The above is an official tourism video for the city of Hakodate, Japan. Giant squid battling giant robots with local landmarks as collateral damage is nothing short of genius.
According to a survey of 100 aliens, Hakodate is the number one city they would most like to invade.
To see more videos in the series, all equally brilliant, you can hit up the Pink Tentacle link, which offers a breakdown of the back story. You can also find the rest on the official YouTube channel.
A new online gaming service called OnLive was announced this week at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), promising a new way to play video games via digital distribution, but will it undermine the hardware based consoles?
Instead of worrying about keeping that tricked out gaming rig up to spec, or having a big old console sitting under your TV, OnLive actually runs the games on their own servers and streams the video to you through a 1Mb browser plug-in for your computer or a "microconsole" hooked up to your monitor/HDTV. They also have a very Xbox 360-like wireless control to control the games (though I'm guessing that keyboard and mouse support will be there too), and promise a number of online community features, such as being able to watch others play a match without owning the game, their own version of achievements and much more.
Pricing for games will include a combination of subscription and purchase options, which offers a lot of flexibility, with a number of big name game developers already signed on, such as EA, Take Two Interactive, Warner Brothers, THQ and Eidos.
The idea of being free of the hardware hassles of keeping up with the Pwnses is may be liberating, though it may come with a price.
“OnLive is the most powerful game system in the world. No high-end hardware, no upgrades, no endless downloads, no discs, no recalls, no obsolescence,” said Steve Perlman, Founder and CEO of OnLive. “With OnLive, your video game experience is always state-of-the-art.”
According to OnLive's President and CEO Steve Perlman, to get the maximum image quality of 1280 x 720, you'll need about 4 megabits worth of bandwidth, with image quality dynamically scaling back when bandwidth decreases, which would be more than a little annoying when fighting of hordes of the infected in Left 4 Dead. In comparison, a 2+ year old system with a low end Core 2 Duo E6300 (1.86 GHz) and a similarly old Nvidia 7950 can run the same game at 1920 x 120o (the equivalent of 1080p).
Graphics quality isn't the only question raised by the OnLive system.
The bandwidth requirements work out to be over 1.4Gb per hour, which is equal to downloading a full copy of the game in after about 3 hours of play. In comparison, online games takes up much less data, in most cases by a factor greater than 10.
Now you'll be fighting for that bandwidth in much the same way you used to fight for control of the remote, or both suffer the pixelated consequences, even if you're playing a single player game that shouldn't require any bandwidth at all. Imagine your ISP being down, so you can't finish off the final level of Prince Of Persia.
That would be more than a little irritating.
In short, I doubt that Mr. Perlman's goal of unseating console hardware is going to happen. Gamers already used to 1080p or greater gaming experiences are not going to give up hardware for what will be an inferior visual experience that is tied to bandwidth.
It's not the OnLive product, but the dependence on the availability of real broadband from ISPs who are slow to upgrade network services, while enforcing ridiculously low monthly caps.
Don't get me wrong, as OnLive looks like it could be a decent supplement for the 'hardcore' gamer, and may also be an entry point for people looking for something more than a Wii with a lower barrier to entry than a PS3, Xbox 360 or gaming rig. With the video game industry continuing to experience solid growth every year, there's more than enough room for OnLive, without the 'hardware is dead' hyperbole.
This is part of an animation side project I've been working on. The site is finished, and the first couple of animations are in the can, so I thought I'd post the latest here for (what I hope will be) your enjoyment. The website is ashrants.com
For those who are curious, the animation is done in the venerable Lightwave 3D, with an able assist in the lip sync department by a program called Magpie Pro. Magpie makes lip syncing dialogue easy, and can output for just about any 2D or 3D application, from LW and Maya to Adobe Flash.
One can hope. It's been a long time coming, but Sam Raimi is back helming a horror movie about a witch who puts a curse on a loan officer who denies her a mortgage extension. Not a sexy Wiccan witch with parent issues, but a ripped from the pages for the Brothers Grimm wart-bespeckled old hag, complete with an evil eye.
Way to kick it old school, while keeping it topical. Don't be surprised if people start rooting for the witch to win, given the current economic climate. Another point in favour of the witch - Justin Long plays the loan officer's boyfriend (or husband).
One of the great rock and roll hold outs in the digital age has been The Beatles. Rumours of the Fab Four hitting the mp3 stores surface every year like clockwork. Surprisingly, all the speculation has been wrong.
Finally, Harmonix looks to be on track to be the first to get the Fab Four online, as long as you want to play along, that is. September 9th, 2009 is the scheduled release date of an unknown number of Beatles tracks (albums?) for the popular music game Rock Band. Along with the music, there will be new instruments based on the gear the band used.
It's not surprising to see Apple Corps Inc. dipping their toes in the datastream in this manner, for a couple of reasons. First is that by definition, tracks for music games are DRMed by default, which gives them a more controlled environment. Secondly, with the average tune costing somewhere around $2 there's a built in premium that I'm sure the Corps likes.
So if you're a Beatles fans (honestly, I've never been personally), check out their placeholder website, and sign up to notified when more details arrive, if the throngs of screaming teenage girls don't tip you off in advance.
And if anybody ever gets wind of Harmonix doing the same for Pop Will Eat Itself, The Dead Kennedys or Bauhaus, PLEASE let me know.
A new twist on playing Call of Duty: When 13-year-old Evan Spencer wanted to play the ultraviolent video game Call of Duty, his parents gave him the green light, on one condition: He had to follow the Geneva Conventions.
Before he could even play the game, he read through all the Geneva Conventions, and his father quizzed him on them.
