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Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with a Film or Digital Camera

2008-05-02T05:56:41Z

Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with a Film or Digital Camera

by Bryan Peterson

I have to say, I highly recommend this book. As a beginner photographer with a shiny new SLR and a bevy of bad photos already under my belt, I'm just beginning to feel like I'm grasping the basics - and anything I've grasped I owe to this book.

I've been going through it, one exercise a day, for a few days now, and I'm learning something every single time. Friendly, first-person writing, and a patient writing style that's both rich in anecdotes and in photographic example.

If you're new to photography, or like me struggle to understand the relationship between ISO speed, aperture size, and shutter speed, I can't recommend this book enough.

]]> It covers all the basics well: Exposure, aperture, shutter speed, light, techniques, and a number of differences between film and digital.

On exposure, he provides great examples on the basics of exposure, light metering, and a focus not only on 'correct' exposures, but 'creative correctness' - focusing on using these three variables to creative effect. He then goes on to talk about aperture, deppth of field, and macro photography. Shutter speed overs freezing motion, panning, and implied motion. Light covers all of the subjects you'd expect: front and backlighting, overcast conditions, sidelighting, exposure metering, and sky, night, and low-light photography.

It's just a great overview and an opportunity for new photographers to get a feel for the breadth of creativity available to them, to urge them to open up and try lots of ideas. There's lots of emphasis on effective use of both manual and programmed modes to achieve good effect, and it's a great companion to a manual that is probably fairly unhelpful in providing anything other than a head full of jargon.

Two thumbs up for one of the best books I've read in a long time, and one which I'll be reading for some time to come, and a big thanks to Hank for telling me to go buy it. Money well spent.

Knuth loses plot, film at 11.

2008-04-26T21:28:48Z

Knuth is suffering from extreme isolation from the world around him.

On unit testing:

As to your real question, the idea of immediate compilation and "unit tests" appeals to me only rarely, when I'm feeling my way in a totally unknown environment and need feedback about what works and what doesn’t. Otherwise, lots of time is wasted on activities that I simply never need to perform or even think about. Nothing needs to be "mocked up."

...and multiprocessing:

I might as well flame a bit about my personal unhappiness with the current trend toward multicore architecture. To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas, and that they’re trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore’s Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks! I won’t be surprised at all if the whole multithreading idea turns out to be a flop, worse than the "Titanium" approach that was supposed to be so terrific—until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write.

Multithreading and multiprocessing aren't going away. Unit tests aren't some optional artefact, a crutch of the weak and/or stupid. Knuth is wrong. Think I'm taking this out of context? Read for yourself.

]]> Anyone who believes that multithreading is a flop must be using indexes at the back of books to find information every day, or some search engine other than Google. Multithreading and multiprocessing scalability is the backbone of many of our favorite businesses, internet services, games, and passtimes. Got a 360? You've got six cores and a GPU. Got a PS3? Multiple SPUs, a CPU, and a GPU, the first time in my memory asymmetric multiprocessing has ever been quite this extreme *and* commercial. You've got Google, capable of providing near-instantaneous results of searches on vast chunks of the internet, and services like Last.FM, capable of tracking what every one of its users listens to and using that data provide recommedations. We live in a society steeped in parallel computing infrastructure and applications, disguised as the everyday applications we know and love.

Moreover, I'd like to emphasise the importance of unit tests in team-based development where the project or product outlives the developer. Knuth can literately document every brain cell in his head and it won't protect the code from changes from others once he's dead. And most programmers leave a project - they do not, unlike Knuth, spend their entire life refining a handful of projects. Knuth is a throwback, a window on the way things used to be - but doesn't in any way reflect the world as it is.

Knuth's own statements stand as proof that not only do programmers only change under huge amounts of pressure, and only under necessity, but that concepts in computer science that were once au fait become outdated and outmoded as the science/art form evolves. Developers are more mobile than they used to be - a lot of people will change jobs every two to three years, and development processes have changed both to enable that kind of mobility and to protect the product from the rate of change. This isn't a weakness - new blood, new ideas, new directions keep products fresh and young, and introduce changes into a product that are vital to keep those products alive.

Knuth couldn't be more wrong - but he's totally capable of building an ivory tall enough that he never needs to look out the window. Let's face, it folks. He's Sauron, not Gandalf, a once great man who went astray. His products are stable, sure - they're made of granite, immovable objects. The rest of the world, however, remains the irresistable force, and that force is change.

Mass Effect Limited Edition (Xbox 360)

2007-12-09T13:52:58Z

Mass Effect Limited Edition (Xbox 360)

by Microsoft

Great game. Really, honestly, great game. An inch from "bestest game ever". So close to flawlessness...

