 Bernie says hello. He'd like to know if you have any wet cat food for him. Welcome to ology.org! This is the personal vanity site of Eric Tilton and Carrie Jones. It mainly exists so that we can laugh heartily at our clever e-mail addresses (like tele@ology.org). Ho ho ho! Please wander around, and feel free to enjoy my fine Corinthian web log. |
[Posted 9/17/2001 12:05:02 AM by tilt] I finally finished playing Oni. Two words: good goggliocious! While Thief did an outstanding job of conveying the sense of tense, still terror of hiding in the shadows, Oni does the same equally outstanding job of kicking your fight or flight response into high gear, leaving you panting as heavily as if you'd actually taken part in the crazy action-fu kickbox fest that makes up 95% of the game. Let's get this out of the way up front -- I hate games with save points. I hate games that don't let me save anywhere. I'm resigned to them, but that one "feature" is usually enough to tip my interest away from a game unless it's got some other really compelling features. It almost led me away from Oni, and it almost caused me stop playing it about a quarter of the way in. The difficulty level of Oni can vary wildly, and some save points seem almost impossible to get through -- after having to fight a series of especially hard enemies, you might still have to do some kind of tricky jumping sequence before getting to the next stage. Or you may have to repeat a particularly complex series of maneuvers a dozen times because you keep messing something up near the end. Or you might hit the save point with almost no health and no ammo -- whoops! It's very, very frustrating, but in Oni's case, it ultimately contributed something more important thant that frustration: a heart-pounding sense of immersion. Oni doesn't make things easy -- the cheat codes are disabled, for example, until after you've finished the game once. But it does leave you with a sense of accomplishment when you've succeeded. My reaction to the game was always composed of a little more love than hate. So what did I love? Plenty. I loved the anime backdrop; I loved the combat system (once I finally figured it out); I loved the feeling of being able to take on multiple opponents at once; I loved the story that did a decent job of feinting in one direction and surprising me with another; I even loved the ending. I loved the crazy plethora of weapons that added visual splendor and a bit of long distance strategy, while still clearly taking a back seat to up-close-and-personal melee. I loved kicking ass, and I loved the fact that I had an adrenaline rush for a good hour after I finally completed the game. I loved, in short, the strong emotional reaction the game generated in me. There some other minor nits: the environments boasted a noticeable lack of high detail texturing, and frequently seemed rather, well, boxy. There were some plot threads that never seemed to get resolved, and at least one apparently major character who shows up in "mission failed" art but never shows up in the game (or else shows up so briefly that I've completely forgotten him). And if we have to have save points, they could have been placed a little bit better -- like, always put one right before a jump sequence. Still, those nits are minor, overall. This game is one of the few that still stands out vividly in my mind days after I've finished it, and that's quite an accomplishment of involvement. If you're willing to deal with the save game nonsense, I definitely think this title deserves an A. -- Having finished Oni and Summoner, I've now gone out and picked up Arcanum. I'm very much enjoying it so far -- I'm probably about 8 hours in. You can tell it came from the same guys who did Fallout. There are some weird nits, mainly in the graphics arena: animations are a bit too jerky and fast, textures seem heavily dithered, and there's some significant memory thrashing that the README implies is related to the tile cache. However, what's more important is the deep and flexible character generation system, and the lush conversational trees. Mmmm, this kind of stuff is CRPGing at its finest. Definitely a game for the enthusiast, but, well, definitely a game for the enthusiast!
