beautifully-crafted games like Jet Set Radio, Cosmic Smash, Seaman (hehe), Samba De Amigo and Rez. Inspired by the works of Kandinksy of all people, it's a game which is astounding to not only look at but also to hear. There's some wonderful meshing of visual and audio and without sounding too pretentious, it's as close to art in videogaming as you can get. Jeff Minter commented that Rez was "Space Harrier in techno trousers" which is pretty close to the mark. It's a shame that his recent Xbox Live Arcade release of Space Giraffe can't even hold a candle to something this expertly crafted. You do need to do the game justice though - get a surround sound system with a stonking huge television and turn out the lights.

"Memorieessss..."

When I was holed up in the flat in Mold, Rez helped coocon me from the drunken pissheadery and small town mentality and I look back on those days with joy. It was almost like a ritual getting myself ready for another trance-like assault on the senses. I also know of someone I used to work with who swore by Rez. He did smoke d'herb, mind you. The game is ideally suited for it. I'm just joyously happy that the game will soon be in the hands of the Xbox Live Arcade community and I predict it'll do incredibly well to the point that Rez 2 would be a certainty. The great thing about Rez is that even though it's a few years old, it still looks fresh and different - the art style is so radical that you accept it and enjoy it for what it is. It's like watching Tron - even though it's dated, the Syd Mead-inspired designs still hit a chord and look fresh and modern. Rez's achievements are spot on too! Here's a small taster...

Assassin's Creed - The Opinion So Far...

My favourite videogame reviewer Yahtzee has recently reviewed Assassin's Creed and once more he's spot on. There was a lot of mixed opinion online about the game, so I was keen to see what it was like. The first time I experienced the open world in the game was quite an incredible thing - you start off in the bowels of your main Assassin's Bureau. After some (many) tutorials, you get stuck into the town outside the Bureau and the game does a good job of getting you involved. Soon after you get on a horsey and end up in the huge main map - The Kingdom. It was quite mind-blowing - I have to say the graphics in the game are the most truly immersive I've seen yet. The shadows are so nicely produced that everything feels solid. It's very easy to believe you're there in the world and soon I was tasked with sneaking up viewpoints and launching myself off posts into haystacks. This is more fun than you just reading that. You then go to the city of Acre - and when I say city, I mean it - the place is vast. You then interrogate suspects, pickpocket, eavesdrop and help citizens as part of your campaign to find out more about the person you've been assigned to kill.

So Far So Good?

Well, yep. Except the review comments I've heard about repetition are true. Every job thereafter has been the same - travel to city by horse, investigate area and then assassinate. Yahtzee mentioned the horse thing where you have to slowly walk past guards on horseback so they don't suspect you. This got quite irritating quite quickly, and was more fun to leg it through areas with guards running behind you. The parkour stuff is nicely handled and your movements are startingly fluid and realistic - in fact, it's quite enjoyable running on rooftops collecting Crackdown-style hidden things (in this case, flags) while running up to a guard and assassinating him with your handy hidden blade in one fell swoop. There's also the sub-plot set in the future which Ubisoft spoiled themselves by leaving the futuristic HUD in their promotional materials. Ah, well. There's some horrificness in the game though. The combat system can be frustrating at times in that sometimes when you get knocked over, you lose the ability to lock onto stuff - although it's more a case of pressing the left trigger to lock on and then the right trigger to defend yourself - instinctively you press the right trigger straight away, which is where the problem lies.

More Problems!

Yep. Although countering to kill people is great fun, you sometimes glitch through buildings as you perform your moves. If you're backed up in a corner, the camera can suffer somewhat which makes anticipating counters difficult. The repeated soundbytes from passers-by get old way too quickly, especially when saving citizens - plus the camera will lock onto the citizen you've saved when all you want to do is get the hell out of there before another guard turns up... and yet the thrill of running away from many guards is an enjoyable one, as is setting stuff up before you assassinate a main target. Killing guards is good fun because - get this - they stay dead! No respawns here... so killing archers outside the area will make your life a lot more easier. Also nothing beats climbing a massive building and looking around you. In Acre, there's a humoungous cathedral which you get to access after your third kill - and climbing to the top of that was extrememly memorable. Launching off it into a haycart was even more memorable, although I was expecting an achievement like the one I got in Crackdown from getting to the top and jumping off the Agency tower. In short then - rent before you buy. It's good in short doses (say an assassination a day) and the sub-quests help increase the longevity of the thing.

Computer Update!

Here's me thinking I could only burn discs with Vista's gimped burning, but no! Clicking on the Help and Support bit of my PC, I discover I have Roxio Creator - meaning (hopefully) DVD burning won't be painful and I won't have to shell out £59 for Nero. It's curious I only found out about this via the Help and Support bit. Also I think I've found out why my keyboard and mouse are cack - a workmate of mine tells me it sounds like I need to update the BIOS. He also told me why this would be the case - and the link to a forum I posted yesterday had inklings of a BIOS update - although the process to go about it sounds ball-achey. I've contacted HP's After Care Shizzle via a contact form so I hope I'll get concrete help back from them. The frustrating thing is I shouldn't really have to go through all this shit. It's curious that The Tech Guys didn't mention that I had Roxio on this computer when I complained about the slow burning speeds - their "solutions" were either to buy Nero or to use msconfig to shutdown everything and see if that improved anything. Is it too much to ask that I can go into a shop, buy a branded PC-type product and have it do the job it's supposed to do? This BIOS stuff is good news though. I could still salvage this puppy. I can phone up The Tech Guys for shits and giggles and give them the exact reason why this PC is sick and they'll be dumbfounded as they try and use google for an alternative solution.

Book Update!

I recently got a test book through from blurb.com which also acts as a present for Mum - she's not seen any artwork of mine for some time, so it's the least I can do. Anyway, the quality of the book was great - there was a small rip on the bottom of the back of the dust cover, though that might have been my excitement getting it out. The book, I mean... tsk. Well, I was told by another workmate that there's a new way to produce books and it's Amazon-fuelled! CreateSpace is extremely exciting - basically it's the perfect way to get my 365 book out to the masses. I'll need to use InDesign to get the book together, but there's a lot more advantages to this than blurb - you get your own ISBN number, you have more control over content and layout and - get this - Amazon will actually sell the thing for you in their store!!! This is insanely good news. I was using the BookSmart software to layout 365, though now I will use these guys. I just need to start hunting down all the bits and pieces of artwork I have lying about.

YouTube Update!

If you've not yet seen Network, then I suggest you watch the below clip and realise just how relevant it all is to today...