Best Games - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy There was never any chance that text adventures would last. Not in any real way. There are a lot of people who still dabble in the genre, and a few techno hipsters that would swear up and down that text based games are more pure than games with graphics, or some such nonsense.

What you are really designing against is boredom. Somewhere along the path to writing that book or composing that song or staging that production, they have all had that thought. It might have been a twinging type of thought, ephemeral, just barely there and then gone. A thought not fully considered. Never rolled around the mind and tasted like rich liquor. The foremost design challenge is boredom.

I think pro wrestling is awesome. I try to stay current with the personalities and performers. I have read no fewer than four books by wrestlers about wrestling. At least the book jackets said that they were written by those wrestlers. I actively seek out news about the current state of wrestling every few months. I find the whole business fascinating. Now I haven’t actually watched a whole pro wrestling show in at least a decade. I have watched a few isolated matches, some great japanese and mexican stuff, a couple of smaller american promotions. I started out this paragraph by stating that I think pro wrestling is awesome. As a concept, I do, but I also think that, as presented, it is pretty terrible most of the time.

I have been doing a lot of 3D modelling lately. The tools I have to work with now are so much better, so much richer, more stable, and capable than anything I ever used in the past. This isn’t because, Blender, the suite of tools I am using is any better than the others available. In fact, strong arguments could be made to the contrary. Maya, Houdini, ZBrush, and 3D Studio Max, are all probably better in some ways than Blender. Still, through the march of time, all of the tools currently in use are quite simply the best they have ever been. Almost none of this clever software design makes it easier to make a model.

Best Games - Smash TV Did you know that The Godfather wasn’t the first gangster movie? There were a lot of them. Like really, a lot. All sorts. Funny ones, scary ones, true ones, boring ones. All the types of gangster movie. The Godfather is still one of the best. “How can that be?” you might ask. How could there be so many of the same type of movie, and one of them is somehow better than almost all of the others. Except Goodfellas. Goodfellas is better. 

The first game that I ever played networked multiplayer, was Doom. That isn’t true. I wish that it were true, but it’s not. Getting Doom to connect was an arduous task and we didn’t get it right the first, third, or 15th times. The first game that I ever played in networked multiplayer was Wing Commander Armada. A friend and I connected our computers across a ping pong table using a null modem RS-232 cable. I don’t know why we knew that it would work, but apparently the ancient nerd knowledge had been delivered unto us and it was our responsibility to carry it forward.

I went to school for computer animation in 1998. You can go and look up the first release of the juggernaut graphics package Maya. When I started school Maya hadn’t been released. We learned for the first few months, the ins and outs of Power Animator. Before the School year was over, we had transitioned from Power Animator to Maya on Irix Silicon Graphics O2 computers.While finishing up my final class reel I was running pirated copies of Maya on a pentium 2 machine at home running windows NT and carrying the files back and forth to school on zip disks. Everything was moving so fast it was hard to keep up. Adobe also had their main video compositing program move from Mac only to both Mac and Windows I concluded that year creating animation and assembling video with tools that didn’t even exist when I started. It seemed that if you blinked, the industry would pass right by you.

I just spent the last few minutes searching the web for the origin of a particularly striking image. It ended up coming from Hong Kong based artist Alex FaiChan (http://alexfaichan.wix.com/de-saturation). The picture was only one of many excellent illustrations in his portfolio. If his career is anything like most of the working artists that I know, the stuff he can actually share on his portfolio is just a sliver of the work he has done over the years. The overwhelming majority of it is probably owned by some other company and doesn’t legally belong to him. This was an image created by a commercial artist. It is unlikely that he spent days, or even hours, on that picture. That is just not the way we (I’ll include myself here too) are wired. He probably creates a lot more than anyone will ever see.

Four months, 112 hours (47 hours and 65 hours on two different characters), and 257 deaths later, I have finished Dark Souls. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say I am finished with Dark Souls. There are a few side things that I didn’t completely wrap up, a few monsters left unchallenged. I took a quick look at some of the dlc, but I have done nothing of note in Oolacile. All in all, I think I’m satisfied. I have drunk my fill of Dark Souls, and I don’t really feel like heading back for more any time soon. Maybe I’ll feel differently the next time the Steam sale rolls around.

Best Games - Aero Fighters/Sonic Wings 2 Cyborg, ninja, baby, or dolphin. These are the sort jet fighter pilots you can choose from in Aero Fighters 2(Sonic Wings 2 in Japan). At the end of the game you fight a space baboon and maybe a ghost.

When The Tragically Hip album Fully Completely came out in 1992, I bought it a copy, and also received one as a gift. One was a CD, one was a cassette, but I don’t remember which. The sensible move might have been to sell one copy, or give it to a friend, but that wasn’t what I did. I kept the cd in the house and I took the tape out to the shop. The stereo I had out there was a tinny, scratchy little thing, but sound came out of it when tapes went into it, so it served my purposes. For a good long time, the only tapes that nestled into that little deck were Fully Completely, Pearl Jam’s Ten, and maybe some Soundgarden.

I was thinking recently about the way I work on design problems. There are about as many ways of approaching and dealing with design problems as there are people who wrestle with them. Because of that, I have always felt that the usual tutorial style writeup people do of their work flow and habits was at best overly simplistic, and at worst blind to alternate solutions. For far too many people the contents of tutorials are taken as the definitive way to solve a problem or use a tool. I can think of few things more counterproductive than telling a creative person a definitive way to do something. As is my general policy, I will not do a tutorial. If anything I write is useful to you in your own work, we can call that a happy side effect.

We are all playing Pokemon Go here. What of it there is to play. The experience of Pokemon Go could be described as thin. The game consists primarily of going for a walk and getting interrupted. That may not sound particularly fun but that would be missing the point. What Pokemon Go offers is wish fulfilment.

Best Games - Star Trek : 25th Anniversary and Star Trek : Judgement Rites There is a theory floating around that the music you listen to during your mid to late teens will shape your musical taste for the rest of your life. Some pattern of rhythms and tones gets etched directly into the topography of your brain, and any new music that fits that imprint will be much more appealing. If that’s true, and if it applies to media other than music, I have a Star Trek shaped valley in my brain. 

After a while away from it, I returned to development and programming this week. That inevitably lead to trying to figure out what the hell it was I was doing. I find that going back to old code is like trying to read the mind of a completely different person, and that person is an idiot.