Little Brother

June 10, 2009

By Cory Doctorow is quite a good book.

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The List

January 17, 2009

Hey look, another year end list.

Music

3. IV - Nerf Herder
Cheesy as fuck pop-punk goodness. (Stand By Your) Manatee makes me happy in unmeasurable ways.

2. Stop Drop and Roll - Foxboro Hot Tubs
Probably the best album released by Green Day, really really tight and listenable.

1. Red Album - Weezer
I was pretty disappointed with Make Believe and was very apprehensive of this, but it turned out to be an amazing album.

Last year I said - “Nerf Herder IV should be good for fans. I’m looking forward to Black President’s first release sometime this year.” Well IV was good, Black President turned dissapointing.

Next year - New stuff from Bad Religion, Sonic Boom Six and Biffy shouldn’t dissapoint. Oh, and No Doubt are back.

Movies

3. The Dark Knight
Clearly was gonna be on the list somewhere. Gets deducted points because Hollywood still feels the need to shoehorn two fucking villains in every fucking superhero movie when one is more than enough.

2. Quantum of Solace
James Bond’s got good again.

1. Taken
This is a film about Liam Neeson beating the shit out of France. Over the top, entirely predictable but nonetheless kick-ass.

Last year I said - “Hellboy 2 is easily my most anticipated. Jumper looks like it could be fairly decent and the X-Files sequel should be, er, interesting, if nothing else.” All 3 of those were pretty much shit. Although I should get points for pointing out from the outset that Indiana Jones 4 would be wank.

Next year - Star Trek, Watchmen, Transformers 2 and possibly Terminator: Salvation.

Games

3. GTA IV
The like of this game turned to all out love when a ped called me a “shitbeast”. Amazing.

2. X3: Terran Conflict
I lost about two months to this game. And it looks and runs awesome.

1. Left 4 Dead
Bought on an impulse, turned out to be amazing, especially when you’ve got 3 mates to play with.

Last year I said - “The Dawn of War sequal, SoulStorm, should be more of the same rts goodness. Little Big Planet, Final Fantasy XIII and GTA IV look to be the PS3 games to go for.” Still no FFXIII, LBP and GTA IV lived up to the hype though. SoulStorm was shit.

Next year - Dawn of War II makes me happy in the pants, considerably moreso that StarCraft II, which is probably gonna dissapoint. Is it conceited to list Cohort’s next release here?

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And you just don’t care for tomorrow, today

September 30, 2008

First off, I’d like to make it clear that if Zachary Quinto was to walk up to me in the street and say “Live Long and Prosper” then I’d slip him one right there and then.

Now that that’s out of the way, Little Big Planet is amazing. I’m not sure yet what it’s best feature is - either being able to make your character cry while cracking one out or Stephen Fry saying “Stiffness controls how rigd your piston is…now I hope you’re not giggling”.

Beyond the initial hilarity (yes, the first thing everyone does is make a cock, it’s inevitible), the scope for user created content is immense. Playing for a couple of hours we came across some really cool concepts and designs and once the full game is released and people get used to the tools I’d be expecting some levels that’d rival full commercial games in their complexity.

The engine itself is really nice as well. The facial animations of the sackpeople are astonishingly good and the whole cooperative play thing has been implemented really well. If I was Sony I’d be looking at LBP and Home and wondering which would’ve been a better virtual environment for them…

Finally, got a handful of new bands to try out thanks to Mr Mike Davis - Billy Talent, The Gaslight Anthem  and Frank Turner now entering regular listening.

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Cohort

August 28, 2008

Yeah, so I do occasionally post. Working at Cohort Studios for a couple of months now and pretty much loving it, proper commercial PS3 development is kinda fun. With any luck the title I’m working on’ll be announced fairly soon so I can actually talk about it.

Cohort as a company is a great laugh. I knew to expect the games industry to be pretty relaxed but the atmosphere really is excellent. Having the flexibility to wander in at half nine and then hang around later on to finish stuff off is refreshing and you can’t really complain about a job where you sit around in shorts and a t-shirt (ok, I lie, I’ve worn shorts once…) listening to music and hearing your boss say the words “tranny porn” rather loudly. Occasionally I even do some coding.

Talking about coding, I’m doing a fair bit of stuff in Lua now. I was aware of the language before but finally getting the chance to have a proper go at it is interesting. It really is extremely powerful and flexible and just generally neat.

On the other side of the spectrum my experience with Maya so far is that it’s a steaming pile of shit (”oh, you didn’t double click the scene file to open it, did you?”). Thankfully we have artists for that…

And as a final note, Big D and the Kids Table are amazing, listen to them more.

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Post Uni

May 25, 2008

So Uni’s finished, my last exam was on Tuesday. Just Graduation to go in July.

This leads neatly onto the future. I’m moving up to Dundee to start work as a games programmer at Cohort Studios. I’ll try to avoid managing to break the NDA before I even start working for them but they’ve got a couple of cool projects on the go that I’m looking forward to working on. I’m starting rather promptly on the 10th so I’ve only got about 2 weeks of bumming about left before I have to start being sensible.

I did end up going to see Sonic Boom 6 in Barfly and they were pretty awesome. The first support act Random Hand were interesting simply for the  fact that Ska Metal is an extremely underplayed genre. Big D and the Kids Table were well worth the effort - their covers of Jonathan Richman’s New England and The Special’s Little Bitch as well as their own song LAX were stand out tracks. I’ll definitely be listening to some more of them. SB6 stood up to their reputation of genre bending and songs Bigger Than Punk Rock and All In being stand out. Piggy In The Middle made the crowd go nuts and the lead singer calling for a circle pit during the final song capped off the night.

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