Four of my resolutions for this year:

1. Become a shit hot drummer (I recently splashed out on a Roland HD1 electronic drumkit, yay)
2. Take more photos (better, more ambitious ones – particularly of people)
3. Blog more often (and more impulsively, about a wider range of topics)
4. Become fluent in Polish (I get free lessons at work – it can and will be done).

There are others, but they’re all secret. Or boring. Or boring secrets.

Have some photos of snowy, snowy Warsaw:

Another two months since my last post. I’m shit. Sometimes I think about how rubbish I am at this regular blogging lark, and I cry like the one on the right:

(Merry Christmas, arseclowns.)

Over two months since my last post. Shame on me.

I have an excuse though, which is that I’ve had a lot going on. It’s always a rubbish excuse, but this time it’s actually true, I swear.

Midway is no more, our studio closed down, I became unemployed, I lived with my brother in Northampton for a while, signed on at the job centre for the first time, interviewed at a few places then ended up landing a job at People Can Fly / Epic Poland… so I’ve left the UK and I live in Warsaw now.

It’s quite bonkers, when I think back to what I assumed could be my next step three months ago. I’m learning Polish, going out a lot and generally having a jolly good time. Which is good.

More on Warsaw later, because there’s a lot to it and I’m lazy. For now, all I have for you is love, rainbows and photography.

Here’s the photography:

           
(Click the pics for bigger versions on Flickr)

Describing something as “sweet” is a very rare thing for someone like me. It’s a very feminine thing to say, you see, whereas I am an extremely manly man. It’s more my kind of thing to be outside fixing my pickup truck, or in my garage sawing some blocks of wood in half, or sat in front of a TV, scratching myself and grunting.

But even I – an extremely manly man – have to admit that QRP is a terribly sweet little game. A retrospective, autobiographical game, from an indie developer who evidently spent his schoolboy years pining after girls who were, like pretty little fluttering butterflies, always a little out of reach.

The game is one song long – that song being “Close to You” by the Carpenters, appropriately recreated in the cute and slightly sleazy sound of MIDI. To describe exactly what you do during that time would spoil the experience somewhat – but quite brilliantly, however you choose to play QRP, you will in some way come to understand and re-live what this person went through as a teenage boy at school.

It’s quite a funny experience, and also slightly sad. Play it:
www.wyrdysm.com/qrpgame.php

A couple of months ago I posted about a bunch of nice skate photos I took at Exhibition Park here in Newcastle. I said that I’d like to do something similar again sometime, but a little more ambitious, which I’m glad to have gotten round to last weekend.

This time it’s a little skate video (well, if you can discount the fact that there are barely any skateboarders), which you can watch on youtube by clicking on any of these thumbnails below, or the url:

   
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acW6N2ZHQ7A)

Again, I’m pretty pleased with this – this time particularly because of what I used to make the video with. Whereas I should’ve been using a DV camera and some respectable video-editing software like Premiere / Final Cut, I managed to make do with my Canon Powershot S5 IS (a photo camera which happens to do 30fps, 640×480 video), and Windows (bloody) Movie Maker.

On top of that, I came back from the park feeling pretty underwhelmed with what I’d shot – it didn’t seem as most of it would be up to scratch – but after deciding on the Mr. Oizo track (M-Seq), it all (hopefully) came together surprisingly well during the editing process. Which was nice. It’s been a nice experience doing all the video stuff myself for the first time (shooting, editing, colour correction, cutting the soundtrack together), and I’m happy it turned out to be worth sharing on youtube at all. So hopefully, there will be more video to follow in the future.

(Another thing I’ve always wanted to shoot / make is some kind of music video. We’ll see how it goes – I’ve got bigger fish to fry at the moment…)

A lot of games revolve around challenge, success and failure. They often ask that players invest lots of time in practice, before they can play it well. In some cases, most of that time spent practicing is also spent failing, which can be a problem.

Traditionally, good games deal with this problem by ensuring that whenever the player fails, the game educates them on how to do better next time, so that they feel obliged to keep trying, and confident that they will improve. QWOP on the other hand represents a fairly unique alternative solution, which is to ensure that failing is always funny.

The funny quotient comes from the control system, where instead of simply hammering away at one or two buttons as fast as you can (as you would in say, Track and Field), QWOP asks you to use the Q, W, O and P keys to manually control each of your runner’s thighs and calves, as he lunges wonkily down the track.

It’s as hard and ridiculous as it sounds – to the point where you will occasionally find yourself scoring minus points by falling backwards, and behind the start line. To run as far as five metres can be considered an achievement, and I’m in awe of anyone like this person on youtube, who can make it past the hurdle, and reach the long jump sandpit at the end of the course.

QWOP’s only flaw may be that the controls for the thighs seem to be the wrong way round. For some reason Q controls the right thigh, while W controls the left, whereas I’d have expected it to be the other way round – but everything else about it is brilliant. Even the title makes me wee with joy.

