Ok, I did not. But I did move most of my websites to gandi hosting in france.
As part of the move I cleaned up my old frob.nl page, threw away some stuff and moved the rest to 320x200.org. I also copied some posts from tumblr. I will probably post on 320x200.org from now on, so please update your rss feeds if you’re reading me at tumblr.
Not long ago, I was very impressed with the achievement system of Xbox Live. In fact, I was so impressed by the concept, that I started working on similar system not limited to any specific platform or technology. However, now that I actually have an Xbox 360 and take a closer look, it turns out achievements are not what they seemed to be. My vision of the Xbox achievement system is much superior compared to the actual achievement system microsoft implemented :)
As a somewhat obsessive hardcore gamer, the statistics I am interested about when playing games are:
And, well.. that’s about it. Microsoft has the technology to implement that, but instead uses it to add a whole bunch of arbitrary challenges to every game released on its platform.
Atleast I’m not the only one having that opinion, check Achievement Unlocked.
Piksel 2008 has ended. I went to see the live performances on thursday and sunday, some presentations on friday, and had a quick look at the real.code thing on saturday.
Despite having a lot of workshops, presentations and performances, the event did not really feel like it was intended for an outside audience. Most of the people there seemed to be involved in this scene of audiovisual software/hardware hackers, in that sense it seems similar to a demoscene event.
From the performers I’ve seen, a lot seem to indulge in some sort of noise-wankery. I like to have at least some sort of melody or recognizable beat when listening to music, but for some reason these people think they don’t need that. It’s as if live-coding in Pure Data already makes it Art, so why bother actually making it enjoyable for your audience?
I did enjoy the _rrr performance on sunday, though I wasn’t properly awake when seeing that because some drunken students had kept me awake most of the night before. And I really enjoyed the performances by IOhannes zmölnig and Gabor Papp & Agoston Nagy.
“Do sinusoids dream of electric sweeps?” by IOhannes is another live-coding performance with Pure Data. It is interesting conceptually because he added some interesting bits to his patches. He could make the patches move around on their own in his Pure Data work area, and not just move around, also automatically making connections to other patches (based on proximity in the work are?). The end result (the audio) wasn’t terribly interesting, but as a performance I enjoyed it.
“No Copy Paste” by Gabor Papp & Agoston Nagy was the best performance IMO. The first six minutes of the performance are silent, the performers start from scratch and it takes them a while to set up sound and visuals. Music is made in Pure Data by one of the performers, which was projected to one of the screens (sadly you do not see that in the video of the performance). In he mean time, the other performer is creating the visuals on the main screen using Fluxus, and he is able to interface with pure-data to use some aspects of the music as input to the visuals.
Videos of the event are here: http://giss.tv/dmmdb/piksel08 (you may need VLC to view the downloadable .oggs). The piksel homepage is at http://piksel.no.
Conclusion: I did enjoy visiting Piksel, also, Bergen is pretty (for pictures see http://www.flickr.com/photos/kuno/sets/72157610695427713/ :).
I just finished Silent Hill 2. I was playing on easy, because some creature kept killing me really early in the game on normal, and I was afraid it would only get harder. Looking back I should have persevered, playing on easy just removes too much of the tension the game is supposed to have. I think that’s also why the game seemed so short, it probably is on easy.
I’ll be sure to play Silent Hill 3 on normal, I will probably start on that soon.
In related news, I also finished Katamari Damashii recently, also quite short, but that was expected. It remains one of the most remarkable games when it comes to styling and user interaction, almost every little detail has been tweaked to stray just that little bit from the cliche approaches you find in other games. I’ve already started playing the sequel, and somehow it still doesn’t get boring.
Please, everyone vote for this idea! I want my electronic ink netbook :)
I’ve seen enough videos by now of people playing video game music on their pianos, but I enjoyed seeing this, someone playing falcom (sound team j.d.k) music on violin.
Fucking stolen scepter. I remember getting lost in that first level of sorcerian, over and over again. I never got very far in that game….
I’m still undecided on the gambit system in Final Fantasy XII. In the field, grinding is less tedious, the decisions you would normally make over and over again for certain enemies can just be configured once with the gambit system. So, in that sense, the gambit system makes FF12 more fun (or atleast less annoying) compared to previous final fantasies.
But, with a decent gambit setup I don’t have to do anything during a boss battle either. So, my typical boss encounter in Final Fantasy XII will be something like this:
I can’t help but feel that something is seriously wrong with a game if I can go do something else while the game plays itself during those moments which should’ve been the most exciting bits of gameplay.
I’m in the middle of the city, I have the living room window open. It’s about 23:00 in the evening, fairly quiet outside except for the occassional car speeding through the street below my 1st floor window. It’s the peace and quiet of the city, with sounds of cars and muffled conversations, but none of the daytime chaos.
I hear the sound of a ship approaching. I walk over to the window as a fully loaded ship is slowly gliding through the little canal. The slow engine drone reminds me of summer holidays in my youth, a soothing sound. It fits the mood of this evening.
I love my new flat.
