The Lets Play Archive

(from the home page of The Lets Play Archive):

A truly devoted display of games

If you're looking for game playthroughs online, you've just found the most compelling and entertaining collection. This is why we at PokerListings have decided to give our full support and thanks to everyone behind the Let's Play Archive. As we do to with all the poker online games, the Let's Play Archive focus on giving you the full experience of the games in an informative and entertaining manner. Just look at some of the great playthroughs below and you'll see what we mean. Awesome job guys!

At first glance, the whole point of The Lets Play Archive seems kind of ridiculous. People play some video games, record their entire gameplay experience via video camera or screen shots (with written or audio commentary) and then upload the files to this site, for people to come by and experience the game vicariously through them.

It's an unbelievably geeky thing to do, but that's okay, because I'm pretty damn geeky.

Gamers can drop by the site and use the playthroughs as either a guide for parts they're having trouble with, or just watch them play it. It sounds lame, but, if you're a gamer, you get it. I've just perused a few of these and the commentary they provide isn't annoying or intrusive. It's like what you and your friends would do if you were taking turns playing a single player game. You crack jokes and figure out the puzzles together. It can be a very communal experience and this site offers a little of that for you, as a spectator.

Another reason this is something to geek out over is if there is a game that you've always been curious about, but haven't had the means to play, you can see what it was like on this site.

For me, there is one game I hear great things about but probably won't ever get to experience for myself. That game is System Shock 2.

System Shock 2 and its predecessor are pretty widely known as two of the early masterpieces of computer gaming, but both of them were released at incredibly unfortunate times alongside two games that overshadowed them in popularity (Doom and Half-Life, respectively), so they got lost in the shuffle. This means that there haven't been any efforts to port the System Shock games to current hardware, which also means that unless you still have your old mid to late 90's PC, you won't be playing either of them. The creators, however, recently expanded upon the gameplay elements of System Shock with the modern classic, Bioshock, which I have played and can absolutely vouch for its reputation. So, in a way, System Shock has survived.

But I'm already planning on setting a side a couple hours one day to see the abridged version of this game. Thank you, Lets Play Archive. You crazy bunch of uber-geeks, you.

Cooking for Engineers

I consider myself a creative person, but when it comes to cooking, I require strict directions, exact quantities of time to heat or cool and exact amounts to add or not add. Without them, I become lost, confused, unsure of everything and completely useless in the kitchen. Because of this handicap of mine, along with my general impatience when it comes to preparing food (let's just eat it, already!) I never cook. At all, really. This is something about me that my girlfriend, Lori, is very keen on changing very soon.

Well, she may not have to wait long, because I have found the perfect site for someone like me. I can't believe I found it and I'm incredibly grateful that it exists. It's called Cooking for Engineers.

I'm sifting through their recipes now and I'm excited. This is so freakin' perfect. I just found a recipe for a Chocolate Pecan Pie that I may be able to cook for Lori this Christmas. Oh, she'll swoon, for sure.

Thank you, internet. Why I never asked you for cooking advice all this time, I'll never know. But I hope this is the beginning of a long and fruitful arrangement.

Assignment: The Prestige Poster, Vintage Redesign

A while back, in one of my Poster Trends articles, I mentioned that I thought the poster campaign for The Prestige really missed a great opportunity to pay homage to that late 19th Century style of magic posters. And instead came up with this:

And these, which are definitely more creative, and at least hint at the setting of the film more overtly:

Well, I ended up actually putting my money where my mouth is, so to speak, by making the posters myself using Photoshop and Illustrator. This was for a class, at first. We had to propose a redesign of something we thought was poorly designed. Initially, our final project was to actually create that redesign, so I got started on it early. But then our teacher announced that the final project assignment had been changed, so this ended up being extra credit.

I learned a hell of a lot, putting this thing together. I'll go ahead and document some of the steps that went into making it.

First, I took two of those posters from above and used the figures of the Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale as reference and isolated their figures in Photoshop.

I discovered that the process is like the digital equivalent of chiseling a form into stone. I used the pen tool to create jagged shapes of different colors, then used the airbrush eraser to whittle the shapes down and fade into each other so the face looked soft and rounded.

Once I had his and Hugh Jackman's figures ready to go, I started laying everything out.





When I started making the characters for those bottom circles, I used the same technique as I had for Jackman and Bale, but tried to make it less realistic and more like the kind of sketch you would see on those old magicians posters. I didn't quite pull off the authenticity, but it definitely turned out more cartoonish than the Jackman and Bale's faces.

So I tried to keep that in mind so the style would be the same with each of the four heads. But when I got to working on Scarlett Johannsen, I got a bit carried away:

I'm really proud of how it was starting to turn out, but it's definitely too realistic for this poster. However, it's very cool to know that I'm capable of that kind of trace work at this point. When the right project comes along, whether in school or not, I now know I can pull that off. For this poster, though, this was more appropriate:

So, the final layouts went like this:





The sepia-toned version is just for kicks. I don't particularly like it without the color. Below is the latest draft of the poster. I tried to make it look old, gave it some texture and wrinkles.

I'm reasonably happy with it. It was a learning experience, first and foremost. I might tinker with a few details, but overall, I'd be happy to frame it and hang it on my wall.

