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.

I’ve been doing a lot of 3D modelling recently. Making 3D models with the intent of running those digital files through a 3D printer and turning them into physical objects. There is a slightly different mindset required for objects that are intended for the real world. Games and video allow you to get away with a lot of nastyness that reality just isn’t well suited for. Like gravity. Gravity is a thing that you have to deal with in the real world. Also, objects can’t usually pass clean through other objects without at least one of them becoming a broken object. You know, technical stuff.

Best Games - Puzzle Bobble / Bust a Move / Puzzle De Pon / etc. ​ The match three bubble shooters have gone by many names and many numerals, but “Balls” is of course the common shorthand adopted by most players. Accepting how pervasive and ever present the genre has become, it is conceivable that we will reach a day when all games will be, at least partly, Balls.

I played Dodgeball today. Dodgeball is, to put it succinctly, uncomplicated. As names go, few are more descriptive than Dodgeball. The particulars of the game don’t actually extend much further see a ball, now dodge that ball. Left out of the title is that you then pick up a ball and make someone else dodge that ball. And thus, what at first might have been an assault becomes a game.

Best Games - Virtua Fighter If you walked into an arcade in the early 90’s you would have seen a solid wall of cabinets all containing one game, Street Fighter 2. There might even have been many different versions of Street Fighter 2. Street Fighter 2: The World Warrior, the game that kicked off a new era in fighting games. Street Fighter 2: Champion Edition let you play as the boss characters from the first version and introduced mirror matches that let two players fight as palette swapped copies of the same character. Street Fighter 2 Turbo: Hyper Fighting sped up the game, added new character moves, and rebalanced the whole shebang for better competitive play. Street Fighter 2: Rainbow Edition was a hacked bootleg of one of the previous games that could have any number of tweaks and twists that made the fighting flat out goofy and unpredictable. There may have even been Super Street Fighter 2, a game with new characters, completely redone graphics and sound, and new sets of moves for the entire roster. It wouldn’t even be uncommon for there to be a couple copies of each game. Not only could there be a solid dozen cabinets all sporting Street Fighter 2, but odds were good that they would all be in use. That was an arcade in the early 90’s. All hadoukens, all the time.

It’s E3 time again. I frickin’ love E3 and I have no idea why. I get excited for the conferences and the trailers and the reveals and the gaffs and the press reactions and everything from the show floor. It makes no sense. I’m currently playing a game that is 5 years old, and after that I’ll probably play a game that is only two or three years old. My urge to be up to date on the goings on in the game industry is not in lock step with how up to date I am on actual games. I used to think that meant I was out of touch. Now I think it’s great.

I stopped reading a book this week. Not finished, just stopped. This book had come to me well recommended, and it was in a genre that I enjoy but hadn’t read in quite some time, so I was interested. I really wanted to like it. I was rooting for this book, but I just can’t find it in myself to read one more leaden passage.