forgot to set my alarm…

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

Tomorrow never turns up when you have things planned for it, it always jumps another day ahead!

So what’s happened in the last few months?

escape from city 17

This is awesome! It’s a short fan-made film following some resistance fighters as they escape from City 17; the setting for Half-Life 2. If you’ve played the game you’ll see how well they’ve managed to capture the oppressive feeling of the place and the actual visual style is bang-on, something Hollywood would never be able to match. If you haven’t played the game, it should easily stand up on its own merit.

tweet

So I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon and get my own Twitter. Call me a lemming if you want, but it’s best to adopt these things fairly early on to ensure you get a good seat to watch the inevitable crashing-and-burning-into-internet-obscurity of the thing in all its magnificence, if you ask me!

At least you can all check I’m still alive between posts using this thing. Well, as long as I update Twitter a bit more than I do here..

02/02/2009 8:50am

York 's first major snow-storm.

Urk.

They say a picture paints a thousand words… so I’d best shut up then!

the battle of yonkers

Concept art for 'World War Z' by Daniel LuVisi

It may come as no surprise that I enjoy my zombie-related media; books, games, movies and even board games; the book World War Z is no exception!  The fantastic artwork above got its creator a job working on the film adaptation and is making the rounds on the internet at the moment, seems the image was first discovered on io9 but soon snapped up by Worst Previews and SlashFilm among others.

More after the cut.

..back!

What I’ve been upto:

1. Writing the first draft of a short-script (using Celtx).
2. Updating my CV.
3. Buying boardgames (Android, Twilight Struggle).
4. Re-discovered Kingdom of Loathing.
5. Discovered NationStates 2. (Based upon Jennifer Government by Max Barry, but I’m realising it’s not as good as the original NationStates.)
6. Enjoying a visit from my parents.

Apologies for the lack of recent content. I’m aiming at writing a post here each day (at least while my hours at work are low) but I’m yet to settle into a routine. Still, it’s early days, yet!

Finally, it’s nice to know there is still some mystery left in the world: Bloop.

a carnival? in january? brrrr!

We’ve had our first mention for this site over at Prosody.co.uk by Mr. Newton, whose site I’ve added to my blogroll. It’s a chilly carnival this month, but there’s lots to see, so check it out!

Whilst technically not a video game-only blog, any publicity for the Paradigm is welcome!

Cheers, dude!

wrong man for the job?

I’ve seen a few reports on the interwebs about a new film that’s been proposed. It’s a long overdue film, but that’s hardly the point. Like anything, if you want it to be successful, you need just the right ingredients. Could you imagine Jurassic Park directed by David Cronenberg? It’d be damned good, but not quite the family-friendly super-smash it is. Or could you imagine Batman Begins / The Dark Knight with Adam Sandler as Batman and Russell Brand as the Joker and directed by David Lynch? Ugh. Horrible.

The film that’s been announced is based on the book Foundation. Isaac Asimov began his series of books in the ’50s with the first three novels (Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), Second Foundation (1953)), then in the early ’80s wrote the first sequel (Foundation’s Edge (1982)) followed a few years later by a second and final part (Foundation and Earth (1986)). He then wrote two prequels (Prelude to Foundation (1988), Forward the Foundation (Posthumously in 1993)) to the original series making seven books in total. In addition there are also stories by other famous science fiction authors and have been authorised by Asimov’s estate after his death.

The whole saga is fairly intense and there’s way too much for me to summarise here, so I’ll stick to just the first book. Foundation takes place in far future of humanity which, according to Hari Seldon – an amazing mathematition – has stagnated for too long and is on the edge of collapse and about to enter another dark age. Lucky for us, Seldon is the founder of psychohistory – a kind of science for predicting the actions of the human race far in the future, and so long as a few rules can be kept the predictions are incredibly accurate. Of course, anybody with knowledge of any prediction has the chance to sufficiently change the outcome, so one of the rules of psychohistory is that nobody can know what the predictions are until it’s too late to change it.

According to Seldon, the best course of action is to make a ‘backup of sorts’ of all the civilisations history, art, technology, etc and wait out the following barbarism. These ‘foundations’ will reduce the time the barbarism lasts and we’ll be back up and running in no time. Well, no time being a good few thousand years earlier than otherwise! Thus the Seldon Plan was born.

