I must admit that even I was not immune against the onslaught of music games. And that’s when I let myself get talked into Guitar Hero III and Rockband right after that, with me enjoying the latter rather more music wise.
Standing in front of the TV with a plastic guitar trying to look like a rockstar is something that takes getting used to but it has it’s charm and by now I think I am quite decent at this game. It has this incredible feeling of achievement and it is really something different than sitting on the sofa frantically pressing buttons on the Xbox360 controller.
One fun thing with Rockband was that you can customize your character much more freely than in Guitar Hero III. I have created two outfits until now that I quite like and I thought I’d share them here.
The “Angel” outfit was first and the final configuration after many experiments with white clothes. The “Devil” is more openhearted (not all that easy if you look at the stuff available in the Rockband shop) and I think it works perfectly together with the facepaint and tattoos.
One thing that bugs me with the Xbox360 is that it is not really possible to make screenshots except by taking photos of the TV. I’d love a photo mode like in GranTurismo for the PS2 where you could pose and save your pictures to a USB stick. The Xbox360 ought to have a screenshot button that would do this for you anytime you needed to but I guess that would be difficult because of copyright restrictions.
Symphonic Shades 23. August 2008 playing video game music from Chris Hülsbeck with the WDR Rundfunk Orchestra
“Symphonic Shades” was Chris Hülsbeck’s dream of bringing a whole concert with his videogame music to life with a proper symphonic orchestra into reality. The first concert was sold out within days of it’s announcement and I was one of the lucky ones to find out in time to get a couple of tickets (later a second concert was announced for the same evening, three hours later, which sold out just as fast)
I was very excited to be at this concert as this was my very first videogame concert. I had already listened to renditions of Final Fantasy from Nobue Uematsu, but never live, and I was used to these concerts and remixes sometimes sounding a bit strange.
I am a great fand of Chris’s Amiga music and I have also bought nearly all of his Soundtrack CDs, although I have to say that his Style worked better with the rough and gritty sounding Amiga soundchip. Even the remixes of his own songs seldomly reached quality of the originals.
That said I can safely claim that “Symphonic Shades” was worth it. The songs that were played worked well with the orchestral arrangement (most of the songs were arranged by Jonne Valtonen aka “Purple Motion”) with only the odd deviation into the strange.
“Gem’X” had a man hitting coffee cups for percussion which sounded a bit strange and den symphonic rendition of “Shades” had a real synthesizer playing lead which sounded a bit out of place and ever so slightly out of tune.
The only real letdown was the Turrican II theme which was supposed to be some sort of journey through several classical ages which was either to high for me or just simply failed to recreate the atmosphere and ‘power’ that was behind the original. I also expected the Turrican 3 Piano Suite to be good but it was souly played by a finnish piano virtuoso called Jari Salmela who raced through the theme rather faster than his fingers could move and I rather missed the orchestral accompaniment which would have given the ending theme so much more emotion.
Apart from these small gripes the songs were very good. The X-Out theme was great, R-Type was fantastic (although a slightly jumpy beat struck me as weird), Tunnel B1 was brilliant despite being fronted by a 5 minute percussion solo.
“Karawane der Elefanten” was the only new song and as such failed (in my eyes) to convey any sort of Hülsbeckiism, but that may only be me wanting to hear something I can recognize.
The complete playlist:
- Grand Monster Slam – Opening Fanfare
- X-Out – Main Theme
- Jim Power – Main Theme
- Tower of Babel
- Turrican 3 – Piano Suite
- Gem’X – Main Theme
- Apidya II – Suite
- R-Type – Main Theme
- Licht am Ende des Tunnels – Suite
- The Great Giana Sisters – Suite
- Tunnel B1 – Suite
- Symphonic Shades
- Karawane der Elefanten
- Turrican II Renderings – Main Theme
There will be a Soundtrack CD of this concert in late 2008 which is supposed to feature all Songs from this evening. As it will feature recordings made during the week up to the concert itself it should probably sound more balanced than the live concert and maybe the timing issues will also be corrected (I’m no expert in symphonic music but there were parts where some parts of the orchestra semed to lag behind the rest but because I have seen this happen in professional soundtrack recordings I am not quite sure if this isn’t some kind of special rhythm thing).
I will have an eye out for the CD and I hope there will be new opportunities for videogame concerts when (or if) the Games Convention comes to Cologne next year (but there have been signs of Leipzig putting up a fight so there may be two events next year very close to oneanother that’ll both be only half baked).
It was nice seeing Chris Hüslbeck personally attending this event and we even managed to get him onto the stage for the final applause as he prefers to stay in the background. But as a musician he has made a name for himself and an impressive legacy ranging over two decades in the videogame industry.
One last thing that struck me when seeing the audience at the concert was that they were all round about the same age, my age, all with their love and enthusiasm for Amiga and C64 music and one thing dawned to me: man, we’re getting old Laughing
I have started a new spaceship project called Poseidon. It’s a heavy bomber that originated from a couple of design ideas I had long been wanting to do. I also decided to make this WIP more public than my previous ones by posting it on www.scifi-meshes.com.
I think it is working out quite well at the moment. I’ll keep my forum post uptodate.
New metallic AnimA logoHere’s the new and improved AnimA-TV logo. It will be featured on the redesigned www.anima-tv.net as soon as the relaunch is complete.
The logo was completely rebuilt and now features highly detailed bevel edges and creases. This catches the reflections and specular lights much better than the old logo and also looks much better with the new nodal surface settings.