In related news, I want to do another one! Here's the rough layout, so far:

The Criterion Collection of Videogames

If you're a DVD buff, like me, you're well aware of the Criterion Collection.

The Criterion Collection's mission, in their words, is to gather "the greatest films from around the world and [publish] them in editions that offer the highest technical quality and award-winning, original supplements," and also, to publish "the defining moments of cinema for a wider and wider audience."

A major part of their operation is pulled off with their cover art. The Criterion crew is lauded for their DVD box art design and for very good reason. 99% of the time, their covers are stunning, minimalist design pieces that do more justice to portraying the essence of the films than just about any other publisher around. Here are some great examples:








The key is that they always seem to focus on either something really specific that only people who've seen the movie could fully comprehend, or, they create some sort of visual metaphor of the movie's theme. To me, this is what every poster/cover of a major work should be doing, but, as we well know, that can't always be the case.

Now with that in mind, a friend recently tipped me off to this web page, where someone has posted a collection of alternate designs for classic video games, inspired by the design styles seen in the Criterion Collection. It's called the GAF Collection (all the designs are made by members of Gaming Age Forums, one of the most popular videogame message boards around). I'll post a few of my favorites, alongside the original box art.











I'll stop there. I could post so, so many more.

Google Building Maker

Google Building Maker

Pretty smart of them to outsource such a massive project to a world of users. I'll admit, I'm curious to try it out. I want my apartment building on there. My parents' house. My friends' houses, my old schools, all kinds of stuff.

I think that feeling I have is what they're counting on. Our inherent vanity. To see pieces of ourselves up in places that the whole world can access.

But then, also, there's our curiosity of the world. That's part of the fun of Google Earth to begin with. To spy on places we'll probably never see firsthand.

I wonder if the Great Pyramids have been Google Built?

Discovering the Demoscene

You know those computer graphics demos, where some trippy computer generated imagery animates to music? Well, apparently there's an entire underground scene of programmers and CG artists that get together in conventions, and contests and parties and just make demos.

www.Demoscene.tv

It's all pretty obscure and hard to appreciate if you're not a demohead and have a pretty extensive knowledge of the challenges that come with coding the demos. But it's fascinating, nonetheless. Especially seeing how many demos are made using really old technology.

According to the site, the demoscene started when programmers would encode their own imagery on the Commodore 64, or hack existing animations and images. That, along with Atari software, still gets heavy usage from these guys. Apparently, it's the challenge of the limitations. Seeing how much you can pull off with ancient tools, or, with the newer stuff, seeing how far you can push the limits.

The key is real-time computing. Now, for a long time, I've been under the impression that I knew what that word meant, but here's the definition (according to Answers.com):

(computer science) A system in which the computer is required to perform its tasks within the time restraints of some process or simultaneously with the system it is assisting.

and from Wikipedia.org:

In computer science, real-time computing (RTC), or "reactive computing", is the study of hardware and software systems that are subject to a "real-time constraint"—i.e., operational deadlines from event to system response. By contrast, a non-real-time system is one for which there is no deadline, even if fast response or high performance is desired or preferred. The needs of real-time software are often addressed in the context of real-time operating systems, and synchronous programming languages, which provide frameworks on which to build real-time application software.

This is getting harder to understand. The narrator in the intro to Demoscene.tv says that real-time graphics are different from the norm in that the things you usually see (say, in a Pixar film) are all pre-rendered graphics. This makes the concept easier to understand, and now I'm slapping my forehead. Of course. This analogy covers it:

Pre-rendered : Animated Movies :: Real-time : Videogames

D'uh. Okay, jeez. I get it.

Maybe.

So, let's see if I've got it: the videos you see on Demoscene.tv are all reacting to coding that sets a specific set of rules for various outcomes. Unlike a CG-animated film, in which things are molded to happen within a framework of pre-set rules, then played out and essentially recorded (read: pre-rendered), a demo, in the sense of the Demoscene, plays out "live," as the coding works with the hardware to render what you see as it's interpreted. REAL-TIME.

I think I got it.


So, I've watched a handful of them. Like I said, they're hard to appreciate without a full understanding of the challenges the creators faced, but even with the very basic (and probably still inadequately informed) understanding I have now, this one is my favorite:

Scroll-down comics

This is pretty funny. Anyone who's ever seen any zombie movie will get it.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/zombie_how

Content aside, and maybe I'm just sheltered when it comes to web comics, but it never occurred to me to set up a comic that way. To just make it one long scroll, utilizes the most basic of web browser elements (the scroll bar) to great effect. There are little things you can do with timing and pacing in a comic laid out vertically for the entire narrative.

So could this work as well elsewhere? As in, not on a computer?

I don't think so. I mean, humans used to be all about scrolls, but then we realized how much easier it was to make much smaller pieces of paper, bind them, and turn them over with our hands. A scroll is big and awkward (obviously, I can say this because I remember the golden days of the scroll, firsthand).

With the computer, however, we can bring the scroll back in all its vertical glory, as evidenced in this little web comic. Hmm, I think I'll add another side project to my never ending, will-probably-never-finish list of side projects.