April Fools.
Never in my life have I played an April Fools prank that I have been proud of, until this year that is.
It all started when we visited the Marine Lake in West Kirby for a few Calippo’s in the first real bit of sun we’ve had this year. It turned out that there was some construction going on around the Marine Lake pathway and as a consequence we could not walk around it. Also the lake was the lowest I have ever seen it. We looked around but could not find anything to tell us what was going on.
As we strolled down the Promenade I noticed a disused message board that probably had been used to display wildlife information or something of the sort. Me and my friends started to hatch a plan as to what we could put on the old message board to dupe the residents of West Kirby into believing their beloved lake was being replaced.
After a good few hours of thought & design this is what we came up with:
Continue reading to see the contents of the brochure and a few pictures of the people who stopped to have a read…
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Redefining the way we play?
Imagine if you could stream new top-spec games over the internet on a worn-out old iBook. Well that dream is about to be realized by a company called OnLive.
All you will need is a decent enough connection to stream video (in HD if its quick enough). OnLive’s servers do all the number crunching and pipe down some sweet fluid graphics whilst interpreting what you press on your handy little controller by the upstream of your connection.
If your a sceptic like myself and believe no games company in their right mind would sign up to this, think again:
Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Take-Two Interactive, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, THQ, Epic Games, Eidos, Atari Interactive and Codemasters are already on-board.
GameDaily dubbed the play “fantastic” after seeing Crysis streamed “smooth” off a server to a plain ol’ MacBook laptop. See, OnLive claims to have perfected the interactive video compression technique so that latency is low enough to support on-line multi-player setups. Broadband connections of 1.5Mbps (71% of US homes have 2Mbps or greater) dials the image quality down to Wii levels while 4-5Mbps pipes are required for HD resolution.
They’re also bringing out a “mini console” that will be able to connect to your HDTV and your wifi signal. Could this mean the end of console’s taking up precious space in our living rooms? Could it also be the end of the need to constantly keep an up to date graphics card?
The whole things set for release by winter in the states and it’s said that its going to run on a subscription based system with multiple tiers.
I think this is definitely going to open up a whole new market of Mac users whose reservations about the operating system was that it was not compatible with most new games on the market.
Read on for more pics & video.
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Motion Graphics
This is my first attempt at kinetic typography that I did for the Motion Graphics module. The sound byte is from the comedy series The Flight of the Conchords.
My New Monitor.
I picked up this little number from Ebuyer for just over £100 with a HDMI to DVI cable for a few quid on top. I figured that I needed something to appreciate HD to its full potential and this seemed like the most modest option for my room. I read into whether or not it could knock out 1080p with that cable and found out that the only difference between HDMI and DVI is that HDMI can carry sound and the picture quality’s the same on either.
Well the box arrived this morning and so far I’ve been thoroughly impressed. It only took a few seconds to set up because it recognized the signal from my PS3 straight off and it just needed me to go into the settings on the console and set the resolution to 1080p and send the sound out of the component cable to my speakers.
The picture quality is astounding but I do have a few qualms. Because it is a monitor and the recommended frame rate is 60Hz and the Playstation only puts out 50Hz every time the screen resizes an error message pops up, which takes 30 seconds to disappear! Also the screen is astoundingly bright, so much so that I currently have it set to 25% brightness and the blacks still seem too light in the dark. Other than that I’m really happy with my purchase and can’t wait till I watch my first Blu Ray (No Country For Old Men).
Little Big Planet makes me :)
So, I’ve finally experienced it first hand. Little Big Planet is most definitely the best game I got bundled with my shiny new PS3!
This game rekindled my love of the simple platformers I used to play for hours on end as a nipper. There’s no real point to the game other than to collect items to place in your own levels but I feel that’s the way it should be.
After playing a few of the levels supplied with the game I connected to the Playstation Network and sampled some of the user-made levels already on the server. I must say I was pretty impressed at some of the thought and creativity that had already gone into what was on offer. One of the best levels I found was this one, a take on another of my games, Mirrors Edge:
It’s probably just because I own Mirrors Edge that this level appeals to me but I was astounded at how it has pretty much exactly the same textures and materials as the actual game, showing off the true possibilities of the level creator.
I also really love the multiplayer aspects of the title. I took my Playstation around to a friends house on Boxing Day, basically to show off the game, but it turned into a whole night of giggly banter. Everyone made their own characters and, after playing around with the motion sensor in the Sixaxis Controller and wiggling the arms around a bit, we got stuck in trying to complete the game.
The game actually requires you to play most of the levels with other people to complete them entirely, this proved really fun on Boxing Day. After a while of playing with just 2 players another friend brought his controller around and got stuck in straight away. The game pretty much turned to mayhem at this point. After a while of swinging off things and discovering you could slap each other if you jerked the analogue stick hard enough, we came across a 4 player section. So we fired up the Wifi and connected to the PS Network. It took a few minutes before an extra player joined the game but when they eventually did we got to the 4 player section and conquered it!
In conclusion: I feel I’m going to be playing this game for some time to come. I haven’t even scraped the surface of the level creator but I think I’m going to complete the given levels as fully as I can so that I have loads of materials to play with. This game has rekindled my love for playing computer games probably mostly because it takes most of the elements of gameplay from the old Sega and Nintendo games and covers them with some beautiful eye candy. I love the way the multiplayer mode is all played on the single screen, with none of this split-screen nonsense synonymous with local multiplayer modes on FPS’s e.c.t. Expect an update early next year documenting my progress and any levels I have created.
Read on for an interview with 2 of Little Big Planet’s creators at a 24hr level creation jam they held at Parsons, The New School for Design:
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