Installing Might and Magic X introduced me to the wonders of Uplay, via Steam. What a stupid idea that is. The whole DRM issue annoyed me so I responded in a typically British manner, by putting some desktop wallpapers together.
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Snarky IP wallpapers
Enmusicing Dead Rising 3
Gamasutra have a piece from Oleksa Lozowchuk, music director for Capcom, wherein he gives a breakdown of what went in to creating the soundtrack for Dead Rising 3.
To further support the tension of survival horror, we built a simple yet effective adaptive music system to feedback zombie threat to the user throughout the world … That being said, constant tension can wear down the user, so we provided some ear candy and reprieve from the chaotic wall of sound via diegetic music (world based) scattered throughout all 4 districts. As a player enters a location with memorable source music, the adaptive threat score recedes, temporarily giving the user a sense of relief from the hordes of zombies.
Definitely worth a read. Also, it’s nice to encounter a fellow comma-abuser once in a while.
Mike Puncekar: Game Illustrations
In case you missed out last time his art did the rounds, here’s a second chance. Mike Puncekar does the most amazing illustrations of game characters, putting his own unique and wonderful spin on them. Go have a browse around.
The Stanley Parable
A friend gave me The Stanley Parable for Christmas and I finally got around to playing it, if playing is the right word. ‘Experiencing’ perhaps. This isn’t a review – even if there weren’t enough written about the game so far I honestly wouldn’t know where to start.
All I’ll say is that The Stanley Parable is everything it’s cracked up to be, good and bad. If you haven’t played it yet, play it. You’ll never play another game the same way again.
Spaaaaaaace Waaaaaar!
Holy mother of starfighters! Oxide have just released a demo/benchmark thing showing a stress test of their new Nitrous Engine. Thousands of ships, tens of thousands of weapons… Just… just watch, OK? It’s impressive for about 20 seconds, and then it goes crazy.
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Nintendo bosses taking pay cuts
In the wake of poor Wii U sales (the beleaguered and under-appreciated console is about to be outsold by the much younger competitors from Sony and Microsoft) and the attendant drop in share price, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata will be temporarily halving his pay while other members of the board are taking pay cuts of 20-30%.
Nintendo have had hard times before and come back strongly, and I have no doubt they’ll manage it again (especially if they resist calls to get out of the hardware market and start making free-to-play mobile games – ewww). In the meantime though the pay cuts are a gesture not often seen in western companies, especially ones the size of Nintendo. It’s a culture and an ethos that some might do well to emulate. Even if it’s only temporary and will likely make zero difference to their lifestyles, the gesture cannot hep but be appreciated by employees, fans and investors alike.
Facebook on ice: Using Blu-ray for cold storage
Facebook has a lot of data, a frankly mind-boggling amount of data, and vast swathes of it are accessed approximately never. Rather than keep that archive-level data readily at hand on expensive, distributed, replicated content delivery networks Facebook keeps it in cold storage, saving money at the expense of recall speed. The company recently announced plans to replace their existing hard-drive-based cold storage system with a custom Blu-ray archive. 10,000 discs in a seven-foot rack with a capacity of about a petabyte. That’s a lot of photos of cats, parties and babies. However…
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The Sparkis Are Coming!
Excitement! They’re coming! The robot uprising is at hand, and I’m planning on making sure our robot masters know who their friends are.
Game music: The Binding of Isaac
Two Danny Baranowsky albums in a row? Why not? This week, music from the thoroughly disturbing and depressing roguelike The Binding of Isaac.
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