lastest update....

fmp blah blah

hey chaps, been a while.. well more than a while but its all cool, so yea just workin on my fmp and thought oh no! ive not posted anything on my blog so i thought i would post a few piccys of what ive been upto.. enjoy! ideas and constructive crit are welcome.

first one was with unreals textures when i was working on the terrain, slapping any tiling texture on just helps with visualizing the scene.

then moved onto making my own textures to get the sort of chilly but moody scene i wanted.

at this point i decided that to have a darker scene would help to promote the emmisive lights from the orbs i had planned. also have 4 layers of terrain textures on in this picture, it does seem a little extensive but if you think about the base later of stone, then snow and 2 layers of greenery to get the contrast i wanted, it seems necessary

its comin on, il keep you posted, ta taa!

the victor

hi there i know ive been away for some time, had alot of family trouble as well as other things but now im back.

for the first project of this year we got to choose from 3 different lists of models to make, characters, environment and vehicle, and each of these had a sub category with a list of types of each we could choose from.

when i saw the vauxhall victor on the list Andy Frost was the first name that sprung to mind, after seeing Andy's victor on the internet several years earlier i knew i had to make it.

what Andy has managed to do shows what 1 man is capable of when he puts his mind to it.

first of all i will explain what makes Andy's " red victor 2" so special is not necessarily the external modifications made but what lies under the bonnet, with a 9.3 litre chevvy v8 , nitrous and 2 massive turbo chargers, the red victor 2 is pushing out approx 2200 bhp.

capable of going from 0 to 60 mph in just one second and further more from 0 to 180mph in 8 seconds, this car is dubbed as the fastest road legal car ever.

Being a car enthusiast myself i wanted to show respect to andy buy choosing his car as my first model of the year.

zoo racer critisism

zoo racer is a game where animals racer to get to noahs ark, not the most exciting prospect in the best of circumstances, yet all this becomes pointless to mention when you see the graphics and general style. the levels themselfs look like they have been put together from a childs drawings, the textures are completly the wrng sizes for what there on, for instance atree with a 512 texture then a wall 10 times the size with what looks like a 128 texture. theres no normal maps or speculars, and the only thing that looks like they pt any time into what the animation and stupidly unfitting music. if dancing unrealisticly animals is your thing and you like looking at 50 poly people, then go for it but other than that i think the makers would have got more credit if they did finger paintings.

conclusion, pig

well its at the end now, after lost of sleepless nights and days of none stop work weve done it, i finished all my assets and everythings been put together. in the end we got there, after spending 3 monthish doing this i feel i was put into the right group and im very pleased with all the work ive done, but thats not to say that it cant be better. i think the other group had alot more drama than ours, they had people not turning up, conflicts of intrests and people not working quite as well in a team as the other would have hoped.
well in the end top stuff and im well chuffed :D

how its goin ,pig

well half way through now, and its had its ups and downs people have argued and there have been some comminication issues but on the good side were doin great work. we finalized the main idea very early on and made a system to keep control of the assets. im very stressed at the moment as there are many assets to do. also i think i may be neglecting drawing but i think this is a problem everybody is having. nobody wants to let their team down and ive noticed people becoming very stressed and i feel there just not enough time to do everything and have a life, its like living sleeping and eating this project. in my first post i said about team spirit and my group has it in buckets, also people have always helped if ive asked. i think so far this project has made people view what were doing in a more proffesional manner which is great but i think people can be over critical.

team, first impressions

when i first found out which group i was in, i was pleased yet anxious, this is the first team project and i dont want to let people down. all the people in my group ive spoke to before and generally get on with them all quite well. i do however have some worries that some people may decide to try and take over the project, or force their ideas on people, but i'l see how things go.
Im really pleased to be doing a team project as i feel like im a team player, also when in a team you have other people to fall back on and team spirit to keep you going, i hope our group will be both of these.

creative? never say your not! got it!

