I don't tell my co-workers what I earn for one very good reason - I know for a fact that I'm on more money than most of them, even people who are technically doing the same job. They already have enough reasons to dislike me without me handing ammunition to them!:p
Come on,/.ers! While we're waiting for Rutan's (yes, I instantly saw the Doctor Who connection too) server to stop trembling in fear, let's spend the time coming up with some more interesting names to pitch to him.
I mean, 'SpaceShip One'? Guy, intercaps are *so* dotcom-era...
I did hear rumours of game publishers offering the services of, um, obliging young ladies to reviewers in exchange for good reviews. But the names and circumstances are long forgotten.
This genuinely happened? Hellfire and damnnation! Now I feel even more pissed off about my story above ^! What freebies did I get out of my seven or so years working on games mags? A couple of fucking t-shirts and a demo copy of PS1 Bust-A-Move!
Either I was too naive to ask for this stuff, or the PRs really did hate me.;) True story of the games biz, just a few weeks ago - a guy who used to work for me told me about a press trip he went on where he met an old workmate of mine who now freelances for [largeish London-based publishing company]. Old workmate and former writer were on a PR junket to [major European capital with world-famous tower]. In a cab back to the hotel, former writer was astonished to see old workmate (who he didn't know I knew until it came up in conversation afterwards) bring out his personalised press kit and snort a quick line from it, all provided for him at company expense...
Clearly I worked for the wrong company. No drugs, no whores. Hell, hardly any free games, thanks to company policy! If you expect to get loads of freebies as part of your job, don't work for [South Coast-based UK publishing company]...
Huh. When *I* worked as a game reviewer (magazine editor, in fact) I never got invited on any fancy press junkets. Come to think of it, the head UK PR guy at [major American company well-known for attaching shoddy rush-job games to big licences] disliked me to the point where not only did I not get invited on press junkets, but he blew me out at E3 one year on the grounds that he was "too busy to see me". After all, I was only editing the #1-selling unofficial magazine in that sector of the market at the time...
I did always try to be honest about my feelings in reviews, though (an advantage of being the editor is that your views don't get toned down by the subs). If I liked a game, I said so. If I hated a game, I said so. In no uncertain terms. Frequently at great length. I'd on occasion increase the amount of space allocated to truly shit games just so that I could *really* lay into them. Like the time I used three pages to give [unbelievably buggy and unplayable console conversion of well-known and respected PC violent racing game] a final score of 3%. Not 3 out of 10, but *three percent*.
Ah, those were the days! Unfortunately, on most magazines now the PRs have taken control to the point where an 'average' score is considered to be 80%, and even giving that will often generate veiled threats and even open abuse from the software companies. Thank god I'm not doing that any more.
Now I work on a movie magazine and have to deal with agents and managers and lawyers instead...
I saw a PS2 demo build of this a couple of days ago, about 95% complete and missing some AI tweaks (the enemies sometimes just stood there as you smacked the shit out of them) and *all* of the FMV.
Good job, too, on the latter count. The PR guy told us that the game has some *major* spoilers for Reloaded, and he was kind of pissed off at having had to see the footage to do his job! Thankfully he didn't spill his guts to us, though from the name of one of the levels I have a feeling one of the big twists involves Morpheus.
There was also a real "WTF?" moment as well when he was describing some of the enemies you meet (and the only way to kill them) in the Chateau level (the place with the fancy staircase from the trailers). Is this The Matrix or Buffy?
Actually, the game itself is like a cross between Xbox Buffy and Max Payne, with some Driver/Chase HQ sections in between. (Reflections supposedly worked on the car physics.) Combat in bullet-time (called 'focus' here, though it works just like in Max Payne, somewhat ironic considering where Rockstar ripped the idea off from!) is a good laugh, and your character picks up skills as they go. And yes, you can run up walls. There's also a neat 'hacking' (ie, cheat) mode where you can find codes online and enter them into the game to download new moves into your character. Looks pretty damn good overall, though hopefully the Xbox version will have slightly less jaggy graphics on some of the levels, as that's what I'll be playing it on!
All the main Matrix characters supposedly show up in the game, crossing over with events in the film, though I only saw Trinity and Agent Smith. The character models looked good for the most part, though some of the non mo-capped character movements were a bit wobbly.
