Skate Video

I took down the other two smaller videos, combined them into a single video and then added two additional clips. My goal is to upload a clip or two from the game each night and then download them and convert them from FLV to MOV each day. That way, when I hit my clip limit on the skate.reel website, I’ll have all the clips already downloaded and I can upload over the older ones. Eventually, I’d like to build a 5-10 minute video, just for shits and giggles.

Anyway, here’s a comp of 4 different clips. All unedited obviously (from the “pop-ins” and whatnot). I won’t bore anyone with daily uploads, but I’ll post the final one once I have a few minutes worth. But, for now, enjoy…

[flv]http://docholoday.com/video/Skate2_01-04.flv[/flv]

What do you think? Worth continuing?

Skate 2 Videos

Just a little fun I’m having with the Skate 2 video editor. So much fun in fact that I bought the “film-maker” addon to do even cooler stuff later. Enjoy 🙂

Edit: Movies removed, and moved to a new post here.

Gears of War 2

For the past few days I’ve been trying to wrap up my thoughts on Gears 2. Without a doubt it’s worthy of the title and succession to the Gears crown. It’s a marked improvement in almost every way. However, the larger questions remain. Does it have substance as well as flash? Does it have a plot or is it a 10 hour Mountain Dew commercial? How does it stack up against others in the FPS cannon? Read on my friends, read on.

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Time Management

Management of time is crucial during the busy holiday gaming season. So much so that it’s nearly an art form. A constant war must be waged between wallet, free time and the game of choice. Rarely a restructuing of events occures. Most major decisions regarding purchases have been made long before now. This year unfortunatly, is a little different.

In previous seasons, developers have released games for the holidays in close proximity to each other but not on top of each other. For example, last years mega hits Call of Duty 4 and Assasins Creed hit in November and December respectively. That gave me time to play both.

This year, apparently the gaming gods have seen it nessisary to launch every major title in Novemeber, save a couple for October who were in turn released on top of themselves. So, we’ve already seen Fable 2, Fallout 3, FarCry 2 and DeadSpace, all within a week. Those are already hard choices I’ve had to make. I’d love to try all of them. This week we get Gears of War 2, quickly followed by Call of Duty, Mirror’s Edge, Need for Speed, Tomb Raider, Left 4 Dead, 2 different snowboarding games AND Prince of Persia at the end of the month. Then, nothing. A completely blank December.

I have to admit, I’m a little confused by that. Nothing right before Christmas? No one saved a big release for the “after Thanksgiving” shopping season? Really?

Does that seem odd to anyone else?

Either way, I’ve made my choices and changed one of them significantly. After playing the new Call of Duty beta and being very underwhelmed by it, I’ve decided to leave that for an after Christmas sale purchase. I had very high hopes for it but it seems little more than a COD4 mod with less impressive weapons and slower game play. I’m also very much done with the WWII genre, at least for the moment. Need for Speed and Mirror’s Edge will also get the axe, but not for a lack of effort. The Mirror’s Edge demo was interesting and proved it a valid concept. Alternatively, I think I’m going to pick up Gears this week in their place. Something I was going to wait until December to get. It’s not that I’m expecting it to be great, but it’ll pass the time until Left 4 Dead, my true choice for the season. Then, my next big purchase won’t be until Skate 2 in January. Everything else will have to be picked up later, probably while on sale. It’s not that I don’t want them, but seriously, how would I find the time to play something like Fallout if I haven’t finished Fable 2 yet and I’ll be battling zombie hordes inside of two weeks. That’s a very small window to squeeze 80+ hours of RPG into.

Anyway, it’s not like it matters. Everyone has their own list. What are you guys excited for? What will you be playing between now and the holidays?

Endless Posibilities

I wasn’t a huge fan of the first game. I wasn’t a huge fan of Crysis either. But this video makes FarCry 2 look very very interesting. That’s quite possibly the most feature rich level editor I’ve seen that’s also seemingly incredibly easy to work with. If you catch it, for the first second or two, they show the button configuration of a Xbox 360 controller. This is the console version of the editor. I can only imagine the PC version.

A whole host of games have shipped with level editors. That’s nothing new. What is new is the ease of use and console availabillity of the editor. That makes it 1000x more accesable to people who might normally not use it otherwise. As much as I love Half-Life, it’s editor in the Source engine isn’t entirely intuitive. It takes a little time and effort to get that thing up and running. Halo 3 is the only thing that comes close with it’s “Forge” mode, but you’re really only editing game variables and item/vehicle placements. That’s pretty cool, but this FarCry 2 editor could really take it to the next level, especially if the maps are able to be shared among their respective communities.

FarCry 2 wasn’t on my radar at all. I knew about it but I wasn’t planning on picking it up when it came out, if ever. This might have changed that.

Nice

I rarely extol the virtues of giant computer companies, except perhaps, when they give out delicious candy for free in the way nVidia has. Being a supporter of their brand of graphics cards over their competitor, ATI, when I built my last PC I opted for the then top of the line GeForce 8800 GTS 512. Time passes and nVidia buys physics card maker Ageia and their line of PhysX products. That was nice, I assumed that in the next generation we’d see integrated GPUs and PhysX chips working together. Apparently, all PhysX chips are are regular old GPUs with drivers meant to support physics rendering. Why? Because nVidia, through a driver update, just added PhysX features and support to their already existing line of cards. If you own a 8000, 9000 or new GTX 200 series card, you’ve already got the capability of having really cool physics acceleration.

nVidia released a whole host of stuff which you can find here. They’re calling it their “Force Within” pack. We get a new Forceware driver (v177.83) plus a couple game demos, fluid physics tech demos, the UT3 physics upgrade pack and a full game called Warmonger.

Like I said, I’m not one to usually heap praise on big companies, but this is pretty cool. nVidia said they were going to fully support PhysX, the gaming community and more and it seems like they’ve actually delivered.

So, if you’ve got a graphics card from the past two years, check it out. Just thought I’d pass it on.

Matt out.