Today was the last day to finish watching Reformat the Planet over at pitchfork.tv, so I just did that. The documentary, about the first “chiptunes” Blip festival in NY in 2006, featured some interview and performance by Neil Voss, who I have babbled on about here before because I liked his video game soundtrcks for the N64.
It strikes me that there are so many scenes and subcultures that I think are awesome and would love to be a part of, but never will be.
I will have be satisfied with downloading more mustic from the 8-bit people website. Yum.
Last night I was reminded of my fruitless search (back in 2002, I think) for the Tetrisphere soundtrack. Tetrisphere was (and still remains) one of my favorite games of all time. It was released for the N64. Sound for the game was done by this guy Neil D. Voss, I learned at the time, but Nintendo never actually released an official sountrack, even though the game won a “best soundtrack” award from Nintendo Power. Conspicuously the wikipedia link above doesn’t really say what Voss has been up to since then.
Anyway, you can find mp3 rips of the Tetrisphere Soundtrack and The New Tetris (which he also worked on) available at this random Galbadia Hotel site.
Also interesting is this IGN interview with Voss on the making of the Tetrisphere soundtrack (via wikipedia).
Florence, Mike, Jason and I went to see Be Kind, Rewind last Sunday, (the new one Directed by Michel Gondry). I love Gondry’s style so much, but this one fell pretty flat for me. Maybe my expectations were inflated because I have loved his other movies so much, but it didn’t really live up to something. I liked The Science of Sleep better, and I remember feeling pretty similarly disappointed when that one came out.
Anyway, this morning a co-worker sent out a link to the Game Over Project’s Human Space Invaders, which of course I think is brilliant. They also made a version of stop animation human tetris, (not to mention Pong and Pole Position).
Bonus link to a blog post that outlines a pretty sweet tetris variant the author thought up. (lazyweb!!!)
I gave a presentation tonight for the local twin cities chapter of the International Game Developers Association. I think it went well. There were somewhere between ten and twenty people in the audience, and they seemed genuinely engaged and interested.
The presentation can be found here:
http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dg2n4s6k_19dcdkm5gp
After me, another guy, Darrell Hardy presented about board games and the industry in general. I guess he worked at fantasy flight for years… he seemed like a really nice guy, and had several interesting things to say.
Florence tagged along, and she even said afterward that she’d had a good time. She’s been showing more and more interest in games lately. I’ve even got her playing an x-box game (Samurai Warriors 2) with me semi-regularly (the latest in the Dynasty Warriors… er, dynasty, it’s a great one for co-op). My crowning achievement: She admitted to me tonight that she closed her eyes and saw guys running around with little red bars above their heads.
OK, I know I’m late to the game on this one, but I just finished playing through Portal (rented the Orange Box for my 360 this weekend), and… damn. So fun! Everyone and their mother has already ranted about how great this game is, and I have mostly been trying not to pay attention, so I never heard anything about how great the song in the end credits was. I also seemed to miss any mention of how funny the game is. The end boss fight was especially hysterical, and I totally didn’t expect a boss fight at the end of the puzzle game, but it really worked! There were several points at which Florence, who was mostly sitting next to me but not paying attention, giggled right along with me at the robot’s hysterical quips.
First of all, there is a vote going on right now over at greenpeace.org to name a whale. What does it say about people who use the internet that the winning name right now (at 49%) is “Mister Splashy Pants”?
Secondly, our office’s South African Canadian is back from the outback, and he brought a bottle of Amarula with him. It’s tasty… possibly even tastier than Baily’s (although very similar), and makes me want to try out some Marula fruit. Anyway it’s put a pleasant buzz on the end of this first-workday-back-from-vacation.
Tonight I plan on spending my entire evening curled up with Florence on the couch, alternating between the new episode of Heros, Super Mario Galaxies, and possibly the second disk of the first season of Flight of the Conchords. I got the new Mario game this weekend, and am excited to play more… Florence and I rented the first disk of Flight of the Conchords last night, only realizing as we walked out the door that we’d have to return it today. (Overnight rental… wha!? I like nicollet village video, but I’m going to have to remember not to get new releases from there again.) We may well get the second disk, but we’d either be forced to watch it all tonight, or break down and go to Blockbuster instead.
I am sleepy and sated, product of a good family gathering. This weekend has stretched into long-ish memories, globular gelatin-like happy oblong memories… of card games and movie watching, catching-up and conversation. Thanksgiving among mine is a time for family.
In contrast or contradiction, it seems that once again time has passed in an eyeblink and I feel some small amazement that tomorrow florence and I will already be driving back to minnesota. Where does life go once you have lived it?
I was thinking a bit today about my poor memory in the context of how bad I am about remembering jokes, and I would like to think that I’m a product of a rich and varied present. I cannot live outside the moment, because the moment is too powerful, too compelling.
So I finished The Amber Spyglass, and now I’m reading Stardust, by Neil Gaiman, rather than Thirteen, which I’d said I was going to start next. Stardust is shorter, and I started it on the plane to Chicago, thinking I’d get to return it to Florence’s sister Susie while we were there, rather than bring it back on the plane with us because I hadn’t finished it, which is of course what happened instead. There is also a connection between the two, as both the Phillip Pullman books and Stardust are on my “to read” pile for the same reason — I wanted to finish them before their movie counterparts are released.
I just got done uploading a few pictures from the trip to flickr, and realized they were all of people, but that we hadn’t taken any with Susie (Florence’s sister, who we spent most of Saturday visiting). I did also meet Florence’s father on Saturday too, (that was the main purpose of the trip), and that meeting went well.
We stayed with my Aunt Maureen and Uncle Michael, and my cousin Patrick, who I discovered shares my love for “casual” (mostly web-based) video games. We took turns showing each other games we like on Kongregate, and I’ll admit he took way more turns than I did. He also showed an interest in Flash game development. Too bad the program is so expensive, or I’d get him a copy for his birthday or something.
Go Tetris! was featured on usgo.org last friday, and now it’s getting a bunch more hits than it was before. The numbers are not astronomical or anything (approximately 300 that first day, and a little under a hundred per day since then), but it feels good to know there is some interest.
I sort of wish this had happened a week from now, or that I’d known it was going to happen, because I would have made more of an effort to start saving highscores and userdata. (Hopefully, I should be able to upload a new version tonight with that capability.)
Everyone knows I’m a sucker for social networking sites. I just discovered another one, The Great Games Experiment, a site that allows you to sign up as a game player or game developer. I’ve found some of the interface to be awesome and intuitive, but other features of the site are just abysmally hard to understand. There is definitely a lot to do over there, I’ll have to look at it more when I’m less sleepy.
Oh, and after a single day, I’m totally addicted to Travian, a web-based massively multiplayer RTS. Check it out!
I was trolling around looking for cool game developer conferences, and found out I just missed the imgd conference this very month, here in MN. Sounds like it focused more on MMO (an acronym I’m not sure I’ve encountered before, but assume is the relevant parts of MMORPG), but it still would probably have been worth checking out.
I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to whether I’m really interested in persuing a career in game development, or whether I really just want it to be something I do in my spare time for fun. I can honestly say I really dig my current job, and I know that’s something relatively rare and special. I think for now I’m just along for the ride. We’ll see where this thing takes me.