The bad news - Jada Pinkett Smith's voice acting was really quite lousy! [Shopgirl monotone] "Let's get the hell out of here." Very wooden. I hope she's not like this throughout the film!
Since the film and game come out on the same day, I'd strongly recommend seeing the film before playing the game if you want to avoid having the ending of Reloaded spoiled...
Labels: Worse than useless, at least in the incarnation we know from OS9. Better systems can be devised, as the myriad workflow tools in existence have shown us.
To quote some guy from Duckman, "Dwaaaah?"
I have to deal with literally hundreds of Word files over the course of a production schedule. Simply sorting by date doesn't tell me anything, because some of them may have been subbed, but not actually completed as they're waiting for additional elements to be pasted in, while others may have been checked by other people but not by me.
Now I could use different folders for work at different stages of completion. But that would be a needless complication, because I want (note: *want*, as in it's my decision on the best way to work) all the documents in the same place.
Coloured, personalised labels to tell me at a glance which have been fully completed and which still need work? Hardly "worse than useless"!
I work for a magazine that, without getting into specifics, features a major celebrity on the cover of every issue. We recently did a cover of a (deceased) actor for a retrospective of his career.
Now it can truthfully be said of this actor, who pretty much everyone in the world knows, that his face was his fortune. He was a very good-looking guy - but like most people, he had a couple of minor facial imperfections. In his case, though, these 'blemishes' were almost an iconic part of his appearance.
The order from our PHB publisher before he'd sign off on the cover? "REMOVE UNSIGHTLY MOLE."
Forget Linux, can we get them running Be(nder)OS? If I'm going to have a robot pal, I at least want it to share a beer with me rather than be a cringing Asimovian wimp?
Is it called John Quincy Adding-Machine?
on
Robots!
·
· Score: 2, Funny
"He struck a chord with the voters when he pledged not to go on a killing spree."
"But like most politicians, he promised more than he could deliver."
Still, considering all the fuel-cell articles that have been on/. recently, maybe we really *will* have robots that run on alcohol!
Last week a fellow cohort of mine was driving in at 6:30am and happened to glance at the billboard. It was showing the Blue Screen of Death.
The ATMs at my bank run Windows. I know this because on several occasions I've gone into the branch to get some cash and found myself confronted with the BSOD, and somebody frantically working round the back of the ATM trying to reboot it.
Text-to-speech? Come on, this has been around for donkey's years - maybe the computer voice doesn't sound like Majel Barrett yet, but it's hardly new and amazing stuff.
I want to know what's going on with speech-to-text, and will I be able to dictate rather than type a novel any time soon? (Preferably with some form of intelligent speech recognition, so it doesn't end up with passages like "She, ah... walked, no strode into the room to find, uh, er, dammit, did I say Rob left the tape on the counter or the desk? Oh, bloody hell. Hello? No, I'm not interested in double glazing. How did you get this number anyway? Bye. Where was I? Oh, crap! Computer, pause-")
American is nothing more than a bunch of slimy bastards
I don't know about their sliminess quotient, but I *do* know they're a shitty airline. Heathrow/Atlanta return (via Chicago) a couple of years back - worst flights I've ever been on. Uncomfortable (even by airline standards) and shabby seats, rude and unhelpful staff, lousy (again, even by airline standards) food, flickering and tiny overhead monitors for the movie (no multi-channel seat-back TVs here) and the plane itself was grubby, battered, smelly and generally an unpleasant place to spend seven hours. Normally I fly Virgin Atlantic, which is usually pretty good even in economy (the one time when I flew First Class... oh, the luxury! Even an in-flight massage!), but compared to American, even Virgin's economy seemed like business class. Ever since, I've taken every opportunity to slag American off purely on principle. Like now.
I get around it by being deliberately behind the curve with certain software. Everyone else in the office runs Eudora for email. I use Netscape 4.7. My ostensible reason is, "I have a lot of valuable contacts in my old mailbox that can't be transferred to Eudora because the file formats are different." The real reason is, "I can claim that Netscape's email functions don't give me an alert every time a new piece of mail comes in, so I'm not expected to drop what I'm doing whenever my computer beeps." And my bosses are either dumb or tech-unsavvy enough to believe me.