"Creativity, it has been said, consists largely of re-arranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know." George Kneller

an interesting statement, tho i think this is far too linked to artistic creativity such as drawing. creativity can be solving a problem yet as i said in my previous post about john wayne if your trying to do something that is different from what youd normally do in my eyes your being creative. in the case of this your rearranging what you know in order to get a desired result and in this case its not always a case that you dont know the result. it is solving a problem but theres a difference between that and asking a question.
for instance you know a road leads home but the problem is which side of the road to walk on instead of not knowing which road to get home. creativity to me is more a question of how do i feel like doing this rather than solving the problem directly and on many occasions the long road is the more creative one home.

if i wanted to draw a picture of a monster and i had a picture of it in my head how is drawing it finding out what i dont know, yes if i wanted to think of a monster and i did, that would be solving a problem and knowing how that monster will look therefore ive found out what i didnt know, but say the idea came to me one day out of the blue and i was never asking the question how should this monster look? it would be creative but even then wouldnt be problem solving.

creativity 1 read only? no!

What is creativity? creativity to me is everything that is not pure instinct, yet instinct is always there in creativity, creativity is a counsious decision, creativity is when you walk down a street humming a song because your creating it in your own way. if you are consiously making a deicision you are creating a question in your mind rather than your body doing what it knows. for instance if you decide to walk, you dont think about it you just do it because thats instict whereas if you decide to walk like john wayne your creating an image in your head of what you want to look like and activly trying to recreate it, yet it will be creating a john wayne style walk with your own body proportions and instinct. creativity is all around us and should never be underestimated nor put down, just because somebody is less creative in one aspect of life doesnt mean they are less talented. a measurment of creativity can only ever be properly judged by the person creating it, only the person drawing the picture knows if they drew what the saw in their head , other people can say that it looks proportionally incorrect or unrealistic yet if your drawing something infront of you and it looks slightly wrong i think you have a choice, am i trying to acheive an impossible perfection with this drawing? or would i rather creativly put my style into this?. Was matisse a bad drawer? or was it more fullfilling for him to make it look how hed prefer it to look.

"jericho" creativity (atmosphere)

just thought id write about the most recent game ive played "jericho". After talking to a few people about it ive come to the conclusion that many people found it as a very enclosed game with little to do after completing the the game, but personaly i like this in a game. It is very enclosed and packaged pretty much as is but depending on what type of game it is i like this, i dont like running halfway across the world to pick up a secret when i allready know where im going, the events are no longer scarey and the game becomes very laborious and ruins the atmosphere in my opinion, it seems like far too many games are encorperating secret like this and that after the game has finished just to raise your xbox gamer score, to me thats not what games are about. to me a game should be a story which you control, a story where you are living in somebody elses shoes where you feel the fear, depression, adrenaline and every other emotion you would if you where there yourself. if you look at many older games such as pacman or tetris you have a single goal and you try and achieive that goal, thats what makes it fun when you succeed.

christmas!

woo back in leicester now its weird how it sort of draws you back to it, havnt posted here for a while , need to make it a more often thing i think. didnt get alot for xmas just the usual bits n bobs like money, which has all gone on paying debts etc. well glad to be back anyway

week19

The kind of person you would want to employ would completely differ from project to project for instance assuming you plan to create a game and all the assets have already been chosen for this case all you would need is a talented artist to make your dream reality. In the other instance assuming you have a game in its beta stage and talented artist refer to you their idea you could happily incorporate them into the game you’re making.

In my opinion I would prefer a creative artist, in fact that’s what I aspire to be. I will be a talented artist and keep my ideas to tell people. It’s best to have both but that’s not always the case, yet I want to become what I think I would like to employ as I would rather be in an environment where there is an understanding of ideas. Otherwise I would feel like I’m a work horse in a 9 to 5 job. Being taught how to use Photoshop or a 3D modeling software is possible however being taught to have an idea is not possible. It takes concentration and interest to be in the games industry but it take creativity and raw talent to be part of the thinking process that goes into games and if you can find the balance then your sure to be welcomed into the gaming industry with open arms

week 18

Sounds in games, now this is what really makes or breaks a game to me you just need to look at the halo series, the music and ambience surrounding the entire game was phenomenal it just would not be the same without it. I frequently listen to the music from halo just because even stand alone listening to it reminds you of the very first time you picked up the pad and automatically clicked, everything felt in the right place and perfectly timed. I also remember first playing tomb raider one and loved the music and was amazed when I found if you put the cd into a cdplayer you got over 40 tracks of music from the game.

