Questions Continue

The questions continue on my Tumblr but for today I don't have anything additional to post here. Too much work and Transport Tycoon! Now I should start thinking about May's Moments of Gaming. Also only one week left until E3!

Transport Tycoon

As much as I love Sim City and Theme Park, my favorite simulation game as always been Transport Tycoon. The concept of the game is pretty simple, run a transportation company and move passengers and goods from place to place. I don't know why exactly but I've always get quite addicted to it. It is many years old now but I still have a copy installed on my computer. Today I learned that a group of fans/programmers have been working on a new open source version of the game which "attempts to mimic the original game as closely as possible while extending it with new features". It's called OpenTTD (TTD being short for Transport Tycoon Deluxe) and you can find it here http://www.openttd.org/. I've been playing it this evening and it's great. It's just like the original Transport Tycoon but with the added features you always wished existed and modern updates like scroll wheel support and widescreen resolutions. I can see many more hours going in to this game for years to come.

Beowulf

I missed this film when it was first released but I've always meant to see it at some point and this evening I did. Before watching this I knew very little about the original poem and only the very basic details about the story in general. Most of what I do know comes from a Star Trek: Voyager episode where there is a holodeck version of the story. Still demons and dragons along with some interesting CG work made we want to check it out. The big technical thing with this film is the performance capture system and the CG renderings of real actors. I suppose this has been improved on since with films like Avatar, but unlike the Na'vi human faces are being recreated here. They are all very well done and you can certainly tell which actor is behind the characters with ease. It's not perfect though and that is to do with the texturing and animation. The textures are not totally photo-real and so it has that obvious CG look. Also some of the animation seems a little stiff, slightly robot-like is the best way I can describe it. Part of that probably stems from the fact that it's over four years old now. It's the most obvious in the faces, particularly in the women. The men get wrinkles, stubble and beards to cover things up, but the women all seem too smooth. The general environments were great though. It gives the impression of a high-end cutscene from a computer game rather than a motion picture. That is until you get into the story and stop worrying so much about the look. It wasn't quite what I was expecting, especially with the look of Grendel, but I enjoyed it a lot in the end.

30 Days & Almost People

I starting doing one of those silly thirty questions in thirty days things on my Tumblr account. Check it out if you want to learn some random facts and things about me. I suppose that a lot of the stuff I could just post here but Tumblr is a different style of site, so I'll leave that over there and continue as normal over here. So the other important thing today is of course, new episode of Doctor Who. The thing is it just didn't get me very excited so I don't have a lot to say about it. It wasn't terrible, it just felt a bit average. Matt Smith did do an excellent jobs as two Doctor's though. Now that we're reaching to mid point I'm starting to not like the idea of a split season, it's gone by too quickly!

Time Is Short

Let him who have understanding reckon the number of the beast! I was only meaning to post that it's late and I don't have a topic today, but as soon as I wrote 'time is short' my brain had to continue with the quote from the song/bible. Even though it's the end of a line in the middle of the quote. It's funny how memory works sometimes. Is it time for a new Iron Maiden album yet? I'm not up to date on the news but I guess The Final Frontier has not been out that long and they're touring at the moment IIRC. So perhaps next year? Still in the mean time I must listen to Arch Enemy's new album soon.

Songs to Test By

Fresh from the Aperture Science Psychoacoustics Laboratory is the aural stimulus package Songs to Test By (also known as the Portal 2 soundtrack volume 1). It's freely available for download by anyone, you can get your copy here http://www.thinkwithportals.com/music.php. I'm listening to it as I write this. If you're a fan of the game or interested in electronic music at all then I would highly recommend it. It's great to hear it clean without being distracted by GlaDOS and Wheatley while you're busy trying to solve puzzles. I've not heard it all yet but my favorite so far is The Friendly Faith Plate.

Duke Gold

If you had said this only a year ago you would have been laughed at, but Duke Nukem Forever has gone gold! After so many years in development no-one ever expected to see it after 3D Realms went under. However Gearbox stepped in and finally finished it off. I wonder who they're going to market the game too after all this time. Anyone who can remember playing the last game when it came out will now be pushing 30. I'll always have a soft spot for Duke Nukem 3D as it was the first game I ever released a custom map for. I didn't even have a website at that point, I was just giving floppy disks to my friends. So now the new game has finally gone gold I have pre-ordered my copy of the fancy special edition. Of course there's still a chance the game will turn out to be rubbish, but it will always be a major story in gaming history.