I've been at my company over ten years, and had the same email account for about seven. No matter how many filters I put in, I get *shitloads* of spam every day. (Changing my email addy would be a nightmare because I get so many legit mails a day as well.) If I responded to emails immediately, as everyone else in the company has apparently been trained to, I would *never* get any work done. And since I'm in charge of my section, this could be a slight productivity problem.:)
Oh and I don't have to worry about falling victim to someone else's idea of "High Quality". Commonly people and services will encode at 128 or 192 to save space on their drives, and if you even remotely concidered yourself an audiophile, such sampling would be really sub-standard to your ears. =)
I'd like to consider myself an audiophile, but unfortunately my medically documented poor hearing rules me out. However, it does have the bonus that MP3s encoded at the 'sub-standard' rate of 192 will sound as good as anything else I'm going to get. Hell, most of my MP3s are at 128, and there are even a few 96 tracks in my collection. Damned if I can tell the difference...:D
...and at the time I took over, I thought, "How cool is this? I get to play videogames - *for a living*!"
Three years later, frankly I wanted to kill myself - or never play another videogame as long as I lived, whichever was easier. Luckily I got the chance to move out of games and into movies (but that's another story).
I'd been playing arcade games since the Seventies, had most of the computers that were around in the Eighties and the consoles in the Nineties. And as I got older, I realised that the more advanced the technology became... the less fun the games were.
Don't get me wrong, there have been games I've enjoyed playing in the past few years - Halo, the original Tomb Raider, Goldeneye, Crazy Taxi, MGS, Unreal Tourney (once all the Futurama mods are put in). But these days, the 'big' games just require too much of an investment of time for too little reward to be worth it. I was talking to a guy I used to work with who's now on an Xbox mag, and he told me that a senior designer at one of the majors had admitted that his company doesn't bother spending too much time on game ending sequences "because hardly anyone can be bothered to play that long". Chicken or egg?
Certainly, the only big game I've played through to the end in the last few years has been Halo, and even that had some infuriating bits where I was very close to putting it down forever. FFVII I gave up on when I got stuck fighting Barrett's ex-mate and had to keep sitting through five minutes of exposition before getting killed again. MGS - getting blown up by Metal Gear Rex for the fiftieth time was just too much. Even something like Jet Set Radio Future's skyscraper stage... life is just too short!
I actually get more fun out of a quick blast on MAME or Frodo or Spectacle, or Robotron on GBA, or 30 minutes of Crazy Taxi on DC, than any of the so-called megagames of the moment. I have no interest in committing 70 hours of my life to some game (which I know is going to frustrate me with the die/retry trial-and-error loop that designers still think is *soooooo* clever) when there are other things I could be doing.
Not even Miyamoto is infallible - I couldn't be arsed to play through to the end of Ocarina Of Time, simply because I got caught in a die/retry loop and decided I couldn't face playing through the same section yet *again* just to reach the next checkpoint.
The idea of the 'short, sharp shock' seems to have all but disappeared from modern designers. But right now, those are the only kind of games that I have the time (and patience) to play. I've seen everything already - there hasn't been a new gaming genre for years, and nobody seems to even be bothering with new twists on what's already been done. (After three years on an N64 mag, I'd rather eat my own toenails than play another 3D platformer with a cartoony hero. Oh look, the ice level! The volcano level! The minecarts! The jungle! The haunted house! FUCK RIGHT OFF AND DIE, YOU UNIMAGINATIVE SHITEHAWKS!)
The only problem is, nobody's developing games that are designed for a quick 10-15 minute blast, because the focus groups want FMV and level bosses. I couldn't care less about FMV if the game's playable, and I *hate* level bosses, so that's why the big, bland game companies that thankfully I don't have to deal with any more aren't getting any of my money...
UK cable unlimited broadband (128K) via NTL - £15 a month, compared to £10 pm for 56K dial-up. Not the fastest around, but since I'm not spending 24 hours a day downloading movies, I can live with it!
In the UK, it's always 'half mast' when talking about flags. I'd never even known the US did it differently (and this from someone who's been there a lot, has family there and even did a degree in the subject) until the Columbia disaster and CNN kept going on about flags being at 'half staff'.
