A Couple Reasons Why Cut-Scenes in Games Suck

If you haven’t yet, you should check out Wired’s list of five film-school violations in cut-scenes. There’s some stuff in there that seemed obvious to me but then this last gem is one I didn’t catch when I was playing Mass Effect 2.

Spoilers be in this video.

Don’t Violate the 180-Degree Rule
It’s a simple principle and one of the basic rules of cinematography: Characters should maintain the same spatial relationship no matter how many different angles your camera uses. If one character is on the left and the other is on the right, they should stay that way.

In order to pull this off, filmmakers will picture an imaginary line that bisects the two characters and try to avoid crossing that line with the camera. Though there are quite a few exceptions, cinematographers generally don’t break the rule, for fear of nauseating or confusing their audiences.

Sadly, this rule is violated multiple times in one of the final cut-scenes of Mass Effect 2, Bioware’s excellent sci-fi RPG. Because the camera jumps around from angle to angle with no regard for the 180-degree rule, characters’ heads spin all over the place. It’s jarring and not particularly fun to watch.

Bioware usually crafts its cinematics quite competently, and Mass Effect 2 is packed with great cut-scenes — but cinematography is a complicated art, and its rules exist for a reason.

Link.



September 30th, 2011 by Adam

Subvein Looks Like Fun!

Subvein is a game still in development but it looks like a ton of fun! From the Subvein website:

Subvein is a free multiplayer action game. It has over 20 weapons, a strategic skills system, crazy vehicles and countless user-generated maps. It’s tactical, fast-paced and most importantly, fun! Download and play Subvein now – it takes mere minutes to setup and best of all it’s 100% FREE!

And from the creator of Subvein:

Basically, Subvein is a top-down multiplayer shooter. It was heavily inspired by games like GTA, Counter Strike and Diablo. It has guns and vehicles, all the standard game modes like CTF and deathmatch, and a rather sexy skills system. There are 33 skills to choose from including stuff like Regeneration, Invisibility, Bullet Time and Force Fields. Basically you run around completing objectives and shooting eachother, and as you kill enemies you’ll level up. This gives you a skill point that you can invest into a skill and so on.

Check out the promo video.

On Reddit, the developer discusses a bit about how he made and why (inspired by GTA2).

When I get home I’m definitely playing this.



September 30th, 2011 by Adam

X-Summit Early Bird Ends Today

For those of you who are debating going to X-Summit you’re going to want to get your tickets before the end of the day today. It’s Interactive Ontario‘s annual interactive media conference held in Toronto, albeit with a new name this year. Why they changed the name, I can’t say, I guess some people like it better that way.

X-Summit is happening 24-26th of October in Toronto.

About X-Summit

Cross-Media || Intelligence, Collaboration, Change

X marks the spot where interactive digital media innovators meet, collaborate, partner and learn.

This two-day business intelligence conference focuses on the areas where cross-media converges; enabling content producers to better tell their stories seamlessly across multiple platforms.

X-Summit embraces innovation and explores the future of cross-media content through active learning, hands-on workshops, round-table discussions, concise presentations, dynamic panel discussions and cutting-edge demonstrations. A departure from typical formats, this next-generation conference will inspire and challenge, outfitting participants with tangible takeaways, fresh ideas to consider and new opportunities to explore.

X-Summit’s thought-provoking and future-oriented content offers insights from outstanding speakers from across the globe who will share their experience, knowledge and strategic foresight, providing valuable insights into the constantly evolving world of cross-media. X-Summit is an unparalleled opportunity for content creators to collaborate with interactive media professionals in a world-class conference setting.

X-Summit’s official site.



September 30th, 2011 by Adam

SMBC: Mona Lisa or Elderly Woman?

Great comic from SMBC today:


I have to admit that sometimes I feel lie the man in the beard too often when discussing philosophical problems with nearly anyone. Neoliberalism has clear one the war for minds…

Where’s Grant Morrison or Adorno when you need him?



September 29th, 2011 by Adam

Gamers May Have Found Thirty-Plus Planets

Hot on the heels of the success of Foldit (which used gamers to identify how an AIDS enzyme folds) gamers may have found two new planets. Gamers, whomever that refers to, were tasked with finding new planets through a game aptly called Planet Hunters.

Essentially Planet Hunters works by taking the data that the Kepler telescope captures and piping it into the game. The game itself is about finding patterns that match potential planet transits (which is one way to discover planets).

As of this post being published the game players have found 34 potential planets with 4,235,328 observations analyzed.

After some four million games, players have discovered 69 possible new planets, which the Kepler team will now look into in more depth. Each user that helped discover the two planets has been named in the acknowledgements section of a report published in Monthly Notices Of The Royal Astronomical Society.

“While the human brain is exceptionally good at detecting patterns, it is impractical for a single individual to review each of the 150,000 light curves in every quarterly release of the Kepler database,” the report reads.

Read more here.

No word on if they found natural palladium and element zero deposits.



September 29th, 2011 by Adam
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