Archive for January, 2008
If Only I Could Aim
My PS3 demos downloaded, so I’d thought I’d share my feelings about both.
Ratchet and Clank was a lot of fun. There was a good bit of variation in what was going on, it was easy to control, and was immediately understandable and accessible for an idiot like myself. Charging around the level and blowing crap up was simply very satisfying, and being able to lock onto the enemies before blasting away removed any difficulties I might have had aiming with the controller (I’m still a keyboard and mouse man in this regard). It’s totally a game for kids, but I could see myself buying this.
Uncharted: Drakes Fortune (or is it Drakes Fortune: Uncharted), was a less enjoyable experience, but still not too bad. Like I said, I’m no good at aiming with a controller, and with no lock on here, that’s exactly what you have to do. I don’t know why I can’t do it, I just find there’s none of the control you get with a mouse, and don’t quite understand how so many people are able to play games like this with a joypad. Therefore I found it incredibly difficult, and actually gave up before the demo was over because I just couldn’t complete one of the sections. Being slaughtered over and over and over again just stops being fun after a while. I’d be tempted to go back and give it another shot, but it doesn’t make me want to immediately rush out and buy it.
In both games, regardless of their particular merits, the graphics are astounding. Ratchet and Clank gets compared to a Pixar movie, and while that’s perhaps taking it a bit far, there’s no doubt you could create a perfectly credible TV cartoon show using the engine on display here. Where games a few years ago would have pre-rendered intro sequences before you entered the action, what we have in both cases here is the in-game action living up to the graphical promise of those cut-scenes. Light in Uncharted filters through the trees while the leaves cast perfect shadows on everything below. Running through the water or under a waterfall not only creates beautiful looking splash effects, but also leaves your character visibly wet, before he dries slowly in the baking sun of the forest.
Graphics by no means make a bad game good, but they can help sell an environment, and push the narrative that’s being told within it. Both these titles are a good example of what’s now available within this framework and if you can lay your hands on a Playstation 3, are well worth the download time to try out.
Why Thinness Beats Weight
My conclusion with the Macbook Air is that it’s simply easier to advertise thin than it is light.
Saying that you have the lightest notebook ever made is difficult, because you’d have to define what you could class as a notebook. But when it comes to thinness, well it doesn’t matter how you class it, they really are the thinnest one ever made. And being thin has an advantage over being light when it comes to advertising - you can show it. How exactly do you photograph something that’s light? There’s no immediate visual impact there.
The truth of the matter is that they simply wanted to create a really light laptop, a super portable, without sacrificing things like screen and keyboard size that are usually the first to go when it comes to that class of product. As a side effect, because they’re so design concious, along came the opportunity to make it super thin in the process. And when you’re Apple, that’s exactly the kind of feature you jump upon, because it’s a design feature, rather than a practical one.
Where’s The Bandwidth Sony?
I fought through the terrible Sony store in order to find some demos to download, and was pleased so see that both Ratchet and Clank and Uncharted had one available. Wishing to try out both of them, I added them to the download list, choosing for them to download in the background. I then found a 1080p trailer for Cloverfield so thought I’d add that in there too. Right now, as of 9:46pm on Sunday, I’m currently waiting for all of them to download.
Oh yea, did I mention that I added them all to my download list on Friday?
Does Anybody Care About Thin?
Who cares if the laptop you’re buying is thin or not? I mean, really? Anybody?
Weight, sure. You don’t want to be carrying around a big heavy brick, especially if you’re a user on the go. And actual width and depth is important too, because you want to use it on a cramped airline seat, or you want to try and slip it into a small bag or backpack. But thickness? Do people have particularly large, yet thin, bags? I just don’t get it. Especially when you’re sacrificing ports, an optical drive, memory expandability and the ability to replace the battery. It’s a solution without a problem.
Strike Differences
I watched The Daily Show (sorry, A Daily Show) all last week, and it was well-produced, planned, presented and entertaining.
So exactly, how is it not being written?