Just another one of those things they did in the 19th Century to set themselves apart from Britain, like taking the 'u' out of words like 'colour' and holding the fork in the right hand, I guess...
Yeah, this is the system that even *Londoners* don't understand and haven't been fully informed about the payment methods (at least according to my family down there, including one High Court barrister), and that *nobody* outside London - even visitors - has a chance of understanding or planning for in advance. If you're from Newcastle and happen to be passing in the general vicinity of London to visit relatives when you get caught by a camera, bang, you're nailed - and because you know nothing about how it works, the first you know about it is when a fine for far more than the actual charge arrives at your home a week or so later. Yes, an entirely fair system...
If this 'dark energy' is acting *against* gravity, then can we call it *anti*gravity? If so, I'd like to be first in line to put a deposit down on a flying car...
I don't get it. Why does a park need to 'break even'? It's a frickin' *park*! Trees, grass, flowers, the odd lake, some birds... why does it need a honking great Hall of Jar-Jar dropping into it?
Is this the state we're in now, where even the natural environment has to turn a profit to survive?
BTW, I've been to Skywalker Ranch. It's *massive*, genuinely a case of "everything you see, I own" for the tubby beardo. Now, what tax breaks has Lucas been offered to move ILM et all to the Presidio rather than onto his own property?
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I don't tell my co-workers what I earn for one very good reason - I know for a fact that I'm on more money than most of them, even people who are technically doing the same job. They already have enough reasons to dislike me without me handing ammunition to them! :p
I mean, 'SpaceShip One'? Guy, intercaps are *so* dotcom-era...
This genuinely happened? Hellfire and damnnation! Now I feel even more pissed off about my story above ^! What freebies did I get out of my seven or so years working on games mags? A couple of fucking t-shirts and a demo copy of PS1 Bust-A-Move!
Either I was too naive to ask for this stuff, or the PRs really did hate me. ;) True story of the games biz, just a few weeks ago - a guy who used to work for me told me about a press trip he went on where he met an old workmate of mine who now freelances for [largeish London-based publishing company]. Old workmate and former writer were on a PR junket to [major European capital with world-famous tower]. In a cab back to the hotel, former writer was astonished to see old workmate (who he didn't know I knew until it came up in conversation afterwards) bring out his personalised press kit and snort a quick line from it, all provided for him at company expense...
Clearly I worked for the wrong company. No drugs, no whores. Hell, hardly any free games, thanks to company policy! If you expect to get loads of freebies as part of your job, don't work for [South Coast-based UK publishing company]...
I did always try to be honest about my feelings in reviews, though (an advantage of being the editor is that your views don't get toned down by the subs). If I liked a game, I said so. If I hated a game, I said so. In no uncertain terms. Frequently at great length. I'd on occasion increase the amount of space allocated to truly shit games just so that I could *really* lay into them. Like the time I used three pages to give [unbelievably buggy and unplayable console conversion of well-known and respected PC violent racing game] a final score of 3%. Not 3 out of 10, but *three percent*.
Ah, those were the days! Unfortunately, on most magazines now the PRs have taken control to the point where an 'average' score is considered to be 80%, and even giving that will often generate veiled threats and even open abuse from the software companies. Thank god I'm not doing that any more.
Now I work on a movie magazine and have to deal with agents and managers and lawyers instead...
Good job, too, on the latter count. The PR guy told us that the game has some *major* spoilers for Reloaded, and he was kind of pissed off at having had to see the footage to do his job! Thankfully he didn't spill his guts to us, though from the name of one of the levels I have a feeling one of the big twists involves Morpheus.
There was also a real "WTF?" moment as well when he was describing some of the enemies you meet (and the only way to kill them) in the Chateau level (the place with the fancy staircase from the trailers). Is this The Matrix or Buffy?
Actually, the game itself is like a cross between Xbox Buffy and Max Payne, with some Driver/Chase HQ sections in between. (Reflections supposedly worked on the car physics.) Combat in bullet-time (called 'focus' here, though it works just like in Max Payne, somewhat ironic considering where Rockstar ripped the idea off from!) is a good laugh, and your character picks up skills as they go. And yes, you can run up walls. There's also a neat 'hacking' (ie, cheat) mode where you can find codes online and enter them into the game to download new moves into your character. Looks pretty damn good overall, though hopefully the Xbox version will have slightly less jaggy graphics on some of the levels, as that's what I'll be playing it on!