“Good times” was a very influential recording mainly for its addictive bass line, deemed as being a rappers best friend, and deep within the funk culture. I think what’s most relevant about this beat is how it easily draws you in like you know what’s coming next and that’s why you love it. I think this is a lesson yet to be learned in many games that you need to have relevant and compelling music and sounds to add to atmosphere, I long to feel how I did when playing halo again, where your senses are overrun by everything going on, and then you press pause and realize that what was once 6 in the evening has now changed to 6 in the morning and you didn’t even see the sun go down.

To me one of my favorite games music composers has to be Steve Vai because of his work on the halo series that part which the electric guitar just after you’ve stuck the disc in just makes you go “dam this is going to be good” its like an instant draw in.

week 17

The main advantage of making your own game engine is that you can make it specifically for the game at hand as well as the added bonus of being able to sell the rights to use it to other companies. This is also a good way of advertising, as if a game uses your engine (for instance the unreal engine) they will state that, this also brings people to your game if they enjoyed the game that was created using you engine. There is also a sense of being superior about other people using your engine.

There are two different ways of working in a video game engine, one is additive and the other is subtractive. The names are self explanatory, working in additive means you add shapes into an empty field to create your level design and subtractive is simply the opposite. Subtractive in my opinion the harder of the two to use because you will have to visualize your design before you make it, in subtractive you start off with a giant cube then you carve into it. I would prefer to use additive as you save yourself confusion as you know everything within the level is made separately therefore should be easier to move around and manipulate.

A game engine is the glue for a game, it tells everything what to do, where to be when to move etc, without it a game would just be like a body without a brain and well all know a game where nothing moves wouldn’t be much fun.

week 16

To me video game culture is everybody who has ever played a computer game, ranging in age, sex etc. video game culture is this vast network of minds who feel compelled to play games to fulfill a part of their lives, games are a way of being able to be in a position where you can do something that may be physically impossible other wise. Personally I feel I am close to the heart of this culture being somebody who wishes to base my future around the gaming industry. Gaming occupies a vast section of my life, I live with people who enjoy gaming as much as myself and we spend many hours talking about games and how we would love to make different scenarios within games or different atmospheres. I think games can be a way of life to people such as myself, when I meet a new person one of the first things I talk to them about is what games their into and which was the first final fantasy they played. I’ve met many people through the use of multiplayer games it’s a very good way of meeting people with similar interests because lets face it if you didn’t like games why would you be playing one. I played a game called runescape for 6 years and met an unbelievable amount of friends on there, we had a massive community going but slowly people became less interested in the game and left, in the end I was glad I had their MSN addresses.

week 15

So how is the industry doing? From my research on the industry so far, all I seem to come across is how much Nintendo has achieved. Apart from the fact that the PS3 has sold more consoles on its launch Nintendo is ahead of the competition. The DS is still doing really well for them but now with the release of Pokemon Ranger they are getting even more ahead. The Pokemon company is currently doing the best compared to other game manufacturers which I think is the key to Nintendo’s success over the past years.

What are the biggest challenges facing the industry at the moment? The PS3 is now out but what does it have to offer. Apart from being the last next gen console to hit the markets (which hasn’t benefited Sony) the online play is still nothing in comparison to Microsoft’s Xbox live. I think Sony seriously needs to pick up the pace, I feel none of the next gen consoles have any games that have blown away the gaming industry. Gears of War amazed us for a while but still nothing has pushed these consoles to their limits. I think the playstation 3 has a lot of amazing games to offer that will captivate the audience such as Metal Gear Solid 4, Home and Little Big Planet however they are not out yet. Until they are we need to sit and wait until the playstaion 3 releases these games and becomes the top next gen console.

week 11

Game play is something that is very difficult to explain. Different people have different ideas of what game play is, well at least that is what I think. I believe game play is what makes us want to play a certain game regardless of its age or graphical capabilities. Take Diablo II for example, the graphics are a barely 3D and they are very dated for today’s standards. However game play is not about graphics, as long as the graphics are bearable game play is the start of an addiction to a game. Game play is what makes a game unique and when it is unique graphics don’t matter; you get sucked into the original design and storyline of the game. If these two elements exist within a game and you can relate to it and have a general interest chances are you will at least enjoy parts of the game. For example if I was into Medieval design and strategy games chances are I would like Lord of the Rings.

