Archive for Blog
September 29, 2007 at 10:49 AM · Posted under videogames
Halo has always had great vehicle fun. In Halo 2 Lewis, Lance, and Josh invented ‘Warthog Basketball’ wherein one would drive toward a particular spot near a particular base on a multiplayer map and the other would fire a carefully timed rocket at a precise location. If all done correctly the warthog would fly arcing into the air to fall into the slightly-larger-than-warthog sized hole in the center of the top of the base.
Fun stuff right?
But something happens when a player gets behind the wheel. Something…takes over. The urge to drive over things: grunts, elites, brutes, rocks, ramps, and, most of all, other players. It can be more fun if the other player is on foot, but isn’t strictly necessary (there is another game called Warthog Tag which quickly devolves into Warthog Smash).
Here is Donald, perched on a ride new to Halo 3, the brute chopper.
Here he is, being hit by temptation. I’m that alien in the foreground.
Incoming!
After a sucessful hit, Donald tries to strike again…but a little too close to the edge of a cliff. Oops. :-)
Ride that ride!
I tried to get a video of this hilarious back and forth, but Halo 3’s theater mode let me down by not allowing recording from a campaign.
EDIT: For some reason there is comment display trouble on this post. Click here to see all comments
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September 27, 2007 at 12:56 PM · Posted under videogames
I love Halo 3’s theater mode. I can’t think of any other videogame that so gleefully invites you to meticulously examine the game from every possible angle and location. I was overjoyed to discover that theater mode is not just reserved for multiplayer, but every single game experience that you have is available for potentially painstaking examination. You can pause the action, slow motion cool scenes, have your camera follow the game character or the character of any other person you are playing with, you can even setup fixed camera locations and watch the action unfold.
That last bit is particularly fun. Rather than constraining the graphics and focus to the player-character, the creators of Halo 3 allow you to move the camera with an amazing amount of freedom. I spent ten minutes following one of my AI marines around until his bitter death at the hands of a grunt. The sheer amount of detail that my camera exposed was astonishing. Completely separated from the player/character the marine chattered with his, also AI, squad. When the marine’s leg was speared by four 2” spikes he grimaced in pain, fell back, and then struggled to fight on before finally falling to a brute’s attack.
Halo 3 is simply brimming over with this massive level of detail. Donald and I played two co-op game sessions last night that lasted about an hour each. I could easily spend three or four hours on each in theater mode and still not see everything. At one point in the game the player/character is riding up an elevator hearing about a Covenant attack over the radio. In theater mode you can actually see the attack taking place by flying the camera up ahead of the character. Where most (all?) gaming companies would justifiably only worry about detail immediately surrounding the character, Bungie has created a wealth of detail then gleefully given us gamers the tools to peruse it.
This isn’t to say that theater mode doesn’t expose the ‘game’ itself. There are the sudden pop-in and pop-outs of sets and props if you move the camera extremely distant from the player. Rather than hide this, Bungie simply accepts it as a consequence of giving the player complete freedom with the lens.
As I watched Donald and I kick Covenant ass I found myself moving the camera in and around the battles like a photographer, which is handy because it’s actually possible to take screenshots and share them with the world.
Awesome? I sure think so.
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September 26, 2007 at 06:41 PM · Posted under videogames
Amazing. The single player campaign is, so far, everything I had hoped it would be. The multiplayer is so flawlessly awesome that it practically bring tears to my eyes.
Let me just take you through a single aspect of the multiplayer: theater mode.
- The game keeps fully viewable records your last 25 online matches, meaning that for each of those matches you can watch the entire thing in slow-motion, from the perspective of any of the players, move a free roaming camera anywhere on the map
- Using these ‘video’ records you can also record screenshots and film clips
- Those film clips and screenshots can be uploaded to space provided for your user by Bungie
- Other users can browse those clips and Bungie makes finding them extremely easy. If I save a cool screenshot from a match, if I, or anyone else, looks up the detailed match information on Bungie.net my screenshot will be listed as ‘Game Assets’
After I have been beaten down (check out my Halo 3 multiplayer match record) I can view the game from the perspective of the player(s) I found most impressive and steal their tactics (which are hopefully not beyond the reach of my skill).