All the main Matrix characters supposedly show up in the game, crossing over with events in the film, though I only saw Trinity and Agent Smith. The character models looked good for the most part, though some of the non mo-capped character movements were a bit wobbly.
The bad news - Jada Pinkett Smith's voice acting was really quite lousy! [Shopgirl monotone] "Let's get the hell out of here." Very wooden. I hope she's not like this throughout the film!
Since the film and game come out on the same day, I'd strongly recommend seeing the film before playing the game if you want to avoid having the ending of Reloaded spoiled...
To quote some guy from Duckman, "Dwaaaah?"
I have to deal with literally hundreds of Word files over the course of a production schedule. Simply sorting by date doesn't tell me anything, because some of them may have been subbed, but not actually completed as they're waiting for additional elements to be pasted in, while others may have been checked by other people but not by me.
Now I could use different folders for work at different stages of completion. But that would be a needless complication, because I want (note: *want*, as in it's my decision on the best way to work) all the documents in the same place.
Coloured, personalised labels to tell me at a glance which have been fully completed and which still need work? Hardly "worse than useless"!
Now it can truthfully be said of this actor, who pretty much everyone in the world knows, that his face was his fortune. He was a very good-looking guy - but like most people, he had a couple of minor facial imperfections. In his case, though, these 'blemishes' were almost an iconic part of his appearance.
The order from our PHB publisher before he'd sign off on the cover? "REMOVE UNSIGHTLY MOLE."
[Sigh...]
Forget Linux, can we get them running Be(nder)OS? If I'm going to have a robot pal, I at least want it to share a beer with me rather than be a cringing Asimovian wimp?
"But like most politicians, he promised more than he could deliver."
Still, considering all the fuel-cell articles that have been on /. recently, maybe we really *will* have robots that run on alcohol!
"Yes! In your face, Gandhi!"
The ATMs at my bank run Windows. I know this because on several occasions I've gone into the branch to get some cash and found myself confronted with the BSOD, and somebody frantically working round the back of the ATM trying to reboot it.
I trust these people with my money because...?
I want to know what's going on with speech-to-text, and will I be able to dictate rather than type a novel any time soon? (Preferably with some form of intelligent speech recognition, so it doesn't end up with passages like "She, ah... walked, no strode into the room to find, uh, er, dammit, did I say Rob left the tape on the counter or the desk? Oh, bloody hell. Hello? No, I'm not interested in double glazing. How did you get this number anyway? Bye. Where was I? Oh, crap! Computer, pause-")
Somewhere in Arlen, Texas, a bespectacled man rubs his hands with glee...
I don't know about their sliminess quotient, but I *do* know they're a shitty airline. Heathrow/Atlanta return (via Chicago) a couple of years back - worst flights I've ever been on. Uncomfortable (even by airline standards) and shabby seats, rude and unhelpful staff, lousy (again, even by airline standards) food, flickering and tiny overhead monitors for the movie (no multi-channel seat-back TVs here) and the plane itself was grubby, battered, smelly and generally an unpleasant place to spend seven hours. Normally I fly Virgin Atlantic, which is usually pretty good even in economy (the one time when I flew First Class... oh, the luxury! Even an in-flight massage!), but compared to American, even Virgin's economy seemed like business class. Ever since, I've taken every opportunity to slag American off purely on principle. Like now.
I've been at my company over ten years, and had the same email account for about seven. No matter how many filters I put in, I get *shitloads* of spam every day. (Changing my email addy would be a nightmare because I get so many legit mails a day as well.) If I responded to emails immediately, as everyone else in the company has apparently been trained to, I would *never* get any work done. And since I'm in charge of my section, this could be a slight productivity problem. :)
Now, if the damn thing just had a '%' button...
...will be Joan Baez tracks. Damn you, Steve Jobs!
I'd like to consider myself an audiophile, but unfortunately my medically documented poor hearing rules me out. However, it does have the bonus that MP3s encoded at the 'sub-standard' rate of 192 will sound as good as anything else I'm going to get. Hell, most of my MP3s are at 128, and there are even a few 96 tracks in my collection. Damned if I can tell the difference... :D
Three years later, frankly I wanted to kill myself - or never play another videogame as long as I lived, whichever was easier. Luckily I got the chance to move out of games and into movies (but that's another story).