[Posted 9/11/2001 05:25:32 PM by tilt] Holy shit, huh? It's been a weird, quiet, horrified day. I spent most of it in front of the TV, with Headline News on, watching the talking heads repeat the same information over and over while flipping between shots of the rubble of the World Trade Center and the rubble of the Pentagon. These visuals are -- as they inevitably are -- almost unreal in appearance. They seem out of a movie or book, although it's always slightly startling to realize how understated reality can be by comparison to Hollywood visual effects. Except, of course, for the emotional impact, which starts quietly but builds inexorably, as it becomes more and more clear that people are dead. And you realize there's a part of you that wants somebody to pay. The rhetoric going on now is the rhetoric of war. Hell, the politicians (and the foreign press, if not the domestic press) are flat-out calling this "an act of war." War against who? Don't know yet, although CNN hasn't shied away from pointing fingers at Osama bin Laden (dropping broad hints while winking and saying "but we're not suuuure yet...", which has generally been their approach in this fact-thin morning after). If it turns out it wasn't bin Laden, he may still not escape -- the scent of blood is in the air, and the dogs have been given his scent. The political divisiveness of just a few days ago is gone -- this is the kind of time where we stand together, even if it's behind that judicially elected asshole -- 'cuz he's the asshole we've got, you see. As part of the blame game, we were treated to a news conference from the Taliban via videophone -- apparently the technology of last resort for coverage in low-infrastructure areas. We saw a middle-age man with a bureaucrat's face and glasses (indistinguishable except for that pesky turban) declare that Afghanistan ain't had nothin' to do with it. But more interesting with the way it was presented -- CNN kept the eyes-downcast bureaucrat in a small inset video panel, up against the larger video panel of the smoking remains of downtown Manhattan. So, Afghanistan: small beady man in small grainy video frame (the message loud and clear that this is a country that's inferior to us -- just look at the shitty video quality!); and New York: a majestic, anger-inspiring distaster area. As media framing goes, it was moderately subtle ("well, we HAD to use the grainy video -- that's what we had!" and "well, we HAD to keep showing the live feed of New York -- that's what we had!"), but I've no doubt the news director was tickled fucking pink that he got to do it that way. That being said, I'm no fan of the Taliban, and I didn't particularly mind seeing the media framing done that way. This whole thing has been waaay too personal. My brother just moved to New York -- he's OK, and NYU is apparently not letting people out of dorms, god bless 'em -- and my other brother is on an aircraft carrier that's unsurprisingly being deployed much earlier than expected. And I used to live in Pittsburgh, where that last plane crashed. Thankfully, no one I know seems to have been directly affected. That'll come later -- if this is a prelude to war, then ain't none of us getting out of this without a scratch. It certainly seems like a prelude to something. My first thought -- because I read too many spy books -- was to wonder what this was directing our attention away from. After all, it was successful at completely focusing the attention of the US on two and only two things, and it was also successful and hampering or shutting down goverment services across the country. If this was a book, there'd be an evil bastard callously using this as an excuse to rob a bank or steal some old nuke-yu-lar missle parts while the earnest young lieutenant was staring slack-jawed at the TV monitors. But that's just melodramatic, and this day hardly needs any more of that. I think the best explanation is simple: the World Trade Center is the symbol of American capitalism, and the Pentagon is the symbol of American goverment. And what better place to plant your Fuck You if you're not so into the US? Still, I can't help but think these assholes have bitten off more than they could chew. I mean, what better way to pull us fractious group of assholes together for once, and get us to actually really focus on something other than ourselves? I hear reports that there are bombs dropping already in Kabul, and -- for better or worse -- I doubt it's going to stop there. There was a talking head on the coverage this morning who unintentionally summed it up, even though he was talking about the Red Cross at the time: "I understand the need for blood."
[Posted 9/3/2001 01:28:28 AM by tilt] I finished Summoner. Shrug. I just wasn't in to it. Looking forward to Red Faction though :).
[Posted 9/2/2001 02:30:03 AM by tilt] We celebrated lady miss Skye's birthday tonight -- happy birthday!
I was irresistably drawn to the colors of the cake in the tupperware container:
[Posted 8/30/2001 08:04:38 AM by tilt]  was what I woke up to this morning. Stupid cats. (The image will probably appear way too dark for a lot of people. Isn't this what color management software is supposed to fix?)