That previous link to my game stats bring me to another fantastic aspect of the multiplayer: stats. Some of you may remember the prodigious amount of statistics that Unreal Tournament meticulously tracked for each multiplayer match (wow, my character took 3768 steps during that match). I am pleased to report that, although Halo 3 does not surpass them, it does a fair job of rivaling them.
That’s my online character over there to the right. I’ve only unlocked the merest fraction of the upper level customization so far, but I’m pretty happy with my current look.
I’m “TheRealXyzzyB” on XBox Live because, believe it or not, someone else has the gamertag of “XyzzyB”. Obviously since I own the domain, it makes me the true personification of the handle. :-)
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September 22, 2007 at 09:55 AM · Posted under videogames
Want to see how crazy Halo fans can get? Well then feast your eyes on this:
What is that you ask? Oh, just the spectrographic analysis of a wav file downloaded from a secret server (206.16.223.61) the existence of which was found in four numbers hidden in an online Halo 3 comic the existence of which was found in a Circuit City flyer.
What? Oh yes. Did I mention the crazy? That is merely the slightest scratch of the depth of the awesome insanity of the serious Halo 3 fan. Check this out.
Is that an Amazon graphic you see on that book? Why, yes! It is! Yes, the Halo 3 alternate reality game “Iris” has even managed to hide clues inside a book listed on Amazon.com.
Not quite crazy enough? No problem:
That is a picture posted alongside advertisements for a company called Flood Containment Control. The company has a bunch of online postings (Google search for flood containment control) ranging from advertising services, to job postings, to equipment surplus sales. But doesn’t that symbol in their example of flood damage look odd?
That’s because it is odd. It’s the ‘glyph’ symbol that represents the alternate reality game.
If you are at all curious at the huge backstory behind Halo 3, check out Halo 3: Iris Wiki, particularly the quick summary. If you just want to see all the pieces of data (e.g. a textfile of array recorder data apparently from when the halo structures were last activated) that have been found, head to the page for the secret server 206.16.223.61.
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September 16, 2007 at 11:44 AM
We in central North Carolina have been suffering from an extreme heat wave. It’s been pretty bad, especially since Sarah’s and my air conditioner stopped working last Saturday (the 8th) and was not working again until last Friday (the 14th). It was actually kind of nice to fully feel the summer, even if it meant sleeping in a wind tunnel, because that means that we really appreciate this weekend. On Friday we had rain, lots of rain, thanks to the remnants of Humberto and the heat (at least for now) has broken.
Saturday was absolutely gorgeous. Hot, but not stifling, with a nice and steady breeze moving through. We opened up the entire house and it was just wonderful. A perfect day for the grilling out party Lewis and I had planned. It was Parent’s Day at NCSSM so Sarah had to work. While she was gone I cleaned and straightened the downstairs of our townhouse, which had rather needed some attention, and prepared the burgers and started the chili, a long simmer is the key to delicious chili (that, and the secret ingredient).
The grill out was great. Fun company, delicious food, Halo 3 movies (only ten more days!).
Now it’s a nice Sunday morning, even cooler than yesterday. The breeze is still drifting through and temperatures are in the low 60s. A perfect day for drinking coffee under a blanket, ahh.
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September 11, 2007 at 09:15 PM · Posted under essays
What is art?
If questions were guns, then that one would be a fully loaded shotgun. Ranking up there with politics and religion, the debate on what art is invokes a reaction from all.
Generally people have a vague notion that art is something that everyone agrees is art. That art is cultured, refined, high-brow, sophisticated. That art must be appreciated to be art. Art is that which is hung in museum galleries and fawned over by elite scholars who write detailed analyses describing their value and meaning. People believe these scholars and nod their knowing agreement, sure that they too see the same value that the experts have ascribed.