With the writers strike still going on, shows like this have been forced to return without their writers by the studios in charge, as part of a technique that the studios hope will force the writers to settle. This means that shows like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, plus late night fare like Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien are going on without their normal writing backup. As the hosts are also WGA members, they’re not even allowed to write their own material as that’s against union rules. In fact Leno has already gotten in trouble for saying he wrote his own monologue.
But on A Daily Show, somebody must be writing it. There are clips, there are captions and graphics, there’s a very deliberate order to the way the show is running, making it very difficult to even tell the writers aren’t there. So if that’s not writing, what is? I know there might not be lines for Jon on the auto-queue, but that doesn’t make it any less written. Conan feels improvised or like time is being filled, especially when 5 minutes is spent with him spinning his wedding ring on the desk, but A Daily Show just feels… like The Daily Show.
Futurama: Bender’s Big Score
Film Review
Rating: 2.5 out of 5.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0471711/
Billy West (Primary Contributor). 20th Century Fox 2007, DVD, £13.19
I can see why this show has been cancelled before, it’s just so… average, which is guaranteed to split the audience. It’s not that this feature-length episode is bad, it’s just that there’s nothing about it that makes it particularly great either. There’s definitely a good story at it’s heart, and there are some funny moments, there just aren’t enough of them. So much so that it actually had trouble holding my attention for the full 90 minutes, which is never a good sign. Definitely one for the fans, but it’s unlikely to win over any new converts.
Say Anything
Film Review
Rating: 2.5 out of 5.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098258/
John Cusack (Primary Contributor). 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment 1989, DVD, £3.28
Disappointing John Cusack film. Everything moves far too slowly, John Mahoney’s character seems to dislike Cusack’s without a good reason, and despite good performances all around and a bit of pace pickup towards the end, it just lacks any proper sparkle.
In The Shadow Of The Moon
Film Review
Rating: 4.5 out of 5.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0925248/
John Young (Primary Contributor). Channel 4 DVD 2007, DVD, £5.52
“Man on the Moon, The Epic Journey of Apollo 11…. Sponsored by Kellogg’s” - introduction to 1969 CBS coverage of the first moon landing.
There are no shortage of documentaries, films and television shows about the Apollo missions and the journey to the moon, and I’ve seen a lot of them. I therefore wondered what this new documentary film was going to offer, as at this point I really thought I’d seen it all. It turns out that I was very wrong, because somewhere, perhaps in the back of a cupboard at NASA, the producers of this film found footage I’d never seen before. And it’s glorious. With rich, vivid colours, and often perfect camera work, there are shots that truly bring the majesty of space exploration to life.
But more than the footage, this is the real life stories of the astronauts that actually walked on the moon. With contributions from every mission, and with beautiful cinematography, they recount their memories of the highlight of their lives. With no narrating voice, and no interviews with other NASA personnel, these men get the opportunity to speak. Noticeably absent is Neil Armstrong, still living the life of the recluse, but whose colleagues speak very highly of him.
The film does a wonderful job of piecing together the footage and interviews into a narrative, especially of the Apollo 11 mission itself, and my only complaint is that there’s not more of it. It would be nice to see a documentary that took all the mission footage here, plus anything else that’s available, and pieced it all together into a true timeline of events.
When Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the moon for the first time, the whole world was watching. And they were watching together, united in the quest of exploration, and for that brief moment in time it didn’t matter what the colour of your skin was, or what country you were living in, or that the man up there in the space suit was American. He was human. You were human. And that meant you were the same.
This is a truly inspirational, even emotional documentary, which I would encourage everybody to see.
New York Reflections
There’s just something about the way the lights are reflected off the road that makes me love this one so much.
Apple Store Fifth Avenue
From our recent trip to the Big Apple. From the outside, the most impressive looking store in New York.
Star Trek VI: The Undisovered Country
Film Review
Rating: 4 out of 5.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102975/
William Shatner (Primary Contributor). Paramount Home Entertainment 1991, DVD, £5.65
A well written, well directed and dare I say it, well acted, science-fiction adventure story. There’s action, there’s intrigue, there’s dialogue taken from straight from Shakespeare, I’m always disappointed it doesn’t get more recognition as one of the great Star Trek movies.
