2 posts tagged “rez”

What could possibly be back to dance around these digital pages and haunt the causal reader once more? Why... Mortgages! Mmm! Tasty, tasty mortgages! I got some huge reams of scaryness through the post - a survey from the seller of the place (including the joy of "Fixtures and Fittings") plus the most imposing piece of paper I've ever seen. Yep, the sign off for the mortgage. It requires a witness and also a loss of sanity that you're going to dedicate 32 years of your working life paying off £248,000 pounds. It warns the classic line of "your home will be repossessed if you don't keep up repayments secured on it" and also warns that if I sign this piece of paper, there's no going back. There's no indecision here - fuck up and you lose your home.

It's Not That Bad...

Nope. Not really. There's always two sides to this. The other side is one which is rarely visited by the human mind due to the way it's wired up to always assume the worse. When I was in the thick of my depressive episode before I was rescued by the kind souls of Midway Studios - Newcastle, I learned many things. Depression is a chemical process and we have programmed into our psyches from evolution that we have a fight-or-flight way of thinking - it's almost a binary process. No grey shades. This or that. This purchase of a flat has been the biggest thing of my life - the second biggest being the move up here to NewcastleGateshead in the first place. I've been thinking in the abstract - that this new place will be a new beginning. A fresh start where I can do all the things I've always wanted. The huge debt is an unfortunate by-product of this, but as long as I keep things in perspective and don't do anything crazy then it'll be fine. Actually, knowing more about the mortgage is a handy thing - I have the offer to over-pay the mortgage, so say I could save up £1000 a year and put it as an over-payment to help pay the thing off. If the worst was to happen, then the overpayments will be taken into account and used as a "payment holiday" so I could avoid paying the mortgage for a month until I find a new job.

For the foreseeable future though, I'm firmly placed in Midway Studios and I really feel like I belong.

We Kick Ass!

So get this - every so often the executive side of Midway gets all of the studios to produce a latest stable build of their games so they can play them and gauge how well or badly we're doing. Recently we've been spending a lot of time in the office to concentrate on this build, though only now have we eased off the gas and our build was sent over to the States along with some of the production team to show our wares. The game is played in front of the bigwigs and then it's evaluated. The good news is that Wheelman's Product Review build was very well received - our ultimate boss, David Zucker, was reported to have got up out of his seat and applaud the thing. Good sign? Yep. It's always good to see hard work rewarded like this, and I think most of the team pulled out the stops to get the thing looking ship-shape. There's still work to do and tweaks/refinements, but we're being very, very brutally honest with each other regarding the game and I think that will work out to our advantage in the long run. My current (for the moment) landlord who is also a producer at the studio has blagged himself a position over in the Chicago HQ, although he's not leaving until Wheelman is at alpha stage.

The game is starting to really come alive now and is leaping and bounding. I just wish we had more time to get more things into the game as we're at the painful process of cutting out parts of it which we don't have time for. This happens with all games and the optimist will comment that this will be good news for the sequel. I think this game has helped shape the studio into a more cohesive unit and I can feel things evolving for the good. It's extremely exciting - I would just love to have some gameplay footage out in the wild so people can check out how we're doing. As soon as stuff comes online, you'll be the first to see it!

Butterflies

I posted something on my Facebook blog about how I was walking to work on the Monday and I happened to pass by an incredibly attractive girl - the crazy thing is that what most men would consider attractive, I'd consider fake... cliched? This girl seemed out of place of the rather hostile environment of the Wild West of Gateshead - for a start, she was colour co-ordinated - red hair, red coat, red boots. She wore spectacles and she must have seen me with my mouth kind of open in mid-stupification because when I turned away before turning back (I couldn't resist), she clocked me again. I spent the whole day thinking about this... the fact that it's been an extremely long time since I had that shock of love-at-first-sight feeling, and it was nice to get it back again. Intoxicating as it was, grim realisation jumped in again and confirmed that she was mostly probably a one-off. It would make an amazing painting though - her in red contrasting with the browns and greys of the avenues of terraced housing. I did mention in the Facebook blog that the last time I had this feeling was when I was in Sixth Form. This was a lie...

Nightclub Lass

This is another sneaky peek at my 365 book! I semi-drunkenly scrawled this on my PC's art package (Painter 8) after coming back home from a night out - this woman was definitely enamoured by me, though alas. She had an ugly friend who practically dragged her out of my life. This is often the way with me - random strangers getting in the way and stopping things from happening. I had that feeling then. I wasn't that drunk either - getting older gives you hindsight and also a natural limit. I miss dancing... I would drink four pints of cider and then stick to water while I shook my booty and not care. I get the feeling that the M word will get me out and about more in an effort to forget that debt. I may bump into again, I dunno.

First Impressions.

All of this is looks though. It's all well and good looking at a person from the outside and making judgements, but when they turn out not to be the person they look like, well. "Don't Judge A Book By Its Cover" comes to mind. I've fallen in love with e-mails of some of the more important people of my life rather than the first look of them. I think knowing a person inside out makes them instantly more attractive to me. Give me someone who is interesting anyday compared to the stereotypical woman that blokes tend to want. This is a rare occassion where I spill my heart out a bit before I retract back into my shell and revert back to the art hermit. I remember the times of jealousy mixed with admiration when I saw my older brother be extremely confident with the ladies... I guess some people are born for loving.

Mixed Media

So after reporting on the Mass Effect story in the last blog, I've got back into playing it and enjoying it again. It can be a brutal game at times where the combat will suddenly throw you a curveball and you instantly die. It's frustrating, but you become a better player planning out your strategy in a different way. The amazing thing about the game is that all the characters have some immense back story. I nattered to Ashley - one of the women in my command as Captain - for a good half hour about stuff. It was a reward for all that combat - relaxing conversation. Cooper Lawrence's comments about "the game treating women like sex objects" seems like a ridiculous statement when you see the female (and male) characters are believable and have a lot to say. I recently grabbed Rez HD today from the Xbox Live Marketplace and my goodness, it's good to be back home. Such a beautiful awe-inspiring experience but now greatly enhanced with the HD display. It's about 7 years old, but the game still shines as a thing of beauty. It's like Tron - the art style is timeless. Music-wise, I'm very much looking forward to The Feeling's new album - there's snippets of it up on their myspace, though they recently took down one of my favourite snippets. Looks like I'll have to grab the album then..! I'm also going to see Cloverfield this week - maybe Friday. This review from grumpygamer.com says it all -

• Cloverfield is a great movie because a bunch of whiny self-absorbed twenty-something New York hipsters that live in apartments no one can afford all die. For those of you working on your term papers dealing with film deconstruction and plot subtext for your Understanding Film class, let me break it down for you. The whiny hipsters all represent whiny hipsters we hate. The monster is metaphor for a giant monster, and the shallow asshole good looking people all die because they should.

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...