I'd been playing arcade games since the Seventies, had most of the computers that were around in the Eighties and the consoles in the Nineties. And as I got older, I realised that the more advanced the technology became... the less fun the games were.
Don't get me wrong, there have been games I've enjoyed playing in the past few years - Halo, the original Tomb Raider, Goldeneye, Crazy Taxi, MGS, Unreal Tourney (once all the Futurama mods are put in). But these days, the 'big' games just require too much of an investment of time for too little reward to be worth it. I was talking to a guy I used to work with who's now on an Xbox mag, and he told me that a senior designer at one of the majors had admitted that his company doesn't bother spending too much time on game ending sequences "because hardly anyone can be bothered to play that long". Chicken or egg?
Certainly, the only big game I've played through to the end in the last few years has been Halo, and even that had some infuriating bits where I was very close to putting it down forever. FFVII I gave up on when I got stuck fighting Barrett's ex-mate and had to keep sitting through five minutes of exposition before getting killed again. MGS - getting blown up by Metal Gear Rex for the fiftieth time was just too much. Even something like Jet Set Radio Future's skyscraper stage... life is just too short!
I actually get more fun out of a quick blast on MAME or Frodo or Spectacle, or Robotron on GBA, or 30 minutes of Crazy Taxi on DC, than any of the so-called megagames of the moment. I have no interest in committing 70 hours of my life to some game (which I know is going to frustrate me with the die/retry trial-and-error loop that designers still think is *soooooo* clever) when there are other things I could be doing.
Not even Miyamoto is infallible - I couldn't be arsed to play through to the end of Ocarina Of Time, simply because I got caught in a die/retry loop and decided I couldn't face playing through the same section yet *again* just to reach the next checkpoint.
The idea of the 'short, sharp shock' seems to have all but disappeared from modern designers. But right now, those are the only kind of games that I have the time (and patience) to play. I've seen everything already - there hasn't been a new gaming genre for years, and nobody seems to even be bothering with new twists on what's already been done. (After three years on an N64 mag, I'd rather eat my own toenails than play another 3D platformer with a cartoony hero. Oh look, the ice level! The volcano level! The minecarts! The jungle! The haunted house! FUCK RIGHT OFF AND DIE, YOU UNIMAGINATIVE SHITEHAWKS!)
The only problem is, nobody's developing games that are designed for a quick 10-15 minute blast, because the focus groups want FMV and level bosses. I couldn't care less about FMV if the game's playable, and I *hate* level bosses, so that's why the big, bland game companies that thankfully I don't have to deal with any more aren't getting any of my money...
UK cable unlimited broadband (128K) via NTL - £15 a month, compared to £10 pm for 56K dial-up. Not the fastest around, but since I'm not spending 24 hours a day downloading movies, I can live with it!
Just another one of those things they did in the 19th Century to set themselves apart from Britain, like taking the 'u' out of words like 'colour' and holding the fork in the right hand, I guess...
Two and three key combo's improve efficiency, not hinder it. You'd love the old ZX Spectrum keyboard, then. Only 40 keys, but each had five functions!
Yeah, this is the system that even *Londoners* don't understand and haven't been fully informed about the payment methods (at least according to my family down there, including one High Court barrister), and that *nobody* outside London - even visitors - has a chance of understanding or planning for in advance. If you're from Newcastle and happen to be passing in the general vicinity of London to visit relatives when you get caught by a camera, bang, you're nailed - and because you know nothing about how it works, the first you know about it is when a fine for far more than the actual charge arrives at your home a week or so later. Yes, an entirely fair system...
Huh. When someone fits a PC into a Game Boy, *then* I'll be impressed!
If this 'dark energy' is acting *against* gravity, then can we call it *anti*gravity? If so, I'd like to be first in line to put a deposit down on a flying car...
Is this the state we're in now, where even the natural environment has to turn a profit to survive?
BTW, I've been to Skywalker Ranch. It's *massive*, genuinely a case of "everything you see, I own" for the tubby beardo. Now, what tax breaks has Lucas been offered to move ILM et all to the Presidio rather than onto his own property?