Of course there are going to be a few hiccups along the way which Seldon had accounted for, these Seldon Crises are what make up a lot of the following books as humanity try to work through each one. Of course there’s a catch: anyone with knowledge of a Seldon Crisis before it’s upon them would/could do something drastic, changing the predicted cause of humaity, negating the rules of psychohistory rendering the Seldon Plan null and void in the process.

Seldon, obviously isn’t going to be around in thousands of years to come, and so he records himself giving instructions on each step of the Seldon Plan for future generations to watch when the time is right. It’s eerie how bang-on his predictions are – so much so that he convinces these future generations (who think it’s nothing more than a magic trick or ghost story) that he knows what he’s talking about.

What happens, however, when something comes along that is so unforseen that even Hari couldn’t predict? Well I’ll let you read it to find out. Damn good stuff mind.

Which brings me back to having the right man for the job. A story like this (and remember, this was just the first book I’ve described) with so many fans behind it, requires someone to treat it right. It’s not exactly an ‘action-packed, summer blockbuster’ although there’s action in it (it has been a while since I’ve read them, but I believe the stories following the first had more action in, but even then, not upto Rambo standards!).

Oh what’s that? It’s a ‘directing vehicle’ for Roland Emmerich? Gimme a break.

No disrespect to Mr. Emmerich, I’ve enjoyed his films but like Michael Bay, he’s forever tied to making big, explosive summer blockbusters. Independece Day, 10,000 BC, The Day After Tomorrow, yeah, they’re all successful films, they all fit the gap they were intended to fill. These wonderful books were never meant to fill a gap like that.

There are only a few Hollywood directors I’d like to see attempt these stories; Ridley Scott, David Fincher, Peter Jackson, Robert Zemeckis, Oliver Stone, even Steven Spielberg. Kubrick would have done a fantastic job, but that ain’t gonna happen! Maybe I’ve got it all wrong and I hope I have, but to me, Emmerich has a lot to prove on this film!

The botched job they made out of the last Asimov adaptation (I, Robot (dear Lord, what were you doing, Alex Proyas? Your films are normally so good!)), makes me hesitant. It’s obvious they’re looking for another hyper-successful series of films along the lines of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, as this article points out and yes, they have fantastic material.

They’re just lacking that other vital ingredient.

end of an era

Back when I was just three years old, life was a much simpler affair for everybody. Sure, the Cold War still had a few years left in it and fashion sense was still waiting to be discovered, but everything else was… simple.

Sir Clive Sinclair, like Sir Alan Sugar, two Brits that could do no wrong. Their companies saw staggering profits throughout the early ’80s with their affordable, innovative hardware. Throughout my early childhood, Sir Clive’s <£100 ZX Spectrum was king of the hill. OK, it was a hill within the UK and the hill probably wasn’t the biggest, but it was a hill, and a lot of folk enjoyed looking at it atop said hill.

Of course, it had its rivals; the big, brash, and all-round more powerful Commodore 64 from across the pond had its eyes on the Spectrum’s crown, (and its hill within the UK, to boot) but was too busy winning the hearts of the Americans. The BBC Micro (which were still being used in schools when I was in Year 6) was another contender albeit, a more expensive contender, and even Sir Alan’s Amstrad CPC put in a bit of a fight.

Early consoles like the Intellivision, ColecoVision and the Atari 2600 were still kicking about but they were in a different, much lower league to the rest (sort of in a ditch running around the hill). Console games at that time were simple arcade clones, points-fests and nothing more, whereas the Spectrum with its broader range of games (RPGs like the Hobbit; adventure games such as Dun Darach, Tir Na Nog, and Heavy on the Magick; platformers like Manic Miner/Jet Set Willy and the Dizzy games; football management simulations like Football Manager (possibly the first ever football management game created)/Football Manager 2; space/flight simulations like Elite/Fighter Bomber; and even first person 3D adventures like The Sentinel! A final mention to this little gem based on the book of the same name: How To Be A Complete Bastard.) was obviously the better choice.

