Free Candy For Everyone

I was catching up on my Joystiq reading tonight, and saw a great video demo of Spore. The first half is the demo we all waited in line at E3 to see. Will Wright is showing off the game, though he’s a bit subdued. He must be exhausted. But the content is there, and it’s pretty much what I saw. But then he calls up Robin Williams to come play with the creature tool.

Robin Williams is pretty funny no matter what he does. The whole video is on the Joystiq site, and if you’re curious about Spore it’s worth watching. But if you just want to see Robin Williams in action, here you go!

Whoa. Alice over at Wonderland just threw this image into a post. In another example of other things I love creeping into the game world (um. Though I guess Stranglehold should be a bigger example of this, but there’s something about the face of a famous person. The real actual face, I mean!), check out this pic!

The other day I finished a pretty good book, His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik. It’s a fantasy book, but it’s set in England during the Napoleonic wars. It’s one of those alternate history-type books, and it’s really quite well done. As I finished it up, I flipped through the final pages until I got to the author’s bio on the back cover.

You can find the bio at the book’s official website, but I copied some interesting bits here.

Naomi Novik [...] studied English Literature at Brown University and did graduate work in Computer Science at Columbia University before leaving to participate in the design and development of the computer game Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide. Over the course of a brief winter sojourn working on the game in Edmonton, Canada (accompanied by a truly alarming coat that now lives brooding in the depths of her closet), she realized she preferred the writing to the programming, and, on returning to New York, decided to try her hand at novels. His Majesty’s Dragon is her first.

She started out with an English degree, continued to Computer Science, went and worked in the game industry, and then went back and wrote a book. Several books, in fact! The full credits for the title she worked on, which was an expansion pack for Neverwinter Nights can be found on MobyGames. She’s listed as a designer and the technical lead! That’s pretty nifty. Amusingly, as I was looking at the credits, the name of one of the other designers jumped out because he used to work at Mad Doc with me. Small industry.

Anyway, I just found this intersection of worlds to be interesting. I interact with game people all the time, but I love to read in my spare time. I don’t really interact with writers. Well. I think there might be a few people who write when they can at my company. But they’re not professional writers. And they’re probably all designers. I don’t think of programmers as creative writers. We have our own brand of creativity, but it’s not the same as crafting a world, a people, a history, characters and a story. So I am impressed at someone who has succeeded in some fashion in two very different industries. Very cool.

Oh, and if you’re curious about what I’m reading, check out my sidebar. I added a “Now Reading” plugin that I try to keep updated. You’ll find I read way to much fantasy. I always mean to read more good-for-me books. But that doesn’t always happen. Oh well!

I waited in one more line that last day at E3, for a demo of John Woo’s Stranglehold. If you don’t know who John Woo is, go to your video store and see you some movies, for goodness sakes! John Woo is a movie director, known for some iconic fight scene elements. Doves. Lots of doves. Stranglehold is direct sequel to his 1992 movie Hard-Boiled (and I shouldn’t be so snarky, because I still haven’t seen it! But when I’m not being recognized for my cynicism, my snarkasm is my signature role), and the movie stars Chow Yun-Fat, as does the game (where “stars” means that they did a lot of motion capture with him, and he’s playing the main character).

I like a good action movie with the best of them. They’re great fun. The idea of trying to bring that action film sensibility to a video game is very neat. The demo involved showing fight scenes from a lot of Woo movies, then they actually demo’d the game, hands on through a fight scene, then some snazzy canned PR footage.

My friends walked out totally amazed and impressed. Personally, I thought the concept was very cool, but I need to see the gameplay mechanic to really see how much of what they showed was on rails and how much was really player choice. You could run around and shoot anything, jump on a cart and shoot off across the room, firing as you go. As you played, you built up a cinematic meter, which you could fire off for a special action shot of iconic Woo camera angles and mass carnage (though I don’t think it was canned, which is the cool part. It seemed to be actually just controlling things in the current scene), complete with doves. Go doves!

But my final word on the matter is that the visuals weren’t up to snuff. It’s for next-gen platforms, and it just did not look as good as a lot of the other titles I saw on the floor. The people looked vaguely mannequin-like, a bit plastic and stiff. The whole game looked like a cool concept, but they need to pull the look way up. It has bit marquee names attached to it, they have to be able to make it worth those names!

My pick of the show is definitely Spore. It’s funny. While I’m at E3, everything is a blur. I just take it all in, and now that I’m home, I can start to make sense of everything. But Spore was cool as soon as I saw it. Friday was my day-of-waiting. I’d seen everything else, so decided to wait on all the lines for things on Friday. After the Wii, Spore was my next stop. After about 45 minutes of waiting, I got in. To my surprise, Will Wright was driving the demo.

I’ve been very interested in this game since I first heard news of it. I like sandbox playgrounds. And this is the ultimate sandbox, where you can craft whatever interests you most. It’s like a mix of SimLife, SimEarth, SimCity and Master of Orion, with a dash of the Sims thrown in for good measure. Whoa-ness, I say.

First up, he demonstrated the creature game. He built a creature from scratch, and it looked awesome. He tossed on a beak, and hit a button to get it to make noises, and it animated and squawked in a totally appropriate sounding way. Then he hit some test buttons and it played reaction emotions, looking tired or sad or excited, which is pretty impressive for a strange shaped beastie. Here’s a bad shot of the creature creation in action.

My favorite quote from this part of the demo was (approximately) “Our goal was to have anyone able to come in and create in 5 minutes what it takes a Pixar artist 5 weeks to build.”

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