Graphics comes first to draw you in, game play is what makes you keep wanting to play and achieve your next goal within a game. You can have good storyline, good music and interesting characters in the world but without the interest and game play you would never have the desire to complete the game.

week 10

To me what makes me like a character is being able to relate to that person within my own life, if a character shares similar traits or emotions or ways of dealing with things it makes it easier to put yourself in their position and have a more in depth feeling about the story. In stories I look for a position I would like to be in, or that would make me really think about my reactions towards that situation. Lord of the Rings is a good example as I really felt involved in the film, almost as though I was a character, yet I could relate to each character individually. A film such as Silent hill also drew me in as it plays upon common fears of loss and grotesqueness which is strangely compelling yet if you saw in real life would make you run. In my opinion a good character has to be human enough to relate to yet different enough to make you think and react, stories have to explain enough to put a template in your head but open enough to let you fill the gaps with you imagination. A good story needs to keep you asking questions yet never fully answering them in detail, its like the Harry potter films, some people despised them as the way they had imagined something to look or speak etc was shattered because the director had done the films how he imagined it. Yet something like lord of the rings was less fresh in people’s minds and therefore people were more compelled to see how somebody else envisioned it.

week 9

If you look at some of the older games systems such as the Brown Box there was a lot of use of wood within the design of the console. I think using this material died out as games consoles are supposed to look like a piece of futuristic equipment and wood as a feel of old to it. Using plastic allows this feeling also making the console feel more expensive, yet with games consoles such as the ps3 they have used shiny metal that further still makes the user feel like the console is superior and full of technology. This also creates a bond between the user and his console, when you first get a shiny new console you constantly want it to be clean and free of scratches but as that console becomes more dated the care for the console decreases. To me the best looking console so far would be the Sega Megadrive as for its day it looked the most futuristic piece of kit, it was far better looking than the SNES and even the PS1 as these consoles looked big and bulky rather than sleek. Yet to me the best controller for a console has to be the playstation 1 and 2 controller the saying “if something’s not broken why fix it” comes to mind. This is also the same the playstation’s interface, although different in appearance, the playstation 1 and 2 have very similar bios screens, where you can check what is on your memory card etc. The playstation was also the first console to utilize memory cards which allowed you to take your saved games anywhere where there was another ps1. yet its interesting now that the ps3 has decided to create a controller that is not to different from the shape of the Megadrive controller.

week 8

To me it is very important to have a strong storyline within games otherwise you begin to get lost, for example like the online rpg runescape there is no set storyline, theres no reason your there you just are. I think that without the ability to put yourself in somebody else's shoes within a game its quite hard to understand and make realistic decisions about a situation. Runescape can become very tedious because of this, yet you either hate it because theres such alot to do and no story line or you love it because your so free to do as you wish. Yet at the same time if a game incorporates to strong a storyline you can feel your tied to that single story and you may as well be watching a film of somebody playing, i.e theres no freedom. Games such as Halo are good examples of where the main character just comes out of cryofreezing and then BAM straight into action, I think this is a very clever way to start a game off as with most fps you just want to get on and shoot. In halo there is a storyline but its based on the world of halo and the struggle of humans not necessarily on the master chief himself.
I agree with David freeman in that there are certain techniques to make a game story successful, its interesting to think that looking at the top few story integrations David set down below, that the majority of good selling games incorporate them.

Techniques to get a player to bond with an NPC (a Non-Player Character)

Techniques to give an NPC a quality of emotional depth, even if the NPC speaks just one line of dialogue.

Techniques to take the player on an emotional journey.

I do this call of duty is a war story, as i think a story is a chain of events in call of duty your living a chain of events that may well have happened in the first or second world war and because of this it feels realistic and themed. Even games like Pacman tell a story yet nowhere as deep as games we play today, in Pacman your a face that originated from a pizza with a slice missing being chased by ghosts, and sometimes you get to chase them, its a chain of event therefore a story, that said its never going to be a Hollywood movie.

my new pc!
I finaly got my new pc together so for the hell of it im ognna list the specs below.

core 2 duo e6300 1.86ghz
conroe xfire sata motherboard
1gb 533mhz ram
320gb 16mb cache sata2 hdd
dvd-ram drive
19" widescreen flat panel gaming monitor
wirless keyboard and mouse
x1950 pro radeon graphics card (runs doom3 and farcry on ultra high with no lag)

and there it is my new system i can now run 3dsmax without waiting for hours for it to load up lol this should hopefully result in more work hehe.