Yet so far. The positive, I have no doubt, you have already read. Greatest RPG ever, huge expansive world. Slightly linear plotline, but well architected and with lots of scope to personalise the experience, and I'm sure you've heard the comment that "no two players will experience the same game". For all the warm fluffiness, go read Kotaku, Gamespot, IGN, or any other of the 8 million "me too" reviews that all espouse on how wonderful the game is. Heaven knows I read them before I bought the game.

And it's allmostly true. And you'll walk away from it better for having played it, because it really is a beautifully choreographed experience.

Naturally, however, there's a "but".

I played it with a friend; and throughout the game, we made jokes about the huge time delays on texture pops, and reminded each other to save, save, save the game. Between that and the sheer repetitiveness of the sidequests (which almost made them worth not bothering with, were it not for a handful of them that have really great storylines embedded in them) there are defintely flaws in the gem.

]]> There are, however, some problems for the completists amongst us. Go off the main story path and you'll find that the rest of the background noise has, for the most part, been phoned in. Side-quest after identical side-quest; each uses what appears to be one of three maps, each with a different set of crates, and some minimal scripting...

That, plus the huge number of glitches in the actual renderer, make it feel like it was released six months to a year too early - the renderer just isn't done yet.

Sometimes you'll spend half your life moving between narrowly-spaced elevators; other times, they're miles apart - almost as if partway through development they feared for their ability to do the complex loads and gave themselves lots of 'room' by inserting more elevators to disguise the problems with the engine.

Moreover, the much-vaunted 'choice' that you have is actually more limited than you might think. On my second playthrough - first with a rude, xenophobic bad-boy and now with an angelic, good-guy wonder boy, I'm enjoying the slight differences in storyline; but for the most part, they're more similar than they are different. Sure, you get to choose to have sex with a different character than the one you would if you were a xenophobe, and yes there is some variation in side-story; but in many cases, choosing the good dialog over the bad dialog gets you an identical path through the story, with only your own words being different.

Too often that's the case. We're not talking about a choose-your-own-adventure style of RPG here - we're talking about choose-your-own-dialog-within-that-plot more often than not. I'm not saying it's bad; it's still a really great experience. But don't actually plan on sitting down and having a completely different game based on whether or not you told Grandma that you were too busy having sex with the woodsman to care if the wolf ate her.

Also: Worst Autosaves Ever. Save early, save often, and don't expect the autosaves to be well placed. This I just don't get. There's no excuse for not having at least half decent autosaves in place. You simply *cannot* assume that the autosaves will be well placed, or thoughtfully, for that matter. The last vehicle run through the mass relay is a great example - just after that cutscene, when you've got 30 seconds to do the run, they should have inserted an autosave. Fail to save it yourself, and you'll be back a full hour behind where you last were in the game, and have to do the run up to that point again.

There's no excuse for thoughtlessness when it comes to autosaves in an RPG; there is a clear, planned progression of difficulty, and it again just smacks of rush and oversight. The first time you lose an hour's gameplay, you'll curse Bioware's name.

,p>Those are the worst parts. The game, however, is brilliant. Really, honestly, genuinely brilliant. I think the quality problems are scary - they ought not to be happening in this way. This is different, in many ways, from previous BioWare releases and a diverging of past quality that is unexpected, and which bodes badly for the future.

Props to Bioware for a great game, but I fear for Bioware/EA's future as anything but a grist mill unless they can start being more careful about ensuring a good quality *experience*.

Dynamic vs. Static and The Oncoming Storm

2007-07-14T15:40:10Z

The war of dynamically typed languages (e.g. Python, Ruby, JavaScript) versus the statically typed languages (e.g. Java, C#) of the world has raged on and on for years; it's second in age and ferocity only to the war over runtime-vs-nonruntime languages (e.g. Java vs. C++). With the latter war fading into the background and each side choosing different parts of the battlefield to entrench themselves, the former have reignited recently in a few notable skirmishes.

Cedric Beust, a fellow Googler and well known for his tireless work on TestNG, writes a blog article that points out something I think has been obvious to a lot of hardcore developers for a long time; that static typing isn't always such a bad thing.

The bottom line is actually fairly simple: nothing beats a dynamic language to write a prototype, but if you know that the code will have to be maintained and that it will be in use for several years, the initial cost of using a statically typed language is an investment that is very quickly amortized...

]]> Fundamentally, Cedric raises what I think is one of the cornerstones that make strongly-typed languages so nice these days: refactoring. The ability to build easy syntax trees and perform predictable adjustments on those trees has been around for years; compilers have relied on what programmers these days refer to as refactoring for many many years. Compilers can look at the structure of the written code, decide what depends on what, and perform a series of transformations on that code that results in the exact same output when run, but performs more quickly. These same transforms are the cornerstone of modern refactoring - the ability for a developer to take a section of code, select it, and ask the editor to perform an operation on it - to extract it into a new class, or to inline it throughout the codebase. Rename it everywhere it appears, change its visibility, reorder its operands, whatever the developer wants, the editor can perform - because the editor has a way of verifying, with absolute and unquestionable certainty, that the code before and after the transformation is applied is syntactically sound and cannot, with a pure syntactic change, introduce semantic changes in behaviour.

