Posts by Thrik

  • House of Cards

    Yeah I got through this series during the last few months, I was highly impressed. Kevin Spacey is one monumental actor, and the show felt claustrophobically dark at times. Can't wait for season three.

  • Uncharted 4

    Only skipped through and watched a few bits. The footage doesn't give away a great deal about what the heck this game is going to feature, but I do hope that the jungle gameplay is only a part of the game because I got seriously fatigued by that in Uncharted 1. With that said, UC 2 was undeniably a more or less perfect game but swung almost completely away from that kind of environment, as did UC3. I wouldn't mind seeing UC4 doing a good job of truly fusing urban and jungle together. The MGS-esque use of trees and grass for camouflage is hot.


    Mainly I play this series for the superb cast, locations, and humour though, so I hope to see lots of that. Globe trotting is a big part of why UC2 and UC3 were so great in my opinion. I guess it's possible that Naughty Dog is trying to simplify UC4 by going with a single kind of environment, but to be honest I hope not. The variety is a huge part of why UC1 fell a bit flat and UC2 didn't.

  • Mac or PC ?

    There's so much to the question that it's virtually impossible to answer conclusively, but I do use an iMac and my opinion is that OS X absolutely shits all over Windows (which I use every day at work) in terms of design, usability, and features. It's just a better operating system and I honestly can't see how anyone could contest that aside from the bias of familiarity. I never need to run Windows apps, but if I want to game I can dual boot into Windows with nothing but Origin, Steam, and Uplay installed within like 15 seconds.


    With that said, some things might seem weird if you're used to the Windows approach. To a certain extent you need to embrace the change, otherwise it'll drive you mad. I'll try to answer your questions to shed some light on what I mean:


    1. The default state of a Mac is a fresh installation of OS X. You can factory reset like with a phone or tablet, but if you're looking for a totally bare drive this probably isn't a platform for you.


    2. Whichever one has a retina screen will probably look far better, I know it does in the case of my iMac. If you're doing design then you really need one of these so that you can adequately produce assets for the retina-style screens (i.e. 4K and above) that will be universal within a few years. But honestly, everything is just so much nicer, especially now that most software caters for such resolution — the support in the Windows world is comparably laughable.


    3. Buy Apple hardware when it's brand new. New releases are frequent and you'll probably feel pissed off if you end up buying just before one it happens. The price doesn't change until the next release comes out anyway, so the longer you wait the worse value you're getting. Apple hardware generally sells for very good second-hand prices so expect to get decent money back when you want to upgrade.


    4. There might be some third-party shit that lets you delete the default apps, but in all honesty a lot of the power of OS X is its excellent suite of built-in functionality. If you don't need something, just tuck it away in the app browser — which is OS X's equivalent of the Start Menu and looks just like the home screens in iOS. I was surprised by how useful I found things like iMovie when I wanted to quickly throw together a screen capture or something, using Keynote to open PowerPoint files from work, etc. I see no sensible reason to not keep these around.


    5. OS X intentionally abstracts this stuff. You're not meant to be browsing through system/app folders, and in fact the OS hides all of these by default. Applications are meant to provide their own ways of getting into a folder if this is needed. You can do it, but this is really thinking Windows/Linux-style and not getting into the spirit of the better user experience OS X focuses on. Of course you can handle your own stuff however you please in the user data area (i.e. equivalent of Windows' 'My Documents').


    6. Probably. I don't do it as everything I need is relatively cheap nowadays, even Photoshop.


    7. How shitty Windows looks on a retina screen.


    OS X gets particularly sweet if you have an iPhone and/or iPad due to how well connected it all is now. It doesn't sound amazing on paper, but there's just something really elegant and sensible about how everything is completely synced between the three with no effort on your part. You can access any of your Safari tabs from all platforms (they show up as 'tabs on your iPhone' and 'tabs on your iPad'), all of the apps like reminders, notes, etc are synced, you can read/reply to texts on the Mac, see all your mobile photos, access all your contacts, make calls, etc.

  • [Feature] Level Design in The Last of Us: Part One

    Quote

    In this 3-part Level Design series, we’ll learn about Naughty Dog’s choices to design the intro levels of The Last of Us, using narrative design, level and tutorial design and characters as exposition tools to drive their fearful adventure forward. This analysis is intended for level design students and aficionados alike.


    It was originally given in a class at game design school Supinfogame in October 2014. Spoilers ahead — I strongly recommend that newcomers to the game play as they read this analysis.


    Read feature »

  • What have you purchased recently?

    I've been wanting to focus more on my music hobby for years, so I decided to take the opportunity to inspire myself with a new computer, MIDI keyboard, and Logic Pro X. I thought jumping straight into such in-depth software might be a bit too much after years of only playing on a keyboard and recording the odd thing, but it's actually been really fun slowly getting my head around how music production is done.


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    While it's far from complete, I feel somewhat happy that I've managed to get this done in the last five hours or so. Most of the time has been trying to get the instruments to sound decent together, which it turns out is fuckin' challenging.


    The next thing I want to fix is the bass not sounding great when it goes too low (I don't think an orchestral bass can actually go that low lmao). Also I need to learn how to make the notes blend into each other better. God, so much to learn. I feel like when I first started learning Photoshop or Worldcraft when I was like 13. D:


    Another long-ass session tomorrow I expect. I might try and do a remix of an existing game theme or something after. I made this one up, so a lot of the time has been spent figuring out original chords and notes rather than focusing on the technical side.

  • The Jurassic World

    This is going to be either amazing or awful and I seriously can't tell which.

    The concept is really good, in some ways reboot-ish (i.e. sweet-ass dinosaur park that initially feels safe goes to shit) without disrespecting the original by trying to retell it. This is much preferable to what the earlier sequels did, which was just show more of the 'gone to shit'. For me, the original was so great precisely because of the breakdown happening before my eyes. Similarly to why Half-Life worked so well, with Black Mesa initially being this incredible safe haven that very quickly becomes a living hell.

    Some bits of CGI bothered me, but I can't tell if that's because I'm looking at this on an iPad.

  • GTA V

    Wow, the ocean seems a lot less dead this time.


    I'll tell you what, it freaked me the fuck out the first time I tried to jet ski as far out to sea as possible. This weird kind of dread took me over as I sank — like, more real than I'd ever experienced in a game before — which I guess stems from my real-life fear of that terrifyingly endless expanse of shark-infested death.

  • Far Cry 4

    Glad I'm not the only one with these e-animal morality issues haha.

  • GTA V

    The first-person stuff looks great, think it might actually give the game a new lease of life for me. I'm going to wait for the single-player DLC they've announced though, I don't think I have it in me to go through all that game again without some entirely new stuff to do.