Test post of Ping.fm widget…

Pardon the intrusion, I’m a test post. =D

My goodness. I don’t write in this as I promised I should. All my best laid plans have vanished in a fine burst of steam. I want to stake claim as being a writer, yet compared to the established I feel no more than a pretender. Though a good one, but still a pretender — the I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter of the writing community.

I wanna blame the word processor interface for my lack of productivity . . . yes, let’s blame that.

Treepad, Notepad, Wordpad, Word Perfect, Word, Rough Draft, DarkRoom, the list goes on like a serial lover. Each one has its merits and feel, but never quite has that feeling of versatility and simplicity. Still the monolith of technology can’t replace the raw passionate feeling of pen on paper.

Now if only pen and paper came built with an intergrated spellchecker then I’d be set . . .

I ride the bus. That’s no secret.

But secretly taking pictures of people on the bus is a secret.

About two years ago I had a car; and in a moment of brilliance Sarah thought to call it Nakita. And while Nakita got me around the south county’s delta, Mt. Burling-Wolley, it was a constant drain on my wallet; the radiator leaked into the passenger side, there was never any gas in it, and the alternator never worked right. When it finally broke down a hillside I started walking and never looked back.

So that’s was the story of Nakita. Since then I’ve got a handle on our local bus system or I get around by bike –currently nameless.

I’ve been eager to put my camera phone to good use, but the pictures are small and poor quality and can’t compare to an honest to goodness camera. Then one day I discovered it had multi-shot capabilities. I couldn’t imagine how to put it to good use and I took these haphazardly captured photos of the unsuspecting passengers. Then it occurred to me to throw them into Adobe and, presto, a gif animation.

(Camera Phone + Voyeurism)(Adobe)

I’ll definitely want to experiment more with this formula.

Posted a video product review on Expotv. I haven’t published a video in months so it was kinda odd, especially one that was so site specific.

To give a little bit of insight, I intended the video to be a parody of the poor quality user reviews on the site. As soon as the camera comes on the people look as though they’ve instantly forgotten what their l product is, what it does, and why they bothered making a video to purporting its qualities. They’re just plain painful to watch and that’s what I tried to communicate (or at least hoping I did).

It took three takes and the product I ended up describing is without a doubt absurd.

AIR!?

In individual snack size pouches?!

For when you’re on the go!?

And they’re sugar free!?

Ludicrous!

The Fill-Air bags are in fact used for cushioning product during shipping. When I saw these for the first time I thought what a ridiculous item it was; that there was a company somewhere in the world manufacturing and making money from bags filled with air.

Like any astounded individual I kept one.

Who knows? Perhaps we’ll have destroyed the quality of our air to such a degree that products like Fill-Air bags will be as common place as bottled water, which to a certain degree, is equally ridiculous.

I happen to be one of those people who use savestates when playing on an emulator. I abused that user friendly save-anywhere feature to the fullest extent I could take it.

But by doing so, am I cheating?

I owned a copy of Vegas Stakes for Gameboy and as soon as I made it to the High Roller’s table I exploited the one trick practically everyone knows: Reloading. I’d bet everything on a blackjack hand and if I lost I’d reload the last save and do it again. Within a few minutes my 100,000 turned into 10 million, winning the game. Exploiting the reload has been undeniably common since the battery backup. The savestate function just makes it that much more easier to execute.

If the feature is there within the game environment it’s there to be used, for example the screen warp glitch in Link’s Awakening or the duplication trick in FFVII, Oblivion, or Pokemon. I can’t imagine anyone not using them (unless they have a perchance for  masochism). The glitch in the designer’s eye becomes a tool in the player’s arsenal. Exploiting loopholes is in our blood even if it means we’re robbing ourselves of that satisfaction we get from relying on our skills and talent to finish a game.

But savestates are not a feature within the game-design. It’s part of the emulator’s design, an external feature like a Game Genie or Action Replay or whichever enhancer you’re using. Savestates are a convenience. It compliments us. We no longer have time to toil over challenging levels and troublesome final boss. We want to the option of putting down a game and picking up right where we left off at any time. Savestates give us that ability and under the right conditions it can provide us with that extra advantage over any difficult challenge.

I imagine the abuse of savestates like time travelling. If something goes wrong I can just go back in time until I get it right.  I wasn’t playing a real copy of the game, so I convinced myself that the normal rules of gameplay shouldn’t apply and I used every means at my disposal. All without remorse.

Every journey I took I can recall like a fresh breath, but I have no memories of the victories.

I’m watching the game-play video of Tales of Vesperia and, while I feel that their in-game cut scenes are admirable, the acting cues are pretty stiff. For example one actor will preform during his cue, but as he’s done all his energy just stops in mid-motion once the next actor starts her cue. It all makes the scene feel very stop-and-go, as if there’s only one puppeteer controlling an entire cast.

Over all the in-game cut-scenes of the most resent Tales series are quality work; both excellent voice acting and motion capture for a Anime themed game, but if the action cues were tighter and more fluid it would be a stellar achievement for games in general.

That reminds me, I saw the intro cinema for Bad Company a while ago and thought this same thing. The motion capture was great, the voice acting delivered, and graphics and lighting excellent. And despite all this the cues were all stop and go. For example:

*The private makes a wise-ass comment to his Sargent*

*The Sargent yells at his insubordinate private*

In between those two lines is about a two to three second gap which is masked by idle action, like a breathing animation or shifting weight. That gap sucks the intensity right out of the moment despite the actors energy.  That gap needs to be shortened in order to address this stop-go acting that I see plaguing games. Games want to be movies, it’s a fact, and that translates to proper pacing.

It can mean anything.

“Gather your horses! For fame and fortune! Tally-ho!”

*Into the night we ride*

*The cliff was quite steep and the fall was very gentle*

*I would rather not recall the end*