Mrs.Bairdy

A simple ‘work in progress’ sketch, done using traer physics, featuring an octopus-like creature that goes where the mouse is when the mouse button is pressed. Completely lacking in usefulness, but I like the potential of the legs. Not sure where to take it.

Octopus

Heavily inspired by a sketch in Ira Greenberg’s excellent “Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art”, this is a simple sketch randomly generating ‘distressed cubes’ at 30fps, written while my wife watched Dante’s Peak

Developed by Sony London, it’s yet another ‘rhythm action’ game where you press the buttons in time with the icons on-screen. “Yay!”. The selling point of Beats is that instead of relying on predetermined patterns, it auto-generates patterns to your own music, in this case the MP3s on your memory stick. It works pretty well in practice, better than other attempts at this automatic pattern generation I’ve seen.

The “twist” to the gameplay is that in addition to pressing the correct face icon at the right time, you have to press left, right or no direction depending on whether the icon is crossing one of three circles. Combine this with the “overdrive mode”, and you get a lot of symbols whizzing around to time the buttons to. I likes. It’s no Guitar Hero, but it’s not pretending to be – it’s a way of interacting with your music, having some fun with it, and giving you the freedom to use your own music. I’ll be buying it.

$5 on the PSP store.

This week at work, we had a really cool presentation about the “Demo Scene” by three guys from Europe. These audio-visual demos were a big influence on me growing up, I even knocked up some simple demo effects in STOS on the good ol’ Atari ST that I was immensely proud of at the time. So it was interesting to see where the ’scene’ is these days and the outreach by these guys to the games industry (and the likes of Pixar, ILM etc) to get involved in what they’re upto.

The talk was definitely inspiring, and tied in to the whole ‘generative art’ (though that’s a format one guy was a little dismissive of) aspect of processing. These guys are top notch coders, with the emphasis on creating something new & most importantly, impressive – it’s that “kudos” that the scene (a very social beast) lives & dies on. You’re out to impress with everything you do.

Again, inspiring & impressive.

How do I get wordpress to put empty lines between paragraphs?? GAH!

[Added]

Ah, it’s theme specific. Gah.

Turing’s Delirium by Paz Soldán.
A novel about hacking, cybercrime, the nature of cryptography, revolution & personal responsibility, set in a Bolivia caught in the middle of changing from 20th century third world dictatorship to 21st century modern economy. This is a novel of Big Important Concepts, however it’s really well written & well researched. I wasn’t desperately keen on the electric ant concept, but I understood where he was going with it. I’m a sucker for books relating to Turing, albeit slight in this case. The setting of South America is a nice change to the usual cyberpunk metropolis sprawls.

Yes Man by Danny Wallace.
What happens if you say yes to every question? That’s the basic premise of this book charting the journey taken by Wallace as he pledges to say yes more often for a year. Adapted from his diary of the year, Wallace is funny, down to earth, in the same style as Nick Hornsby etc. Wallace was stuck in a rut, when a chance encounter on a late night London bus makes him evaluate where he is in life & take a pledge to say yes. What happens if you say yes to every proposition you get? The book sags a little in the middle, but it packs a nice emotional punch towards the end. I likes.

Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction by Sue Townsend
I adored the Adrian Mole books as a teenager – funny, down to earth but over the top (and a fantastic adventure game by Level 9). This is the latest one, set during the Blair years, with Mole now an utterly boorish character. Absolutely hated this. All the fun of the characters have been sucked out & the political satire is dull & obvious.

Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art by Ira Greenberg.
A handbook for the programming language/environment Processing, teaching the basics of programming/maths for artists/designers, and going into a number of techniques for generative art. Not everyone’s cup of tea or directly related to anything I’m working on in my dayjob, but I enjoy mucking about in Processing. Some nice examples & ideas in this, even if the ‘learn to code’ stuff is for beginners

Creating Fractals by Roger Stevens
Pretty mathematical pictures & the maths to generate them. Not the greatest book about fractals, and it’s a little simplistic at times unfortunately.

I’ve loved Bizarre Creations‘ racing games since MSR on the Dreamcast with PGR2 on the Xbox being the pinnacle of the series for me. PGR3 took a different direction in structure & emphasis, and was obviously limited by the push to be a near-launch game for the 360. Its front-end in particular was off-putting to me. When PGR4 was announced for this year, and close to the release of Halo 3, it appeared like MS was just pushing it out the door with as little promotion as they could. Not good signs, so I was going to skip it. I’m happy to say I didn’t, and that it’s only the second game this year I’ve paid $60 for.

Bizarre have done a fantastic job – they’ve stepped back, evaluated what worked, and refocused on that core feature – rewarding & encouraging skillful driving through kudos. Sure, they’ve added bikes, more tracks, weather etc, but the core is more focused, more refined than in PGR3, which is fine by me. There’s new cities, like Quebec (a return to the closed in twisting tracks of Edinburgh), and old cities like New York & London. St.Petersburg is a new favourite of mine.

I wish I’d written this article, as it’s pretty darn good, summing up some really common ‘mistakes’ we see again & again in games – simple things like turning the ‘long’ way to face a target.

I’m a bit of a cynic when it comes to games, particularly “flavour of the month” titles. Like a lot of people in the games industry, I’m hard to please & far too keen to pick holes whether in gameplay or tech. Bioshock comes along with some utterly gushing reviews across the board. It’s a game that seems to be perfectly pitched to game critics – definite story based game, but still non-linear in how the player can approach problems (”Here’s some tools & a problem, go solve it. OK, here’s the next problem” etc), with a gorgeous art direction & thematic setting. All topped off with philosophy. It’s art with a capital A.

And all of that would usually put me off, but Bioshock is a rare beast that lives up to the hype so far. It’s not a perfect game, but what is? It’s engrossing & captivating both Rose & I, keeping us glued to the couch to see what happens next, to see what new way I can find to take down a Big Daddy,  and to see what part of the story we can piece together from the audiologs. Glued to the couch is only a mild exaggeration as we’ve watched no TV or films with almost all waking hours once Emma’s in bed devoted to the game. We’re going slow, exploring methodically & trying to take as much in as we can from this finely crafted game world.

Good job, Irrational.