Even this long after my 4-year tenure at art college, the word “installation” still makes me want to vomit. However, these fantastic images by Esther Stocker caught my eye because of their resemblence to the many test maps we’ll create in the course of trying out various gameplay features in game development.

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A kid and a giant bird dog… sheer genius.

It looks like the iPhone is now officially a gaming machine, with the release of Rolando – the first game to be neither an overly-sensitive console knock-off or one of the throngs of amateur offerings.

As much as I appreciate their balls though, I’m still unsure as to whether or not the development team can or should be sued for COMPLETELY AND SHAMELESSLY ripping off both the gameplay and visual style of Loco Roco. At least they improved upon their source material, and the Mr Scruff soundtrack doesn’t hurt either.

In the combined absence of a working XBOX360 and an unreasonably harsh flu knocking me on my ass for a whole week, I’ve been going Old Skool lately with some PS2 and Wii action. Thankfully, I simultaneously ran out of contact lenses so the games didn’t look as bad as they could have so an admitted graphics-whore such as myself was able to muscle through God of War for the first time, Shadow of The Colossus again (that never gets old, or ugly for that fact) and now Mario Kart on the Wii.

Now, Nintendo is second only to EA for peddling the same franchises year on year with only minor tweaks and updates, and Mario Kart Wii is no exception – but once again, (and I’ve been playing this same game since high school), it’s an absolute blast – especially in team mode (co-op). What impressed me most though, and therefore resulting in this post, was the online experience – my first with Nintendo.

Being used to XBOX Live’s often unsavoury company of middle-American cowboy attitudes further shielded by online anonymity, as well as the downright embarrassing experience of being a grown man playing with children, it was refreshing to simply play a game against complete strangers that could not be interacted with in the slightest outside of the actions presented in gameplay – ie. throwing shells etc. I used to hate the idea of Friend Codes, (Nintendo’s enforcement of only being able to choose online opponents you already know in real life), but when I come to think of it, I rarely play against folks outside private matches on Live due to the aforementioned issues.

Every race, I am shown the geographic loaction of each participant on a spinning globe, (and the matches are truly international based on when you jump online), with only their smiling avatar and name to distinguish them. No headsets. No trash-talking. No ChildKilla69 or Assr8p firing bigoted insults with every other headshot- just a clean, simple race to the finish with friendly folks sporting names like Bill, Jake, Canadagirl and WingMario. I fantasize that, unlike the petty XBOX crowd, I was playing against similar young professionals as myself. Doctors and lawyers, designers and architects all kicking back in their loft appartments after a hard day’s work – donning the Nintendo avatars of which we all share a particular nostalgia, or their own personalised yet similarly cute Miis.

Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Perhaps the best advert for any product ever. Note the convincing stunt-work from poor bastard Vega…

via Kotaku

The latest edition of HDRI Magazine has a front-page article on an interview with Shareef Shanawany, Visual Effects Lead on Mass Effect. There are some details on the post-processes that really defined the look of the game, as well as the fantastic work employed for the biotics using the crust system.

I’ve always thought Mass retained something of the same look as all the other games rendered in the Unreal 3 Engine, but perhaps we did manage to put our own stamp on it with little tricks like the grain filter and custom depth-of-field, (the DOF in the image above was Unreal 3’s default at the time). And if I wouldn’t love to make a game locked at 24fps with motion blur.

As far as I’m aware, this is the first time they’ve run a cover story on videogame VFX, which is usually the territory of film and television only. Definitely a great step forward and some great recognition for the excellent work done by Shareef and the rest of the VFX team, even if they did kill the framerate throughout (and to a degree, post) production ;-)

I recently bought Forza Motorsport 2, enticed mostly by the car customisation editor allowing players to deeply personalise their vehicles before taking them online and racing against others, giving them a real sense of ownership of their unique vehicle. It’s amazing how much fun can be had simply winning new cars then painting them and adding racing stripes, decals and text. Even more fun is taking your worst prize cars, painting them beige, adding expletives on the hood then sending them to your friends via the “gift cars” option.

Anyway, I wanted to write about this to draw attention to the amazingly comprehensive character-creation editor included with the upcoming APB debuted at GDC, (the animation-related notes of which I’ll be uploading as soon as I get the time), and created by my old buddies at Realtime Worlds back in Scotland. Check out the decal editor below, which can be applied not only to vehicles but clothes and tatoos too. While I love playing with customisation editors in other people’s games, it’s a real bitch to support in your own from an animation standpoint. One of these days I’ll have to work on a simple game that simply requires specific animations for specific, un-evolving characters. Chance would be a fine thing.

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Fellow Eidos team members Thierry and Sebastien (BARONTiERi and Reinart respectively of STEAMBOT Studios) have just released their first Gnomon instructional art DVDs. Not animation, but Character Design and Matte Painting.

Go buy them and laugh at their funny French accents.

Recently Watchdog, (a UK consumer complaint show), ran an article on DS Brain Training / Brain Age supposedly discriminating against accents – especially those of Northern England and Scotland. As silly as this sounds, I actually found it to be entirely true when playing despite commanding a relatively well-spoken Scots tongue myself, though was impressed enough that the voice-recognition worked as well as it did. Nintendo were even thoughtful enough to allow the omission of the voice-recognition element from the Brain Age test.

The thing they don’t mention in the segment, however, is the blatant discrimination against a particular way of writing the number 4. In order to avoid being labeled with the mental age of a seventy year-old I had to relearn something that’s come naturally since childhood, with a numerical brainwashing so thorough I’ve never been able to go back to the old way since.