This ability - the ability to essentially modify a code's structure through software, on-command, without having to alter its syntax, is what allows developers to rapidly restructure existing code in preparation for adding new features, to reorganise the structural representation without risking the alteration of semantic meaning of the actions performed in code.

One of the commenters, in opposition to his point of view, replies:

"A good test suite is way better than a compiler."

I'd posit that this is fundamentally false, or at best a bad comparison. They are fundamentally different things; there is a fundamental difference between syntactic, static analysis used to find syntactical errors - structural errors, discoverable at compile-time by compilers and other structural analysis systems - and semantic errors which exist only at the level of meaning.

As anyone who can read anything (in any human language) knows, it's fully possible to write something which is syntactically correct, and semantically garbage: perfectly formed code that does absolutely nothing, gramatically correct sentences that nonetheless say nothing intelligible. Static analysis - analysis of the structure, of the grammar - can never help you determine whether or not something is semantically correct, whether it means something. Meaning is not encoded in grammar.

Statically typed languages assert restrictions on developers; they demand that developers say not only that something exists, but demand to know what the something is, structurally. Dynamically typed languages behave as though blind to the nature of the things they represent; they never ask you what the something you're referring to is, assuming that you know best what is in it because you put it there.

The problem I have with the commenter's statement is thus: it is never the test suite's responsibility to find syntactical errors; a test suite can never help you test whether something is structurally sound. Technically, to be fair, it's the runtime exercising the code that discovers the "syntactical" errors when there is no compiler, when there is only runtime.

What the commenter is really trying to point out is a situation where the code under test expected one thing and got another - an example of a situation that can't really arise in strongly typed languages. There is no syntactical error for this in the loosely-typed language; just a semantic one.

Thus, the problem: In strong-typed languages, these kinds of problems are simple syntactical issues discoverable easily through static code analysis. A language with looser syntax converts these problems into semantic ones that can only be discovered through unit testing (or execution of the offending code).

Now, that's slightly facetious, some will say. You can, for example, do complex static code analysis to find problems in dynamic languages. But to refer back to the older war between Java and C++, there will always be optimisations which can be easily performed in C++ which cannot be easily performed in Java because too many things have to pass through the runtime; C++ will always be easier to build optimisations for because it never has to deal with the runtime's typing system and open-ended constraints (late binding, realtime type introductions, etc.).

This argument also comes full circle into the newer war: Static code analysis tools will always be stronger, easier to write, and return more useful information in statically typed languages than dynamic ones; for every leap that tools take in analysing dynamic ones, that same leap will have been taken sooner, and faster, in a strongly typed one. Whole subsets of analysis can be performed easily in strong typing environments that cannot be made easily in static typing. One problem is inherently easier than the other to solve; every leap dynamic languages make will be into a space already inhabited by their strongly-typed brethren, sometimes years beforehand. The battlefield may be new, but the same old arguments still work fine.

IMO, you may indeed end up writing more physical code to perform an action, or may be forced to do so less efficiently, but you do get a clear tradeoff - you get better static analysis, and a narrowing of the scope of semantic-issues-that-could-have-been-syntax-issues that now need additional test coverage. So to get back to the point of the comment: loosely typed languages demand larger test suites, and better test coverage, than strongly typed languages - because you now have to write test cases for something that everyone else gets for free through their syntax.

Thus, at least when considering refactoring and optimisation (and other types of structural modifications to code made without altering semantic information), strongly typed languages will always have the lead. For that reason alone, they are better suited to long-lived applications; they encode the expectations and the knowledge of the developer in the code more effectively than their loose cousins.

How's that for controversy.

Manhunt 2 vs. The Ban Hammer

2007-06-23T16:10:42Z

Manhunt 2 just got rated AO by the ESRB (U.S), and banned for sale by the BBFC (UK). The tubes that make the internets work, normally filled with pron and stolen merchandise, have backed up and become clogged by the flurry of discussion over two things:

First and foremost, did Rockstar Games' Manhunt 2 deserve an AO rating from the ESRB, and a ban for sale in the UK. .Like any good fiction writer, I'd like you to suspend your belief for a moment - let's say it did. After all, the BBFC, being a film body that therefore has to rate every porn and snuff film that crosses the border, spends the great majority of its time watching and rating content that really does deserve adult rating. One might even argue that if anyone's going to be a half-decent judge, it's probably the BBFC - after all, unlike the ESRB in the US, their remit doesn't begin-and-end at games, they cover film, and therefore have more material on which to judge the nuances of acceptability and create uniformity in attitude; the ESRB only covers software. It's important to also note that in Britain there is an equivalent to the AO rating that the BBFC could have used, Restricted 18+ - they chose instead to ban it outright, a rarity for the modern BBFC Ultimately, my real point isn't about whether or not Manhunt deserves AO - my point is about the subject of AO. Even if it didn't cross the line, it's clear that Rockstar intends to straddle it.