I’m not even going to go into the home-programming side of it, which was another really BIG – if not the biggest – selling point for the system. Again, something completely missing from consoles even to this day. Microsoft have begun to bridge that gap with XNA for the Xbox 360, but you still need a PC to do the coding, so we’re still a long way off having in-console programming. However, with the licensing/copyright issues and everything else in this complicated modern age, we probably won’t see a console allowing the End User to program for it. Plus, it’s no longer a case of typing a number of simple lines of code. There are 3D models to create, audio to record and everything else that makes these modern games “better”. I digress; this is a topic for another day.

ANYway, this was all fine and good in the ‘80s, a big royal rumble of sorts between the contenders of the day… until it all changed. Almost overnight things went from being simple… to being complicated.

Two Japanese companies had to stick their oar in and stir everything up, as this article from my beloved Your Sinclair demonstrates. (This is a wonderful website, by the way, not many websites have had such devotion. YS was a fantastic mag and obviously still holds a lot of good memories for a lot of people. The fine folk at RPS mention it in one of their posts on the wonderful Dwarf Fortress (More on that in a future post).

Yes, The Japanese introduced “The Sega” and “The Nintendo” as they were known back then. Another console war broke out and many arguments were held in schoolyards around the country. Many were injured.

Perhaps needless to say, Sir Clive didn’t fare too well after these two newcomers joined the mix, Sir Alan stepped in and bought the Spectrum range and the Sinclair brand name hoping that by combining parts of this new acquisition with his already substantial Amstrad company, the brand would live on. Indeed for a while it did; the Spectrum 2+ and the Spectrum 3+ (which is ever so-slightly mocked in the article) were released before Amstrad ran into difficulties.

In the article you can see that there’s a little bit of resentment to both The Sega and The Nintendo, perhaps because they were already successful in the USA and Japan, and with the buzz being generated for their release in the UK, everyone could see the end of the line for the Speccy. There were assassins climbing the hill to take the King’s crown. In fact, they weren’t assassins – they were stealth ninjas!

While the article admits the new consoles are more powerful and look fantastic graphically, you can see it’s a shame that there’s not a British based console to compete against nor is there a more-current successor to the Spectrum to pass on the home-programming baton. The Spectrum brought home computing to the British masses, and MANY current video game creators cut their teeth coding on a 48k. (I have fond memories myself following the instructions to create an adventure game called ‘Condensation Street’ with my brother.) Now, however, the closest thing was to buy an IBM PC or one of its incarnations, but to most folk, these were still simply too expensive and out of reach.

People, especially the youngsters like myself that these new consoles were marketed at, were obviously more interested in playing games that looked great rather than learning how to create games themselves, and even though there was a wealth of games on the Spectrum, they didn’t have the sparkly graphics to with them.

Pssst! You know that sex sells? Well in the video games industry prettier graphics sell.

The war between Sega and its Blast Processing, and Nintendo that… don’t…? is a fairly long one spanning a few console generations, and is something I might write about in the future. I’ve written enough for now, and as I only intended to write about the changes I’d witnessed and what it meant to me but I’ve gone slightly off track to write about something you probably already know about!

Make sure you check out World Of Spectrum and The YS Rock ‘n’ Roll Years that goes hand in hand with it, and from there, you can relive the glory days by downloading an Emulator and ROMs of the games. Emulation, and abandonware – something else to discuss in the future!

Le Spectrum est mort, vive le Spectrum!

the shape of things to come?

I seem to think that if I write more often that not only will some of my current problems go away, but that new opportunities will sprout up; hence this blog, some IF and possibly even some game reviews are on the cards.

Unfortunately in the past week, I’ve done absolutely nothing towards reaching my goal.

Fiddlesticks. Not a great start I know, and what’s worse is I didn’t fill the time doing anything remotely productive. I think that when I give myself a lot of things I want to do, that I end up not being able to start any of them. The same is true for when I have a few days off work and I decide to play through a game or two I’ve not played in a while: I end up doing everything but that.

I’ve got a clear weekend, so perhaps something may come of it. Once I’ve cleared this first hurdle, you won’t be able to stop me, right? …Right?

On a side note: I’ve discovered Blender. I miss 3D modelling, so that’s another task for the list.