DIABLO 3?! DUNGEONS OF Diablo?!

ive just been reading through some posts on a website and it seems that i may soon be in with a nice treat as people are starting to drop hinds about the release of diablo 3. It seems there have been many fake trailers already made, hmm hope it comes soon.

week 7

an art director is sombody like rick nath, an art director is somebody that basicly like the name suggests directs art, and visual styles for games and art director is essential for a games prodution team just to make sure the overall style for a game is fluent, without one the game would look unfinished and patchy or would never be completed in the first place. An art director has an extreamly creative role, they basicly take a few sketches and words such as dark and creepy from the director then using his own creativity completely create the visual style . Then he goes and gives people jobs to do such as create this charecter that is mean to look evil etc, its extreamly demmanding and stressfull job. art direction in games is very very similar to that of games, creating charecters and atmospheric levels, yet at the same time i think if an art director from the games family and one from the films family swapped roles they may struggle. I think one of the most important skills id need to develop to become an art director is drawing abilities, but that said many other skills would be needed such as understanding how the programs used to design games work. This said i would also need to e able to used photoshop, 3dsmax etc, on top of that id need to be a very imaginative person but id like to think im part way there on that front.

week 6

Gameplay to me is how easy it is to get into the mood of playing a game, or how addictive that game becomes. I beleive that the rules of gameplay change from genre to genre and the the rules change depending on the person also. At the end of the day its impossible to please everybody, but its not impossible to make it inseresting enough to get the majority of people to play it.
In relation to who is the leading lights in games design, with 3 new consoles just arrived or about to arrive i.e xbox 360, nintendo wii and playstation 3 is it not too soon to say who will become the leading lights in games design? and is that not more important than who is leading at the moment. For instance as the xbox 360 has been out for a little while that will obviously have a larger following that the playstation 3 , so as for next gen games design the future and leader is undecided. The development of a game is and should never be the responcibility of a singular person, if this ever became the case then that game may be doomed before its launched. If a single person makes a game that means that there is only that persons style and experiences inputted into that game never mind the ammount of time and stress upon that person.
To me the most important thing to me when i play a game is relation, if i can relate to a game or a charecter, atmosphere etc within a game it make that game alot more fun for me than a game i know absolutly nothing about , this also relates to why you buy a game and how advertisement affects what you expect from a game.

week 5

The biggest problem that reviews especially magazine reviewers have is time, as stated in keiron gillen's workblog, he picks up the point that there simply is not enough time to think and find out why for example games are buggy, or why the voice of a charecter is not in sync with the movement of their lips. This is because they are forced to find quick faults to point ot without first truly understanding why their there in the first place. This makes for a very poor way of reviwing a game but at the same time do people really want to hear "well they tried their best"?. i think that a better way to review a game is by actually listening to some body who has played it thoughroughly and can give an overall score for the game i.e (10/10). For instance the readers review of project gotham racing 3 has alot more of a personal language to it, therefore if you can relate to that person and they like the game subcontiously your going to think of well in that case il like this game too. NGJ is a form of writing about a game but as though describing everything thats happening in the conversations with other charecters for example, yet things thats happening in real life too "at this point my girlfreind popped her head into the study". This way of writing to me seems a really individual approach and shows how passionate the individual is about a particualr issue, this way the reader knows everything they know about the topic at hand, I really like the idea of NGJ i find it keeps me interested in reading. another form of writing i can think of in game walkthroughs these give a outline of the story of a game and much information, but will allways lack notes of the graphical parts of games and almost allways lack personality. the problems with games reviewers that they have little time to produce a review therefore they rush it and the information they give is not particularly correct, but this is how they make their money, if they complete a review they get their cut from the publishng company. In my writing i beleive I base my points on fact but then once facts are straight i can branch of and say my opinions about it, i.e the graphics are cutting edge technology with the charecters having 10000 polygons is unbeleivable, but the particular style of the game is not all my taste.