Second, and the real question to ask yourself: should Sony and Nintendo publish an AO-rated game at all?. Sony and Nintendo say no, grassroots is equivocal, and the astroturf has been a solid yes. Ultimately, however, it is the answer to this question that makes the argument over the first question so important to everyone; an AO rating, in the eyes of some, therefore amounts to "censorship". In the case of the BBFC in the UK, the game was indeed outright censored, the decision was not left up to Sony and Nintendo. As the BBFC took the decision away from Sony and Nintendo, though, let's leave the BBFC's ban out - whether or not the BBFC ought to ban the game is a problem for the UK and the UK population. Whether or not adult titles ought to be published by Sony and Nintendo is ultimately an entirely different question, and the answer has a material impact on the way games, in the future, will attempt to push the envelope of acceptability.

So what are the implications of a world where AO titles are published? And what might it mean outside of the United States? In Japan, where nudity and sex in anime are utterly commonplace, games can often get away with much more adult content than you would see in anywhere in the West and would be considered porn in the United States; yet Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto 3 was banned for sale to minors in Japan. That same game only got an M rating (suitable for 17+) in the U.S. The U.S. seems to have a nearly (up until now, at least) bottomless stomach for violence, but considers sex taboo; Japan inverts the entire situation. Europe kind-of walks the middle line between the two, with some regions of Europe being more tilted towards Japan's mentality (Germany, for example, where the violence in games often results in bans, but where darstellungen are known, by name, within the general populace).

In addition to fundamental differences in social norms with regard to where the line on "adult" content is drawn, each region - Japan, Europe, the U.S. - have markedly different viewpoints on freedom of speech and how that freedom interacts with the rights of society. In the UK, there is no codified 'bill of rights' - you have no freedom enshrined in a constitution to pin an interpretation on, merely historical precedents and the European Commission's Court of Human Rights. Further astray from U.S. shores, the line blurs again. A defense of "free speech" gets you exactly nowhere as a games publisher with a global reach; those words mean completely different things depending on where you are, and the power of those words is notably weaker off American soil (for better or worse).

So, what falls into "AO" in other media? Content of a sexual nature. Rape. Snuff video and torture. Again, I ask you not to as whether Manhunt deserved that rating - let's assume it did.

Where, exactly, is the place for AO/R18 content in mainstream gaming? Sony and Nintendo draw the line at AO/R18, insisting that AO content will not be published. The line, ultimately, is at AO not because of violence, but because of sex and porn. If I made a sex-with-girls simulator, should Sony allow that to be sold? Given that each Rockstar game finds a way to push closer to the thin red line between M and AO, shouldn't we have expected it to be crossed sooner or later?

]]> The real reason the line is drawn at AO because the moment you have the above scenario, you have a problem. If Manhunt 2 is ok to sell in its current form at AO, what happens when you add rape? Where do you begin to draw the line?

The line is drawn at publishing AO games. I’m not at all convinced it’s a bad thing that it’s drawn there - everything I've mentioned above points at the reason: We don’t ever want to see video games being sold in backrooms of seedy sex parlors - that isn’t the way gaming becomes mass market, it’s the way gaming loses the mass market.

For the sake of gaming, and its continued progression into mainstream consciousness, it’s important to all of us to remember that we are not yet mainstream. We’ve all got a long way to go before we’ve got everyone comfortable playing games. Once gaming is ubiquitous, maybe then it won’t be so damaging - but while the gaming market is still the young, small thing that it is (relative to the global population) it’s somewhat fatal to go down that road.

And gaming, and the continued growth of gaming, is too important to us gamers (not to mention the devs and the hardware folk) to leave open as an option. The people who most want gaming to go mainstream aren’t Sony and Microsoft, they’re you and I - the people who want more people to play with, play against, and to share our experiences alongside.

For that to happen, it needs to be safe to buy, sell, and share in the light of day. “Edgy” content isn’t an issue, adult issues aren’t an issue; but it can’t ever become a back-alley, seedy affair, or it’s all over for a generation and we can go back to struggling to find a mate to play co-op with.

That’s my opinion in a nutshell - and it’s one of the reasons I feel it’s so important not to get embroiled in a war over the Manhunt issue as a community - we have to care about more than the fate of one ultra-violent game. If we have to choose our battles, is this the battle worth choosing?

Once upon a time, Clockwork Orange was banned in the UK, too - times changed, and it’s now seen as a masterpiece. Perhaps someday someone will say that about Manhunt 2; however, it's infinitely more likely they’ll say it’s pretty crude and has more in common with snuff films than with Kubrick. If, as Rockstar says, Manhunt 2 is a work of art, then like Clockwork Orange, someday we'll all come to see that. If, however, Rockstar is just finding new ways to stir controversy, well... You reap what you sow.

