Goldeneye, really good commentary
I got up rather late after the previous evening, and with the buses being rubbish my journey took twice as long as it should have. Therefore, I missed the start of the “Goldeneye : The Director’s Commentary” history session – but still got the vast majority of it. It was great to see the details behind the game which was stuck on a 12MB console, and managed to get 4 player multiplayer, more advanced AI then most shooters and a great amount of maps and huge expansive level vistas. David Doak and Martin Hollis were very talkative and took some good questions all while playing the game.
Harmonix’s history – a very strange advert
“Harmonix : Ten Loud Years” after lunch was an interview with two of the developers about Harmonix’s history and present – from the older games they’ve made, FreQuency and Amplitude, as well as prototypes and some unfinished or unreleased games. They also had Dr. James Newman come on about the National Videogame Archive, and explain what Harmonix was contributing – one of the Rock Band drum set prototypes, handed over to Tom Wooley, curator of the relevant part of the National Media Museum.
Geometry Wars was the last session – they had a runthrough of all the Geometry Wars games, the design – audio, coding, iterations, and so forth.
Ross et al. as Splicers – not counted as zombies either
Then came the Market Square Zombie attempt, dancing to Thriller and Ghostbusters…and some other third, rubbish tune. I didn’t participate, I wanted to keep the facepaint off so I could use my own costume later easier.
Not a bad attempt for a Halloween costume 🙂
I popped back home to get my Medic costume, and went to the party (got there around 30 minutes late, damn Pizza Hut service was atrocious). It was quite good – Jonathan Coulton (despite missing Code Monkey I was told, damn), and Rock Band was available (with the two Harmonix members trying with their interviewer, who failed the first time and then got a guitarist to do it properly 🙂 ). I saw some other great costumes, which was cool too. There was also lots of Resident Evil stuff – a successful 2:00:40 speedrun of Resident Evil 4, and then Resident Evil 5 was on show (on one Xbox only sadly). Lastly there was Resident Evil Live – a corridor of zombies you had to fight past. I was a bit drunk when I did it and laughed at some bits, so got killed, oh well 🙂
Again, I got some videos from this day – but only two, a brief bit of Jonathan Coulton and the Zombie Dance Record. There are also pictures in my gallery.