[Posted 8/30/2001 02:57:25 AM by tilt] Next time, I'm going to wait for them on the bridge itself -- that should be a trip. Carrie and I saw Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back last weekend, as part of Birthday Weekend. Funny funny funny. I think that it requires a fair familiarity with the Kevin Smith canon -- who am I kidding. It requires it. But it's very, very funny. Smith remains an inconsistent genius, but when he's funny, he's hysterical. The movie industry jokes that surround the beginning and the end of the film slayed me. (Apple geek-out -- J&SBSB features a jaw dropping number of Mac LCD displays. W00t!) BTW, Summoner can kiss my grits. I'm up at 3 in the morning because of that stupid game. It's not that I've been playing all this time -- I quit several hours ago. It's that I got so wrapped up in it that I've been twitching ever since. I think I'm just about unwound enough to actually get some sleep now.
[Posted 8/28/2001 12:02:29 PM by tilt] Whoops -- been a little distracted lately. My main distraction was writing some incredibly fun code. About every three months or so, I get caught up enough in a coding problem that it sucks my life away for about two hundred hours, sore wristed, panting, and with a big goofy grin on my face. (Which sounds a lot more like a description of masturbation than it's meant to.) It's these experiences -- where I get completely caught up in the intellectual problem, and in the desire to make it cooler, better, and faster -- that keep me in this coding game. It's a good thing my life isn't like this all the time, though --my brain would explode. In other news, Chris has made it to New York City, where he's starting his frosh year at NYU. Wish him luck! I've started digging back into Summoner. I love those guys at Volition (and Outrage!) -- the Descent games were great, and so were the Freespace games, and the Red Faction demo kicked ass. For some reason, though, the Summoner demo left me unmoved. Nevertheless, out of loyalty (and the desire for a good 3D RPG) I picked it up back in... February? I found it more fun than the demo had led me to believe, but the story just failed to grab me. The opening didn't really draw me in -- for example, I didn't get to play through the initial character defining moment of Our Hero. And as I continued to play through it, I felt... uninterested in the characters or the quests. The game sat on the shelf for several months while I played through other games. Last week, I picked it back up, and started playing through again. Because the plot seemed so uninspired, I was coming up on what I was sure was near the end of a relatively short RPG. Then, they did something good -- they surprised the hell out of me. I was so convinced that the straighforward plot was straightforward, I didn't see the twist coming at all. Now, of course, I'm totally sucked in. I just wished they given me some crumbs earlier, instead of making me play through sixteen hours of game before making me sit up and say "what!?".
[Posted 8/17/2001 09:43:59 AM by tilt] Hey, kids. Here's the haps. First, the PowerShot G2 is apparently out. The biggest change is that it's 4MP instead of 3 (and a couple hundred bucks more expensive). It looks like they've also modified the autofocus system. However, the features I most envy are the increased grip size and what looks like easier access to the power plug. Shrug... oh, well. The changes aren't steep enough for me to regret my purchase -- and besides, with tech toys, if you stress about it too much, you're always going to regret your purchase a month later. Second, I sat through all sixteen mutha-luvin' tapes of Fushigi Yugi (The Mysterious Play) Cheesy, goofy, and completely predictable to the minute for when in each episode the next big disaster would unfold. And guess what: I loved it. Totally fun. That's 52 episodes, at 20 minutes of actual content per episode, so we're talking about a little over 17 hours of anime, digested over the course of four days. Hokey smokes, Batman! You can always tell when Carrie's out of town -- I start going to Encore daily instead of weekly. Also on my anime devourage this last week (as mentioned below) was the first third of Robotech/Macross. The third DVD in that particular set included a goofy "intro movie" for the series that basically summarized the first thirteen episodes. Which I'd just watched. Hoo boy. Instead, I listened to the Carl Macek audio track, where he talks about what it was like to put together the series. (Macek's the guy primarily responsible for managing to edit three completely unrelated Japanese series into Robotech.) He talks about where the idea came from, what kind of technical issues there were, marketing considerations, etc. The most fascinating thing about it was the revelation that Japanese animation tends to only run between 4-8 cels per second. Instead of running at a higher cel rate, they instead use physical camera effects on cels -- e.g., they'll keep the camera on one cel for several frames, but pan out during those frames, or shift the focus between two cel layers. Crazy!
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