Do No Evil

2007-06-11T07:09:22Z

I'm just dying to wade in, but I know I can't. This isn't one of the small businesses that I can be vocal in and not damage, this is Google. I have a responsibility not to speak on behalf of my company.

However, the idiots at Privacy International have decided to feed the trolls at Slashdot, full to bursting with noise about how Google is going to sell out every user it ever had for the lowest dime. The tinfoil hats are out, light sabers are swishing through the air to the sound of numa numa...

What I can talk about is me. Those who know me sometimes argue that I do so exceptionally well, exceptionally often, and at length.

Do No Evil. One of the things that people tend to throw back at Google when they refer to them as the burgeoning evil is the idea that this is some kind of marketing slogan that we feed the world.

Those words aren't for you. They're for us.

Not a week goes by where someone doesn't end up using it in conversation. It's the litmus test - something we analyse all our own actions against to make sure that we're adhering to the ideals we believe in. It gets applied at every level, in every gathering, at every launch. It's something we all care about, and it's something we all believe in. It's the ground rules for anything that we do, and it's used, on the ground, by googlers regardless of what area they work in or what they do. It's been one of the best things about being at Google - everyone, at a fundamental level, knows that it's not enough to do good; that you have to not do evil.

We are what we do. If people would stop for a moment and ask around, they probably know someone who works at google. Given the prevalence of things like Facebook, I wouldn't be surprised if any internet user over the age of 13 knows a Googler within about three degrees of separation. If you really care this much about privacy, if you're really sitting there in a tinfoil hat wondering whether the sky is falling, go and find one of us. Talk to us about what it's like working at Google. Ask us how much we care about privacy. Ask us to what lengths we're willing to go, personally, to make sure that our Do No Evil motto is never knowingly violated.

The fact is, folks, that I believe in Do No Evil as much as I believe in Google. If I didn't believe in it, I wouldn't be working here - hell, I wouldn't be able to work here. And I know I'm not alone - we all feel this way. That's why the motto works - because we all believe in it, top to bottom. Companies aren't really nameless, faceless, amorphous entities; they're made up of people.

I Do No Evil. I with others, help ensure that others Do No Evil. Others like me, and there are tens of thousands of us now, do the same, every day. We, the people of Google, are Google, and we believe in these words.

Because they are ours.

Street View goes live

2007-05-30T08:11:33Z

Congratulations to the Street View team, they've done a brilliant job. I can't tell you how excited I've been about this, and for how long - it's got such huge potential, in terms of the wealth of features it makes possible. This is a really, really important step in mapping - it connects the road maps of the world with the landmarks we see and think in when we move from place to place. Have a look at the team that made this possible, and give them a virtual hug..

The Art of Separation: Emos In Motion

2007-05-19T23:53:41Z

I've come across one of the most beautiful/sad/strange sites I've seen in a long time. Meet The Dumpster, a visualization tool whose data set is a collection of 20,000 breakups posted to Internet blogs during 2005.

Lev Manovich, at the Tate website, describes it thusly:

But if we simply limit ourselves to describing the work as it appears visually, we will miss the crucial characteristics of the social data browser constructed by Levin. We need to consider how the data presented in The Dumpster was obtained and processed before it was presented to us. Using a variety of methods, Levin and his collaborators have filtered the huge data space of online blogs isolating the postings from 2005 where teenagers narrated their breakups. The result was 20,000 postings describing 'confirmed' breakups. These postings were subjected to further analysis in order to derive various metadata about them: reasons for the break-up, who broke up with whom, the age and sex of the author, as well as their emotional state. Most of this metadata was not explicitly contained in the postings but is inferred with a high degree of probability by the project's authors.

]]>

Written in Processing, a programming language designed specifically for visualisation and CG, and targeted at people who aren't necessarily proficient at programming but have god-like data sets, it's one of the most clever uses I've seen of the language.

Some of the excerpts include winners like:

01313: Larchie thinks Bad Religion is better than Fugazi, so I broke up with her. Then she played Sublime.
01503: My former boyfriend broke-up with me because I told him I couldn't have children. I fantasize daily about tracking him down and somehow secretly poisoning him so that he will be rendered sterile.
03315: ok me and my girfiend recenty broke up ya see i think it was cuz we have diferent signs see im a sagitarius and she was a whore tune in for next weeks;)

There's some powerful stuff in here. There's also some really trite whining and an awful lot of 14 year old emos with bleeding hearts pinned to their sleeves, looking up at the sky and crying out "God, why me?"

Note that running the visualizer will require that you have Java on your machine, as that's what the Processing language's runtime runs in.

