Posts by Taylor

I don't think you'll ever be able to download a great big guitar shaped controller

But Internet connections are getting faster, and the connections we have now are fine for downloading the vast majority of games out there (ignoring games like Blue Dragon). I have a feeble 1mb connection, and I've had no problem using Steam or Playstation Store to download gigs of demos and games.

I'm also sure developers knowing their primary medium is the Internet will start taking measures to shrink their game size, maybe compiling all those prebaked assets during the installation procedure? Whatever, things can be done.

I think developers would much prefer these methods, they lose less money on the publisher, it allows Indy developers much more freedom and exposure, and binding things to an account like Steam also reduces piracy (it doesn't stop it of course, nothing does).

I was initally really against things like Steam, Xbox Live/Arcade, Playstation Store, DLSite, etc. because I liked the physical disk, box and manual. But these days they seem like a much better option. People on 56k's be damned.

Sorry, but to my mind that was over elaborate Games Are Art psychobabble. At no point did the guys making Resident Evil sit down and design the first zombie encounter thinking:

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The horror of this encounter stems not only from the carnage...but also from the intensity of the perfectly normal blue eyes staring into/through the player. The zombie acknowledges the player not as another subject, nor even as a fantasy screen...but as a thing to be utterly consumed. The human eyes on the hideously monstrous face horrify us because they reflect a repressed aspect of our desire back at us-the deep repressed desire for nihilistic assimilation, the desire to be reunited with the maternal body, to be consumed (literally in this case) by the Other.

We’re talking about the same game that had dialogue “you nearly were a Jill sandwich.” Even if we accept that those blue eyes do, in fact, juxtapose the monstrous creature around them and represent our deep repressed desire for nihilistic assimilation: they didn’t intend it.

There’s a big quote coming up about saving and loading. Now, I can appreciate a solid point that in survival horror not being able to save whenever you like directly adds more risk to dying, as you have to do more to get back where you are, so you care much more for your avatar’s survival - this adds to the tension, fear and ultimately gameplay (except on the PC ports, which did much to prove the point). But no, this isn’t about that:

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The way we save ourselves (our progress), from a ludic perspective, contributes to our experience saving, from a psychoanalytic conception, ourselves (our conception of self). Writing is presented as a stabilizing, life affirming force. In a nightmarish, apocalyptic moment, Resident Evil allows us to fall back into the secure embrace of writing. This explicit symbiosis between saving and narrating, when considered along side Resident Evil's consciousness of the role of language in perpetuation of the symbolic order, displays their awareness of narrative as a life affirming force. Saving, then, becomes an act of maintaining psychic boundaries; it is the way that we save our selves. This saving mechanism doesn't change throughout the series-every game includes the comforting clickety-clack. Finally, as regards saving in the Resident Evil series, we thought it was too coincidental that the ultimate weapon in Resident Evil 4, a Tommy-Gun style automatic weapon with infinite ammo capable of killing virtually anything in the game with a shot or two, is referred to as the "Chicago Typewriter"... the ultimate textual weapon in ordering the world and protecting selfhood.

The Silent Hill series problematizes this conception of saving established in the Resident Evil series. Just as Silent Hill frustrates our expectation to unquestionably secure symbolic order and provide narrative closure, so does it subvert any conception of saving (or writing) as an unquestionably life-affirming force. In the original Silent Hill players record their progress with notepads rather than with typewriters. Given our inclination to see psychoanalytic theory at play in these games, these notepads reminded us of Freud's essay "Notes Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad'." A toy writing-machine, the mystic writing pad was a special tablet which separated temporary marks on a celluloid surface from permanent marks impressed upon a wax surface underneath (think Etch-a-Sketch meets carbon paper or more contemporary technologies such as the Logitech digital pens). Freud describes it thusly: "the surface of the Mystic Writing Pad is clear of writing and once more clear of impressions. But it is easy to discover that the permanent trace of what is written is retained upon the wax slab itself and is legible in suitable lights" (210-211). Explicating Freud's metaphor, the role of the analyst is to enlighten the subject toward these underlying impressions, recorded far below the level of consciousness, that are traumatizing them. For our study, the most intriguing aspect of the brief essay is its opening discussion of writing:

If I distrust my memory-neurotics, as we know, do so to a remarkable extent, but normal people have every reason for doing so as well-I am able to supplement and guarantee its working by making a note in writing...I have only to bear in mind the place where this "memory" has been deposited and I can then "reproduce" it at any time I like, with the certainty that it will have remained unaltered and so have escaped the possible distortions to which it might have been subjected in my actual memory. (207)

Again, returning to the metaphor, while consciousness copes with the insecurity of its memory, its inability to completely recall (perhaps we should spell it out and say "load") that which it has saved, the unconscious records all. (Of course, since some of them might be Real). While consciousness might not be stable, writing is. Freud, like Resident Evil, conceptualizes writing as stable and permanent. We were surprised, given this perspective, that Silent Hill might grant such a secure ontological status to writing, especially given the series' disdain for narrative coherence.

Or, perhaps, Silent Hill picked notepads because it’s similar to the typewriters in Resident Evil (therefore recognisable as a place to save) without being typewriters? Why think this much into it?

I admit Silent Hill 2 probably had more symbolism and psychological horror than a lot of things, and the article is mainly about the results rather than the methods... but sorry. It’s like they’ve learned the Freud and Lacan philosophies (really well), but just threw them at these games hoping it would stick and surrounded it in enigmatic language. I think if you’re going to analyse something in this way, there are better sources than games whose fear, no matter how much you go into it, was mainly created by some guy saying “putting the first zombie down there and having him turn around slowly would be ace!”