week 4

With the stage light slowly dimming on the ps2 and xbox the new arrivals such as xbox360 and ps3 are begining to bloom, these are exciting times indeed. I find myself thinking about the future of gaming and where this will lead us and affect our lives, i beleive in the future we will get to a point where graphicly we will be able to create pretty much anything we want in the term of games. This does however bring up the question of gameplay, i pray that the importance of gameplay in gaming is not forgotten. I would rather play a game that looks crap but keeps me interested and theres allready some hits of games with better graphics becoming less interesting. I feel also in recent years i been addicted to games less and find it harder to turn on a game and automaticly get into it. With the introduction of direct x 10 just over the horizon and windows vista i also find specifications for games are vastly increasing, is it possible that we wll hit a wall where people say "you know what to play this game id have to upgrade my entire computer and its just not worth it"? who knows its possible, but then theres always consoles. Int the future of games i would like atmospheres and themes to continue to develop , every single game that I hold dear is because of 1. storyline and 2. environment and visual style. Its ok making an amazing looking level but if you cant relate to that or if it doesnt look like it fits in that game its just a waste of time. i also find that there has been a large rise in FPS in recent years I would like to see more games that encorperate individual and distinct features into them, such as condemmed a first person shooter where you hardly use guns and oblivion where you never use guns.

I find myself in need of a faster computer... hmmm, after just losing an alienware gaming pc on ebay for 401 pounds i find myself annoyed. main reasons for needing a new pc is 1. gaming 2. actually being able to run 3dsmax smoothly and 3. i want one. what should i do? with direct x 10 just over the hill as well as windows vista im unsure weather to wait or think ahead, hmm who knows il wait till my bursary comes through eitherway..

week 3

Well Im not too familiar with arcades in the 1980s at i was very young then,in the ye old days of the 1980s arcade gaming took to a larger level. arcade games became far more popular and drew in a larger audience, games such as blackbelt and donkey kong started to defined seperate genres. In this age household consoles were born into the market with consoles such as the comodore, atari and spectrum.


these consoles were the godfathers of console rivalry, the consoles fought for consumers loyalty, at the end of the day these machines were created to make money. more games came out and they started to define new genres such as racing and puzzles games such as outrun and forest.



This game layout was called psuedo 3D. Games began to rival in the market aswell, this began household video game entertainment.
Two of the most famous rivals in game history were sega and nintendo, their battle started off as i remember withthe master system and the nintendo entertainment system (but i mainly remember as a kid it being megadrive and snes) the megadrive was introduced two years after the mastersystem and ruled the market, until nintendo bought out the snes. the mega drive did better in japan but in europe and america the nintendo was ruling the roost. few rivalled the two monster macines but they never were as popular such as the turbo grafx 16.

Sega amazed everybody with the release of the sega saturn, never before had a games console used cd-roms and 3d graphics. the sega saturn was dominant but out of nowhere Sony snatched the market from underneath Segas nose with the Sony Playstation. The sony playstation was such a landmark in the computer gaming industry that it still has sex appeal (playability) even today. I remember tombraider and the final fantasy series, the playstation allowed companies like squaresoft to allow their games to become more appealing to a larger audience with 3d graphics, thus luring them to their fate as a ff lover.



In 1999 Sega was working on a project to allow them to take back the market, this came in the form of the dreamcast released in japan, the dreamcasts fate in europe was yet to be decided.

week 2

Ever since i can remember in my mind the first game was PONG, I have no idea where this thought in my head came from or why it was this game in particular, i know that my fathers uncle "John Gratage" was involved in the makeing of the game PONG or one version of it atleast. after reading into this i begin to think to myself, what is it about a game that actualy makes it a game as we know it? is it a group of LEDs that react when we press a button? in my head this simply has no playability and therfor is not a game. begining to think about pong, no matter how much graphics in games advances, pong will always have playability, and people will always play it, this is what makes it a classic just like tetris. I guess in my head the first person who decided to make computers fun was probably somebody who will never be known, perhaps you? didn you ever look at a keyboard and see how quick you could press qwertyqwertyqwertyqwerty as quickly as possible? i know i did. Computers were fun because they made day to day tasks easyier, so i guess the person who decided to make computers fun is... well... us! we decided to pick up a game and play it, and thats why i decided to do this course, cus i beleive i have something to add to the games industry that will hopefully make other people decide to use computers to have fun.