Crackdown (Xbox 360)

2007-03-13T09:11:58Z

Crackdown (includes Halo 3 beta invitation) (Xbox 360)

by Microsoft

Let's start with the basics. I bought Crackdown for the Halo Beta. There, I've said it. I feel better. I could have given a rat's arse about the game the Beta was packaged in, I wanted early access to Halo 3 multiplayer. Who would have guessed when I hit that preorder button that the game might actually be worth playing?

]]> Microsoft has done a real injustice in one, small way, to the Crackdown developers. By attaching the Halo Beta, most of us won't have given Crackdown a fair shake. On the other hand, I expect an awful lot of people who were burned by the GTA-wannabe Saint's Row will have never looked twice at Crackdown - Saints Row didn't just burn to the ground, it salted the earth beneath it and put up little radioactive markers that say "Radioactive: Not Fit For Humans Until 12,006 AD".

Crackdown, it turns out, is a joy to play. I spent the whole of yesterday taken in by it - not just the clever graphics (which are realistic enough to feel like you're looking at the real thing without getting anywhere near the mechanisms in your head which trigger the Uncanny Valley; it has all the "reality" of a memory in its appearance, stylised and flawlessly perfect in colouring and gradient). It's a pretty thing. In motion, the game is ever-so-slightly hypnotic.

Better yet is the breadth of play style. Here's a game that will let you drive around if you're that kind of person, but as a pedestrian I'm far more in love with the ability to jump from rooftop to rooftop. Here's where the GTA clone develops a personality of its own: You play a genetically enhanced "supercop", and pick up powerups scattered throughout the four corners of the game world. Agility powerups extend your jumping range, and let you leap from building to building in a kind of flashy parkourgasm that twenty years of Superman games haven't been able to recreate. You get vehicle upgrades, powerups to driving skills, and develop the ability to use handguns accurately at insane distances. It's Lara Croft: Grand Theft Auto of War.

It's the first time I've ever played a GTA clone and truly, truly felt it was something unique and beautiful; it's also the first time I've ever felt really absorbed by any of the GTA family or its stepchildren. The developer, Realtime Worlds, has done something I'd have considered impossible - they've turned a genre on its head. Stylised violence without the gory aftertaste, super-vehicles that would give Jeremy Clarkson wet dreams, and real, honest-to-goodness gameplay that doesn't feel like theft.

Hats off to the developers for a runaway streetcar of a hit - they deserve all the success they get out of this. Whether you bought the game for Halo Beta or are yet debating whether it's worth the bother, this is a game worth owning, playing, and proudly admitting you enjoyed thoroughly.

Space Giraffe crash lands @Google

2007-03-06T21:03:22Z

Google is a magical company to work for; every day here in Mountain View is like a little fairy tale unto itself. Today's pixie dust came straight from Jeff Minter of Llamasoft, responsible for Tempest 2k, Llamatron, and who wrote the XBox 360's music visualiser; he reviewed his history of work and gave us a quick playthrough (and let us play with) his new project for the XBox Live Arcade, Space Giraffe.

]]> He started by showing off some of his earliest games in an emulator, and walked us through the body and history of his work. He pointed out the common threads in that body of work, and linked it to his current project, the Neon "virtual light machine" which ships in every 360 as the music visualiser, and the game which uses that visualisation engine as a starting point, Space Giraffe.

I'll skip to the important part. Space Giraffe is a little like Tempest, but if you play it like Tempest, you'll never get any points. The game has been turned on its head; the whole thing plays through, and plays with, the neon visual rendering system - not just backgrounds, but the whole environment, gamespace and entities, are all played through the LSD-like effects system. Far from being a gimmick, it feels authentically and naturally part of the core game.

Llamatron, and Jeff Minter specifically, have succeded in creating a game that takes elements of the known, imparts a huge amount of new material, and fundamentally changes both the experience and the gameplay while preserving playability and familiarity. It's beautiful, it's fun, it's clever, and it's really, really intuitive. There's a strong visual cueing that takes place between you and the interactive playfield - it gives you good visual ways of knowing when all of the new powers that you have beyond those of the core tempest game are ready for use, and the game makes strong use of that visual cueing all the way through the game experience.

What's most impressive is that it's not just you interacting with the gameplay, or you interacting with the effects system; your enemies have ways of manipulating the effects system to increase the difficulty levels and alter the gamespace. And all of it happens in a way that looks natural and doesn't overly-punish the player while still increasing difficulty levels. On earlier levels, you and your enemies can be defined by the lines that are drawn; on later levels, sometimes you and your enemies are the holes in the light and color, and sometimes the whole game is a beautiful, colorful negative.

This game is a work of art. It deserves to be played. It deserves to be successful. And I encourage each and every one of you to sit down, turn out the lights, fire it up on the biggest TV you've got, and just get immersed.

