Zero Punctuation on Prince Of Persia

Posted by Vaughan on Sep 28, 2008 in Games, Review | 1 comment

Zero Puncuation is still one of the best break review sites around.  I might not agree with all his reviews (i.e. Castle Crashers, BC: Re-armed), but what makes the site good is that he’s not trying to make anyone happy.  It’s a review site with an opinion, a great sense of humour, and not a back handing promo site stroking every publishers epeen.  Back on track, the Prince of Persia review had me falling off my chair.  Check it out below. 

Game Review: Star Wars – Force Unleashed

Posted by Vaughan on Sep 28, 2008 in Games, Review | 0 comments

It’s rare that a big label game comes along, and I play it until the end. Since Halo3 there have been very few games I’ve been bothered to complete, and most of them XBox Live Arcade games (that reminds me, I need to review Castle Crashers and BC: Rearmed). GTA IV did take a fair amount of my time, but the mechanics of the game were too unforgiving. Anyway onto the review…

Star Wars – Force Unleashed: Kid, flash forward, adult, bad, slash slash, bad, push push, bad, zap zap, confused, zap zap, good, slash zap pew push slash, boom, vader, confused, emperor, bang bang, the end.

This game was a real treat. Bad camera, quite buggy, emphasis on the controller-in-tv infusing camera, but a real treat.  The game mechanics at a high level are quite awesome.  Your character levels up slowly, unlocking abilities as you go, which is nothing new.  What makes the difficulty slider on the game.. slide… is that every time you die, you don’t lose experience Jedi uber power points. Hence the game gets easier and easier as you bash your head against the wall. This works well for impossibly large groups of gun toting angry wookies, just after you opted for the focus fire and are in dire need of AOE. Boss fights start off impossible at times, and then you figure out the strategy, and away you go. The Darth fight was really well done, and the emperor fight, well, who cares!  I just pulled a Star Destroyer out of the sky!

The downside, aside from the plot, which in essence is needed for the game, SWFU is short. Whilst dodging the store salesperson who was determined to sell me the Wii version with the WiiSaber, I picked up the game amazed they had a ‘pre-owned’ version so close to launch.  “That makes no sense!”… but after playing the game, it made perfect sense. Finished in an AFL Grand Final weekend whilst doing everything else I needed to get done. Other downsides, no multiplayer that I can find, and faux replayability.

Buy it if you are a die hard fan, but otherwise, rent it.

Project Rubixel – Now Live

Posted by Vaughan on Sep 27, 2008 in Art, Rubixel, Street Fighter | 0 comments

People have been bugging me about getting some images of my Rubik’s cube creations.  So to avoid this blog filling up with Rubik upon Rubik, I have created Project Rubixel.  A combination of pixelisation and Rubik’s cube turning, which earned the term “a rubixelisation” or simply “a rubixel”.  Currently with 3 Rubixels on the site, many more to come, and many more images of the existing Rubixels.  So head on over to the Rubixel site to see more.  As a teaser, here are the Street Fighter II boys, all 700 Rubik’s cubes in full glory.

State of Installation

Posted by Vaughan on Sep 17, 2008 in Random | 0 comments

As a developer, over time the gradual corruption of your computer through installing, compiling, crashing, and bending your OS into shapes it was never intended for, leads to only one solution.  A fresh install, and while we’re at it, a new PC.

Time to dig up all the software installs, which some how after 2 years, are still where I left them.

Vista install kicked off, and head to dinner.  Back from dinner and Vista is installed, ready to rock.  I install live mesh and synchronise my tools folder.  Less than a minute later I have my swiss army knife of software downloaded, installed, and configured out of the box.  Now for software that requires an actual full installation.

Office, check.  Takes only a few minutes.  Last but not least, I’m lead to reinstalling the Adobe software I need.

10 minutes pass.  15 minutes.  20 minutes pass.  At this point I start writing this rant, and now I’m waiting for the installation to complete before continuing.  45 minutes pass, on a new PC, and the installation is completing.  I could understand if this was an installation of the full CS3 suite.  But Photoshop CS3 only, as a minimal install, I am confounded.  This is not the first time I have had this experience, but in the past I thought it was because the PC I was installing on was past its prime.

I don’t have a problem with software taking forever to install if I get a list as long as my arm in features, but when an application evolves to be a polished version of the same software I used over 10 years ago, and it takes longer to install than the operating system, there is something seriously wrong.  It is time for the CS3 install team to wake up to themselves.

Update: CS2 required installing on an older machine at work.  It was significantly faster.  I thought maybe I had not noticed it in a previous release, but once again, it’s just CS3. 

Re:Animation – Underground Film Festival

Posted by Vaughan on Sep 13, 2008 in Art | 0 comments

I headed out last night to the Underground Film Festival.  Re:Animation was 2 hours of short animations from artists world wide, ranging from sketches, to cartoons, stop motion, to full CGI productions.  It felt like two hour flash back to eat carpet.

There were many highlights, from entertaining, to simply purplexing, but for me the biggest highlight was MUTO. MUTO is one of the best street art creations I have seen.  Thanks to the guys at blublu for putting it online.  View the video below.  More information can be found here.