as for my history of gaming, the first game i remember seeing was a game called Forest on the Spectrum i can remember that back then graphics barely existed "LOL" . But my first console was the sega master system, i remember every saturday morning getting up early and playing alex the kid, my mum used to have tears for fears on the big stereo, and whenever i hear that album now it reminds me. i also remember playing mickey mouse "land of illusion" and allways getting to the donald duck level when my mum decided she wanted to go to town, and back in them day there was no save game, she used to tell me to turn it off, but i paused it and turned the TV off instead. my next console was m,y brothers mega drive, this was where i found SONIC, he was so cool, i had sonic wallpaper, sonic quilt, sonic everything... i loved it. T he mega drive was allso where i found my love for RPGs when i bought a second hand game off the market called "Super Hydlide " i absolutly loved this game until my brother decided to sell his mega drive, :(. After this came the PSOne and TombRaider, GranTurismo and Final Fantasy, between these games they managed to keep me from the "real world" for months at a time, my favorite being final fantasy 8, i remember my sister deleting my saved game of 128 hours. this is where my greatest gameing acheivement came in, at 15 i played for 68 hours straight, with the exceptions of the toilet and eating but no sleep. At 12 i remember starting my first mporpg "Runescape" which i still play to this day, this game opened up a whole new world for me, i made so many freinds on this game and it means so much to me. As a whole 90 percent of all my good memories have come from times ive played a game, as sad as it sounds.

week 1

Who's writing, and how do you perceive them to be? Does blogging strike you as objective or more personal? How often do they write, what do they write about? How do you see yourself using a blog? Do you feel comfortable writing for an invisible audience for example?

After reading the blog My Brain Is Leaking by John A i have managed to conclude that the guy has an iteresting take on gaming, and has a distinct idea of how a game should be. In one of the posts he was touching on the fact that a game should stick to a certain genre, and wrote about how the matrix should not have included driving levels, yet i disagree. The matrix is renowned for "Bullet time" which we all know is where time goes really really slow and some guy can dodge bullets, yet just because its renowned for this it does not mean thats all that makes the story up. The matrix films had much going on it was supposidly set in the future, every where you look there was objects and environments designed to give a certain atmosphere to add impact to the scene. basicly what im trying to say i dont think that matrix was made famous by bullet time alone, and by encorperating things like car chases into the game it allows the audience to get a better picture of what that atmosphere is like, using this to make a bigger picture of the world in their head.

I think blogging for me is more an objective as i dont particularly enjoy writing, nor am i very good at it, i do how every enjoy gaming, this allows me to still have a personal edge to my writing. i think that with writing, you dont have the added aid of expressions that you do with speaking, this means you write more than you would usually say, but this means that you need to explain things and thus becomes personal. you also need to make writing personal to keep it interesting, otherwise if its not interesting whats the point writing if nobody will ever read it.

i dont think John A has a particular schedule of when he write, he did however say in one post how he had not posted anything for 3 months , this goes back to the last question ,John seems to use his blog to complete objectives, yet at the same time his style of writing is personal and very interesting, with references to cartoons and games. As i wrote in the answer to question one (about enter the matrix), john uses his blog to note down his comments and thoughts on games and games culture, as well as adding humour to keep the reader interested.

I think i will end up using this blog as a diary of my thoughts , ideas and concepts, i will also use it to boast about my various gaming acheivments and moan about how the ps3 will eat up all of my student loan (*munch*).

i do feel comfortable writing to an "invisable audience" to me its exactly the same as writing in a diary, yet this will be kind of like a photo album of words and well photos i guess. Atleast i know that the people reading my blog will have similar intrests as me and therefore more likely to know what im on about.

Sorry this is late im a bit slow when it comes to learning new things....like how to write

yay for blogs

I find myself scared, dazed and confused over the idea of using a keyboard for anything other than moving my character around the screen and reloading "R", the idea of using such a device for this thing you call writing has long forgotten me.