You can read more about Space Giraffe in Jeff's LiveJournal (http://stinkygoat.livejournal.com). It was a privilege to see, and when he says that Level 64 really needs to be seen in motion to appreciate its beauty, he's not kidding. This is one of those games for which screenshots do no justice whatsoever - the whole point of the game is in the visual movement, not in the static image.

Bad Coffee

2007-02-06T08:53:24Z

Here at Google, some people have personal assistants, just like everywhere else in the business world. And just like everyone else in the business world with personal assistants, some of them get used for things that they really shouldn't.

Oh, it's not the little stuff, like sorting out all the personal crap - it's the small-but-hugely-important things. Like coffee.

Now, for me, coffee is hugely important. Google has a huge, steaming monster of a coffee machine, and it can make absolutely amazing coffee... if you care. You can get coffee that's freshly ground in the grinder, test to make sure you've filled up to the right level, tamp it down with as much force as you care to use, stick it into the machine and out comes liquid heaven.

Or you can do what I just witnessed: some PA sticking two coffee cups under a double that was half-full, that she didn't bother to tamp, and when they didn't look like there was enough coffee, just run another single through the same one. No crema. It looked like dishwater.

And milk? Don't expect frothy, steamy goodness. No. She sat there with the cappucino jug under the steamer, at the bottom of the milk, and left it there for the time it took me not only to make my own coffee but to steam my own latte. What came out of her jug was flat, lifeless, and had basically been boiled into nothingness. In went the frothless milk onto tasteless coffee.

If I ever, ever get a PA, I want them to like me. If I get coffee like that, I'll know I did something wrong with my life.

Flog: A Definition (a.k.a, All I Want For Xmas is Sheep Dip)

2006-12-20T15:36:08Z

In case you're living under a rock, Sony has been caught red-handed doing something few are aware has become hugely common: authoring a flog. Once discovered, Sony took it down as fast as they were able - but Consumerist has gratefully reposted their mirror of the PSP flog at http://www.alliwantforxmasisapspflog.com/.

]]> A flog is a blog written as a marketing tool; like astroturfing (a "fake grassroots" campaign is probably the best description), a flog has a specific purpose: To pretend to be one or more people writing a blog out of pure enjoyment or enlightened self-interest, when in reality the whole blog is a sham/shill/marketing exercise. The person may be real, but usually isn't; and everything you see has been craftily worked over and written.

This isn't like Major Nelson's blog, or any of the other Microsoft blogs - they're not claiming to be anything other than a bunch of Microsoft bloggers. Sure, they're astroturfing in their own little ways, and their high-profile blogs are just as carefully managed, but they're putting people like Larry Hryb out on the line to air dirty laundry with. They're real people, with all of the good and bad that entails.

This? This is flogging at its best. Consumerist put it in third place, behind McDonalds' surreptitious 4Railroads and Mcdmillionwinner flogs and Walmart's covert Walmarting Across America sites.

This works, folks. It works an awful lot better than people think; everyone's gotten pretty used to YouTube's high-quality of content, and forget that a lot of it can be carefully engineered by one organisation or another to create huge astroturf events and generate buzz for products.

...and boy, are my arms tired.

2006-12-09T10:27:34Z

Oh yes. The Wii arrived yesterday, albeit late - ParcelForce is the worst possible delivery system on earth, and it astounds me to this day that they can stay in business, the bastards. Anyways, it got here at about 6:45 PM yesterday.

And its ability to drag-in non-gamers is truly amazing. Matt is now, and has been for the last hour or so, in the spare room with the Wii, playing vs. Pete, who came over last night. I played through Wii Play (s'ok, good fun, but nothing spectacular) and Wii Sports (Tennis is GOD), and played about an hour of Zelda.

]]> Wii Play is a nice introduction, but really feels much too... disconnected. It's not that it's too easy; there's definitely skill in some of the higher levels, and the skill level ramps up quickly - it's just that it doesn't have the same kind of addictiveness as Wii Sports. Having said that, it was the first game I played, it might need another chance.

Wii Sports... Nintendo's best pack-in game, ever, IMO. Both Matt and Pete are glued to Wii Tennis this morning; I was glued to it last night for about an hour, and I'm -> <- that close to walking out the door and buying another controller so I can go join them. In five minutes, you'll be deciding that Nintendo wasn't wrong about changing the controller.

Zelda is Zelda. It's a great experience so far, and I like the new control scheme, mostly. Camera control rankles a little bit, but it's really very, very good.

I'm in for a fun weekend.

Metriculation...

2006-12-07T11:52:06Z

It's all happening today. My Wii is being shipped in four parts - the pair of nunchaku, Wii Play + remote, the classic controller, and the Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess/Wii Console pack. All ordered via GAME UK. Bits are starting to arrive...