The story is perfect, having the original crew bring peace between the Federation and the Klingons is a fitting send-off, especially with them being such sworn enemies for so long. And just like it often is when attempts at peace are made, there are those that don’t want it, which is the connection with reality the best Trek stories do so well.
There are a few things that could be better, such as Iman’s shape-shifter, or Kim Cattrall’s oddly stunted vulcan portrayal (she seems to have mixed up controlled emotions with slight retardation), but it’s still wildly better than every Trek movie that followed, and holds up very well in the CG generated movie world we live in today.
Twins Who Unwittingly Married
This is the kind of thing that would really fuck you up in later life. Imagine you got married again and had to explain that one to your future spouse.
Most of all I want to see a picture of both of them. If only so I can make disparaging comments like “you didn’t realise that was your sister? she looks just like you!”
A New Beginning
If I’ve done my job well, you should hardly even notice, but things have changed.
There’s always been things I wanted to do. Having comments appear on the same page as a single post for example, but doing so would have required custom development and the fact is that I’m far too lazy to do it. I just want to write, not deal with building the pen and paper that’s going to allow me to do that. So I’ve got myself a webhost, an installation of Wordpress, and here we are. If nothing else, then I’m also finally using the proper domain for the site.
All my existing posts are here, and all existing permalinks should still work (yes, I had to hack Wordpress to make that possible, which goes against my idea of not building things myself, but sacrifices always have to be made). There are some images broken, especially those that were previously uploaded via the Blogbear image system. I’ll work out what to do with them eventually, but there’s not really anything that important in there anyway.
Now that everything is here and looks like it did before (or close enough), I can start building on top of it, adding the things I want to add, following the ideas I want to follow. I have a feeling this may involve some custom PHP, but I can swallow my Perl pride and write a few lines just to make everything fall into place. And that’s the point, a few lines, rather than a few thousand lines, and I can finally have a blog I can be proud of.
There’s a good chance I may also steal a bunch of ideas from Graham, but we’ll see.
Cultivated
I could try and catch up with the last few months, post individual entries describing the things I did on the days that I did them (or at least a close approximation), but I would merely be kidding myself. The fact is readers (if there are indeed any of you left) the magic of blogging is just no longer in my heart. Before I continue on that theme however, here is a roundup of what has happened since I last posted.
Around the beginning of November, I went to London to see Andrea. I got stuck in traffic on the way down (I drove) because the motorway was closed, made the wrong decision about where to go because of it, got lost despite having sat-nav, and ended up not arriving until well after 1am in the morning, at least 2-3 hours later than expected. The next day I walked about 11 miles across London, and on Sunday I got home having covered 828 miles in the car since the Friday. A couple of days later, Andrea launched her own blog and I shouted hooray!
Also in November I finished the user signup for usermesh.com, bought and played Super Mario Galaxy (awesome, just far too much fun), my car exhaust broke, I watched the end of the disappointing Long Way Down on TV (a trip ruined by Ewan’s wife) and bought a couple of H2Glo’s.
In December I bought an EEE PC, for no other reason than I thought it was cool. I was disgusted to read that HTML5 may not be ratified for 10-15 years (by which time the internet will most likely be beamed into our brains wirelessly and it won’t be required anyway).
I also made my yearly pilgrimage to New York with Andrea, where we strolled through Times Square with Pizza, drank great cocktails, and I asked her to be my wife. Which she accepted. Which also made me go hooray! Ah, to be in love.
So now that’s cleared up, what is to become of my blogging career, which I have cultivated since March 2003? The answer to that, dear friends, I have no idea. It would be nice to have somewhere to post my thoughts, my film and videogame related musings, but the format here doesn’t seem quite right anymore. Nor does whatfilm, which has also suffered over the past year due to my lack of writing motivation. Perhaps some sort of combination of the two is in order, with a touch of The Links Effect thrown in as seasoning. Right now, I’m not really sure.
But for now, I tip my hat to you all. I’m sure we’ll speak again.