Qwop. QWOP! Qwooooooooop.

It’s a flash game, it’s quite beautiful, and you can play it here:
www.foddy.net/Athletics.html.

Watching this delicious skate video (directed by Spike Jonze and Ty Evans) recently inspired me to head out and take some skate photos.

There was an idea that I’d been meaning to rip off for some time, from an old PS1 skating game called Thrasher: Skate and Destroy. The loading screens showed multiple, rapidly-taken photos of a single trick, from the same angle, composed into a single image. I remembered it looking cool, and realised that I knew how to do it myself, and had everything I needed (a camera that can take fairly fast continuous shots, a tripod and Photoshop). So I had no excuse not to.

I went to the local skatepark (Exhibition Park, Newcastle) the next weekend, and had a go. The weather was surprisingly great for it, and I’m chuffed with the results:

         
(Click the pics for bigger versions on Flickr)

At first I wasn’t sure how it was going to go, as I literally just turned up, watched people do their stuff for a while, then set my camera up and started taking photos. I could’ve ended up being murdered by a horde of hooded teenagers with hard things in their hands, but thankfully they weren’t the type.

After people cottoned on, a particular group of them were really up for getting involved and doing tricks for the camera, and soon enough we were chatting about things and setting up decent shots and so on. Along with the post-processing / Photoshopping session that ensued once I was back home, it was a really satisfying day’s “work”. Would like to do something similar but more ambitious sometime.

Some photos to fill the void – first from the Chinese New Year celebrations on Stowell Street (Newcastle Chinatown):

And then a few from the closing party of the Maker Faire last weekend, full of 8-bit, circuit-bent chiptuney goodness:

    
(Goto80 and Syphus)

(Slightly grumpy-looking DJ, who made up for it by playing some Kraftwerk)

Back in the day (err… 2006) on her old radio show, Annie Mac used to play a listener’s 5-minute mini-mix at the end – a lighthearted mashup track made from as many different tunes as possible, played over, under and after each other in interesting and amusing ways.

I made one a while back, and sent it in but it never got played. Boooo.
You can download it here: Anniemix Six.mp3 [4.2 mb]

And here’s the playlist:

01. Wham – Last Christmas
02. New Order – Blue Monday
03. Grand Popo Football Club – Men Are Not Nice Guys
04. Chemical Brothers – Chemical Beats
05. Junior Senior – Move Your Feet
06. Prefuse 73 – Cliche Intro
07. Dj Gregory – Don’t Know Malendro
08. Lou Reed – Walk on the Wild Side
09. Spandau Ballet – True
10. Felix da Housecat and Miss Kittin – Silver Screen Shower Scene
11. Dj Shadow – The Right Thing
12. Luke Vibert – Realistique
13. Aphex Twin – Come to Daddy [Little Lord Faulteroy Mix]
14. The Chemical Brothers – Star Guitar
15. The Chemical Brothers – It Began in Afrika
16. The Beegees – You Should Be Dancing
17. Unkle – Guns Blazing
18. Luke Vibert – I Love Acid
19. The Chemical Brothers [Feat. Beth Orton] – The State We’re In
20. Orbital – Belfast
21. Sigur Ros – Svefn G Englar
22. Underworld – Jumbo [Future Shock Worlds Apart vox]

For a while now, I’ve had a little dichotomy of ideas in my head, related to the general perception of videogames, that I’ve been meaning to explain in a neat little diagram. This is it:

(Some of these distinctions are a little fuzzy and crap – for example, Technology can be considered a subset of Culture, as opposed to an opposite – but hopefully the overall point I’m trying to make still stands.)

The left and right ends of the scale represent different schools of thought on what games are about. Note that it’s a scale, and therefore not binary.

The left side views games as products – technological products that can be reviewed quantitively and objectively, stating whether or not they are value for money and worth buying, according to how well they perform their function (the general consensus being that games exist solely to be “fun”).

Conversely, the right side views games as (potential) art – cultural experiences that can only be critiqued, based on the effective expression of ideas. The function and experience of games, from this perspective, is considered very subjective, and the merit of the work can therefore only be (adequately) described qualitatively.

I’m not condemning either perspective – I think different games (and consequently, our ideas about them) should cover the whole spectrum – but my own taste and interest in games leans towards the poncy stuff on the right. I don’t really care that much about games as demos of fancy (physics, graphics, destruction, animation) technology; I don’t think games should be summed with up by an X out of 10 review score; and I don’t think all games exist to perform a single function. I also don’t think the length of a game, or how much it costs to buy, is at all relevent to how “good” or interesting it is.

I think the common perception, however – among many gamers, journalists and developers alike – either leans strongly towards the left side, or sits unknowingly muddled between the two. I frequently wish the right side was a little more recognised in games than it currently is. It kind of riles me up a little sometimes. Sometimes it makes me growl.

*Growl*