]]> The first part to come was the nunchaku, out of the blue. Nothing to use them with. No sign when the other parts might come. And oddest of all, delivered by courier. Oversized box, lots of air cushioning in it wasting space. If someone comes up with a better way of packaging stuff, they'll make millions. The world needs a magic shipping box; entrepreneurs, save us all.

Next up came the Wii Play + Remote. Delivered by the mailman this morning with the rest of the mail in bubble wrap. Smarter packaging, why didn't they do this with the nunchaku? And how odd that Nintendo refers to them in english as nunchucks - a strange throwback to an anglicized spelling that I stopped using at 13 when you grow out of that whole "want to be a ninja" thing (these days, it's all about being Pimps at Sea).

And next? I don't know. All I know is that I've been waiting weeks now, and I'm camped out in my living room like a hobbit waiting for Gandalf to arrive with the console. Every truck that drives by gets a waiting stare and a whimper as it leaves.

Sure, I'm patient. I'm also neurotic, it seems. I feel like Woody Allen.

Anyways, the shipments appear to be arriving more-or-less in the order they were filled in. First to get packed were the nunchaku, yesterday at 14:25; then the remote, at 16:18. The console got packed at 21:06 and has a ParcelForce number; the last up is the classic controller, at 7:37 this morning.

In all probability, that's it for today. I can sit around the house trying to hotwire my mac to use the Wiimote, and that's probably about it.

But I can hope.

Oh, yeah. And Amazon, wankers that they are, are still reporting my component cables as unshipped, with an estimated delivery of tomorrow. My arse - they'd have had to ship it by today to get it here for tomorrow, I think; so it looks like I'm going to be component-cable-free. I just knew that would happen. Damn you, Nintendo, for screwing up one critical thing in an otherwise totally flawless worldwide launch.

Update: A parcelforce truck just drove up, sat outside my house for five minutes doing nothing, and then drove off. They're trying to kill me.

Microsoft Racing Wheel with PGR3 (Xbox 360)

2006-12-05T16:44:55Z

Microsoft Racing Wheel with PGR3 (Xbox 360)

by Microsoft

A great wheel. That's the most important thing to walk away with from this Project Gotham Racing with Wireless Wheel combo. One of the best experiences I've had to date with the 360. A quality product, a unique experience, and, for once, worth every pence.

]]> First, let's get this out of the way. If you're a hardcore Project Gotham Racing 3, Import Tuner, Forza, or whatever driver, you're going to keep using thumbsticks for the same reason FPS players prefer mice: Precision. Any wheel will require larger movements, and support less range of motion than you can get in your 360 wireless controller's two two-axis thumbsticks, D-pad, and multitude of buttons and triggers. There. I've said it. For the hardcore racer, nothing beats the thumbsticks.

I'm not a hardcore racer. I could give a damn, really, about shaving 0.0000008 off of my lap time by running the same course eight billion times with every car in the system. I can appreciate that there is a market for that, and that PGR3 plays to that market in the same way that GT4 and Forza do. Build a simulation, add tracks, add cars, and pack in an anorak for every buyer.

Me? I can't even drive in real life. The main reason I like Tokyo Import Racer? Because I get to drive around Tokyo at night and at dawn and say "ooh, I remember when I lived there and did X". I like Tokyo Import Racer not for its driving, but for its ability to remind me of what it was like to live in Tokyo.

And PGR3? I first bought it in the discount bin at my local GAME. Used, not new. Because someone said I should, so I did. And it's ok. Force feedback is supposed to be another way, like visual cueing, for the game to tell you what's going on, but all it ever felt like to me was a bunch of thumbsticks rumbling away in my hands while I skidded around a corner. Of fleeting novelty, I believe would be an accurate depiction of my feelings.

Add a wheel. Now I suck a lot more than with thumbsticks, but gain something: Suddenly, it all makes sense. The wheel is solid, rugged, weighty. It feels really good, like a quality piece of gear. It came in a gigantic package - so if you're buying one, bet on taking a car or a taxi home, it's unwieldy. Alternately, order through amazon and let them do all the heavy lifting. Personally, I went through game, as... well, I appreciate having a local gaming retailer, and want to support them. Anyways, it's big. Bigger than you think, so don't think of carrying it home, even if you only live a short distance from the shop.

The feel when in PGR3 is brilliant. The wheel offers resistance when you're on the road; when you go into a skid, you feel the wheel slacken as you lose traction. It's clever, it's brilliant, it's well implemented. Thought, care, and love went into the PGR3 implementation.

Import Tuner? Nothing. Sure, the wheel works, but that's it. No frills. Truly a shame.

And so I look forward to using the wheel, now - it's given life to PGR3 where once there was none. I could have cared less about games in this genre before; now I actually find myself wanting to play these games. Adding the wheel has done what force feedback has always claimed and promised, but up until now for me, never delivered - the feeling of immersion, of adding an extra dimension of context to convey information to the player.

I'm not going to be better than you at PGR. But I'll bet I'm going to have more fun.