February 24, 2008 – 21:05
I have started to play around with Microsoft’s XNA Framework in C# and, as a first project, started porting my old puzzle game “Colours”. I created that game 1992 on my Amiga in AMOS Basic and have ported it successfully to HTML/JavaScript round about 2004. Several attempts to port it to the PC in Blitz Basic / DarkBasic Professional failed because the languages were a little bit to basic for my likeing (and because I accidently deleted a prototype version that was quite close to getting finished).
Starting with C# wasn’t quite as easy as I had hoped because I am used to PHP and doing everything myself. C# has load of features for handling variable scopes and breaks pretty fast if you try to be smart and ignore all that, which is what you can do in PHP. Also, the XNA Framework is huge and does loads of stuff for you, but if don’t know what structure it expects then you’re a bit lost.
There is a very good list of tutorials and websites for XNA and the basic things are very easy to understand. But some of the more advanced examples work very differently and aren’t documented very well which leaves you out in the cold as soon as you have understood the basics. Maybe the Creators Club is better but I haven’t yet decided if I will manage to keep going long enough so that the 100$ membership fee won’t be wasted.
At the moment I have the blocks, playfield, gravity, colour reactions, cursor movement and score counting running. I still need lots of graphical effects (such as exploding blocks, score overlays and the whole gui) on my todo list as well as everything outside of the actual game. I also have lots of ideas on how to extend the game from it’s 1992 feature set so that will be quite interesting to see those coming along.
I already had Rez on the PS2 and loved this little gem. When I heard that is was going to be released on the Xbox360 in HD (720p) I was quite excited to see what they had made of it for this new iteration.
The graphics look wunderfull and the sound is great. The game has been converted very faithfully to the Xbox360, including the controller rumble which you have to enable the first time around.
Improvements to the original are mostly with it’s enhanced resolution although there are also a couple of minor details that seem to have been added including some extra effects (one spectacular glare effect that makes fighting the area 4 end boss quite taxing).
Overall the game seems a little bit more difficult than the PS2 version (having not played the DreamCast version I can’t really tell how faithful it is to the original).
I am not sure that it is worthy it’s 800 Microsoft Points pricetag having already bought the PS2 version (although it would have been terrible if it had been a full price game). It does have a limited long time playability with only 5 levels to unlock but it also has a uniquely fun gameplay that just works wonderfully on HDTV with a good surround sound setup.
For a rail-shooter remake this is very good (I don’t think we stand a chance of Starblade or Starblade: Operation Blue Planet getting released on any next-gen console) and if you haven’t had a chance to play this one before it is certainly a recommended buy. If, like me, you have the old version this still is nice to have, but just keep in mind that this is only a remake, not a second part.
Here are a couple of models that I have been working on for the last couple of months. The Veloque fighter has been in the albums for quite some time but hasn’t been announced properly.
I created it from a sketch I made on paper and I made it to test modelling techniques for subpatch modelling with Lightwave. I deliberately tried a couple of difficult shapes to find solutions for the usual problems and I think I succeeded quite well in solving a couple of them.
It may have become a bit overloaded in the meantime so I may have to reduce oder modify a couple of shapes.
The second WIP is a long one streaching from an idea I had for a couple of years in the shape of the Titan carrier (or Damocles as it’s predecessor was called). It’s purely polygon modelling and therefore not as demanding as the Veloque. It is based on the basic shape of a two bladed broadsword and will be (once completed) over 1km long. I have planned to launch the SpaceHead and Veloque fighters from it’s hangars but it will be quite some time until I will be able to do this. It is very likely that I will port these meshes into XSI before hand because LightWave isn’t quite as good at handling and combing complex mesh objects in one scene, so that will further delay the completion of this project, but I will keep you posted.
After playing this part in the Final Fantasy row since it’s release in germany (23. February 2007 – yeah, thats half a year after the US and nearly a whole year after japan) I have finally finished the game.
After my failed attempt at defeating Vayne a couple of months ago I took some time off finishing most of the hunts and getting all of the espers. Usually in Final Fantasy you have quite a good chance in defeating the big boss if you manage to defeat most of the extra beasts before hand and therefore this time Vayne didn’t stand a chance.
In addition to the higher level I also had quite a good and demanding time gathering extras for my sky pirate’s den. This is quite a simple thing to implement for the game developer but it somehow adds a nice incentive to the game. Quite similair to the achievements you get on the Xbox or Half Life. I’ll just show you has become of mine:
Quite crowded by now, but I did leave out a couple of things, including the Tiamat and several other things just because I thought it was about time to finish.
My final stats are just over 4.000.000 clan points with all characters being at level 68 (and Vaan leveling to 69 inside the Bahamuth). Final playtime was about 170 hours which must be the longest time I have spent on a Final Fantasy (or any game for that matter).
Now let’s just hope Final Fantasy XIII isn’t going to be late.
November 10, 2007 – 09:25
I decided to test the power consumption of my new PC today.
Intel Core 2 Duo Q6600
Gigabyte P35-DS3
XFX nVidia 8800 GTS 320MB
| Application |
Consumption |
Comment |
| Idle |
145W |
| Lightwave3D |
204W |
Rendering a scene with all 4 cores maxed out |
| 3DMark06 |
up to 247W |
Running on default settings. 3DMark06 gave me 10586 3DMarks (SM2:4102, SM3:4229, CPU:4672) |
Having played through Half Life 2 Episode 2 I could’nt fail to notice a photo hanging in the lab at White Forest. I think I recognise some of the faces, although they look more like the Half Life 1 models…
A group photo of Black Mesa staff found at White Forest:
- unknown
- unknown
- unknown
- seen him in HL1
- probably Eli Vance
- unknown
- Dr. Isaac Kleiner
- Dr. Gordon Freeman
- G-Man
Anyone know the rest or what position G-Man had at Black Mesa? My memories from HL1 are a bit shadey Wink