I hope it's really good, I want another medieval/fantasy stealth game. All these people leaping around in spandex, using weird technology and wearing stupid bright green lights as part of their attire isn’t really my thing.

But I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who knows nothing about this game despite watching the presentations and trailers. Half the material released is people climbing walls and leaping to their deaths to ambient music, and the actual gameplay footage was poor. They seem more preoccupied splicing in the futuristic frames to hint at the plot - that we’ve all worked out for ourselves already (or been told it straight by a voice actor).

The gameplay footage was: The player climbs up the walls of a building, uses ‘intuition’ to see their target, then takes up an elaborate plan to disguise himself as a priest to get close with some woman talking about how great this all is. And it’s all very cool... But then he kills him and 50,000 guards jump out of nowhere that prove to be no problem as the player makes his escape. So I’m not exactly sure why you can’t rush in and stab five shades of shit out of him anyway, unless there’s some horrible brute force mechanic to stop it.

I read in an article from some ex-employee the control system is quite poor though, apparently the 4 face buttons represent parts of your body and the shoulder buttons determine the ‘context.’ Sounds weird, but he may have just been disgruntled, don’t think I’ll know until I try it.

tl;dr: Hope it's good, released media is too obscure

PS3 doesn't really have any "I must get a PS3 for this" games, but there’s a lot of "I'd get that if I owned one" titles. It really needs to get some decent exclusives out the door, the 360 still isn’t that hot in that department (for my tastes) and it’s been out for ages. It really needs things like Final Fantasy to hit.

I think the PS3 would be a whole lot better if the EU and USA Playstation Store was remotely as strong as the Japanese one. I made a fake account yesterday and I was livid! It literally contains twenty times the content of the EU one, it has so many demos and games they split things up by genre, with entire sections devoted to games like Resident Evil 5 and Devil May Cry 4 (movies, wallpapers, etc). It even has demos for American games that are entirely in English, that only show up on the EU store as purchasable full-games!

I hit 360 and PS3 but that’s a bit of a lie really. I’m poised to get a 360 but actually haven’t yet, since the Christmas and early 2008 line-up actually looks stronger for Sony from my perspective right now.

Well I use public transport a lot because I think if I got in a car I'd probably space out and kill five people before I've put the key in the ignition, so I play emulators on my PSP a lot. Throwing names around would be Progear, Streets of Rage 2, Street Fighter Alpha 3, etc. I guess Final Fantasy: Tactics The War of the Lions counts as old too. Still play the older Touhou Project games during lunch at work, and occasionally play people at Guilty Gear XX.

Heh, in my complete ignorance I ended up trying to get DX9c do 1,000 individual draw calls (60 times a second), I could feel the lights starting to dim when I ran it.

The amount of advertising this game is getting is obscene. Take Eurogamer for instance, when I visited there every advert was Call of Duty 4 on the main page. If you watch a trailer movie on Eurogamer the entire background is Call of Duty 4, clicking anywhere on the page redirects you to the Call of Duty 4 homepage and before you watch the trailer you have to watch one for Call of Duty 4.

That's a sick amount of money being spent and, heh, I'm surprised they gave one of the lower scores (relatively speaking). Though I'm not trying to imply here it's a bad game, it looks awesome.

Man, DX10 looks 6 years ahead of DX9.

Quote from killertomato

anyone else as excited as me about this?

I learn from my mistakes

1st person cutscenes are good because they don’t reveal your character, which can ruin the mood a bit in an FPS where that disembodied hand with a camera strapped to it is you. But they're rather limited to things like watching things explode, people talk, and “oh no I am falling” unintended dramatic vehicle exits.

The comments are hilarious.

He now needs to do another Halo 3 review while poking fun at America, he'd have like 400 replies in the first hour.

Touché, bad example. I actually haven’t downloaded the Crysis demo because I’m not going to be paying hundreds to play that and Unreal – which is kind of the perspective point I was going for. I note Nexus triumphantly spent almost the original price of the PS3 on two cards in off-topic.

I did notice even in WoW, instead of throwing skins together on NPC's and storing some file paths, they pre-bake the skin of every single NPC in the game and throw them in one big directory - so yeah, it must have a giant impact on streaming.

$399 is less than it'd take to make my computer run Crysis at 30fps consistant on anything but "god awful" graphical settings.

Cooking makes a load of pre-baked data so the engine doesn't need to work it out itself?

I hope the next version of hammer introduces more cookery based terms to keep it up to date. Displacement map altering should be kneeding or something. I don't know. I haven't thought this through.

There's always the token mature woman into fem-dom. Sometimes she'll look as old as 11.

Quote from dissonance

tonight we dine with weeeaaabbbooosss!

Damn straight!

Though they shed some of that for being game characters, and don't quite match Quakis' Utawarerumono. Which was originally a hentai game with 8 year olds in it. Good on ya!

[Blocked Image: http://alexandertaylor.net/stuff/desktop300_s.jpg]

Quote from CrazyMac

So i've done a bit of research.Going for fictional dates of 04Feb08 to 07Feb08.

Flight to Copenhagen from London £110 (British Airways)

Hotel http://www.avenuehotel.dk about £87 per night (even cheaper if we share obviously).

Only costs missing really is TAXI and police bribes

and it means Mazy doesn't have to travel far...in fact he can just fall out of his office.

Hm, I love it when a plan comes together. I'd be up for this.