Tag Archives: Party

Videogame Events

GameCity 2008: Saturday

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The “canvas” of Lego stuff

TT Games own Jonathan Smith presented how the Lego platformer series of games they’ve made came about. He explained about appealing to people who don’t like Star Wars for instance, and gave some detail on how the games were developed.

Sadly, the session “I was there…. DMA” was cancelled (due to the presenter Brian breaking his nose). This along with the other two “From the Desk Of” sessions sadly 🙁

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This is how Media Molecule rolls…everyone gets a say!

Media Molecule did the “GameCity Vision Statement supported by BAFTA”, and provided information on how the game was made, who made it, the changes during the game development – I also got the presenter Alex Evans to initial my Sackboy, and autograph my book. I do want to play the game, it would be real great to try it sometime despite my lack of proficiency with platformers.

I also got Alex the presenter to autograph my Sackboy model, and he also showed off four interesting videos I got a chance to record some of, the first being prototype footage of “brainfluff”, ie; Little Big Planet and what they showed Phil Harrison to get Sony on board. The second shows their prototyping method to get the team working together – showing the way 2d and 3d can be combined. The third and fourth interesting ones showed the “focus” of the game (made up to keep the team on track on what they were doing), and the last video was what they’ll show at their Christmas party, a short run of clips from their development. Really cool stuff 😀 I should have asked if I could have got any of them for the Internet Archive…damn.

I visited Indiecade through gaps in the day, and got a talk through of Where Is My Heart which looks like the finished game could be a nifty platformer. I played through . I saw levelHead – the physical blocks with a camera, it’s an interesting use of a camera. Democracy 2 was taking me ages to start, but I get it’s simulation aspect, and looks pretty in depth. I played through Ruckblende (Flashback), which aesthetically was amazing, being a paper-built world to do the point and click adventure, and hand drawn animations to portray moving things. I also saw Machinarium being shown off again 🙂

I also recorded one of the more interesting games, Dark Room Sex Game. I’ll let you view the video, since it’s quite hard to describe. Additional info though; yes, you can be male on male, or female on female. It is hard (I didn’t try it myself however) and obviously, the noise your controller makes is the other person’s response 😉

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I hate American politics. Our’s wasn’t the only “Joe” reference either

Lastly was the Guardian GamesBlog Quiz, and the closing party. We didn’t win the quiz (tough competition I’ll say!) but the last round we did the most spectacular entry out of the lot. The party was okay, if a little empty – some free drinks (which lasted me the night), and a great “30 player game on a projector” setup was crazy. The first band, PowerPlay, were loud. Very loud. They also did a lot of Megaman, sadly (since I find the games’ themes all a bit repetitive). Press Play On Tape were more varied, and had some great songs during the night, but also were a bit loud (although more quiet then the others).

Some more pictures are available in my gallery too. My autograph book got a few more signatures, although I missed the bands’ – but all in all a fun day.

Videogame Events

GameCity 2008: Friday

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.