At the other extreme there are those who say that all that I’ve just described is emphatically not art. That art is the living, breathing, messy, chaotic act of creation. That art in museums is dead works and that true art is that which is happening all around us.
Some say that if something is fun then it isn’t art. That movies and comics and videogames and television and books can never be art because they are made not to express a feeling but to entertain and delight.
Some say art must be beautiful. Some say art must be meaningful. Some say art must be passionate.
I have a serious problem with all of these claims and, in fact, the very debate itself. Every single one of these claims are all predicated on the fact that art must be something. It doesn’t. Art is what it is and what it is is entirely, completely, and utterly subjective. There is no debate here because it all comes down to personal perception. No one can make a genuinely compelling argument about the true definition of art because it is not possible to rationally argue an aesthetic point of view.
For example, I happen to think that industrial architecture is both artistic and aesthetically pleasing. If I talk with someone who disagrees on both of these counts there is no way for me to make a logical case and prove that, yes, an electrical switching station is conclusively beautiful. To be sure, I could make my case. I could try and help this person to see through my eyes via example and description; but this is not proof, merely experience.
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September 08, 2007 at 09:52 AM · Posted under music, quicklinks
Behold! The sea organ.
The Sea Organ (morske orgulje) is located on the shores of Zadar, Croatia, and is the world’s first pipe organ that is played by the sea. Simple and elegant steps, carved in white stone, were built on the quayside. Underneath, there are 35 pipes with whistle openings on the sidewalk. The movement of the sea pushes air through, and – depending on the size and velocity of the wave – musical chords are played. The waves create random harmonic sounds.
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September 06, 2007 at 11:59 AM · Posted under tech
Since the iPhone arrived I’ve been saying that what I really want is the iPhone without the phone. A slim touchscreen macbook nano for wifi internet browsing in my pocket. Now it’s here:
Touchscreen iPod
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September 05, 2007 at 05:25 PM · Posted under movies
I like to imagine that back in 2000 when the movie producers were casting for the Harry Potter movies one of them saw James and Oliver Phelps and said:
Twins. Red hair. Get the car.
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September 04, 2007 at 01:01 PM · Posted under television
Ice Road Truckers is one of the best things on TV now, even though it’s in repeats.
It’s like a documentary on what it would be like to harvest ore on an alien planet.
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September 04, 2007 at 12:31 PM · Posted under books
Re: Brent’s September 3rd post (Brent’s September 2007 posts. No permalinks to individual posts Brent?) in which he postulates that there are four “primary dimensions” of fiction writing: 1) World building, 2) Character Building, 3) Density of prose, 4) Storytelling and that:
Frank Herbert was a master at dimension 1, Terry Prachett’s amazing at dimension 2, Ray Bradbury’s a perfect example of dimension 3, while J.K. Rowling’s real strength is in dimension 4.
First I suggest that #3 should be clarity of prose. Further, I submit that a true master of all four is one George R. R. Martin. George R. R. Martin is my favorite author and A Storm of Swords is my favorite book. I say both of these things without pause or hesitation. He’s just that good. His worlds live and breathe and genuinely affect his characters, rather than merely serving as a stage for them to play on. His characters exhibit real dimensionality, even after hundreds of pages and personal insight a character can still surprise and I get the real impression that the characters surprise themselves with what they are capable of. His writing is superb: clear, descriptive, and never boring. His storytelling, though, is his grandest achievement. The stories that he tells are epic and ordinary, fantastical and political, legend and myth and reality all mixed into one huge, chaotic, yet logical plot. This is a world richer than Tolkien’s merely for the fact that it lives. Tolkien will always be the master of background information: languages, cultures, and the like (although Martin is no slouch here) but Martin’s world is so full of experiences and detail that it truly seems real.
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