A very impressive and entertaining Portal fan video. Awesome special effects.
My interpretation of what a real Portal gun would be like if one existed. Based on the video game, Portal. I tried to match the game as close as possible. This was the most challenging project I have ever undertaken, consisting of 3D tracking, seamless camera cuts and 3D camera projection. ENJOY! The Visual Effects.
Breakdowns will follow so watch for that.
For those of you that think the gun is a physical prop you can buy, well…..sorry to break the news to you, but it’s entirely CG. The 3D Portal gun was replacing/covering up a painted up coffee can with tracking markers.
Check out this wonderful rendition of The Smiths’ ‘This Charming Man’ in 8-bit Super Mario style.
I’m planning on doing a video as soon as I can figure out how to work with Flash. The sound effects are only there to help the listener visualize the “game”.
Ah, the good old days of playing Mortal Kombat at my friend’s house after school. I was never allowed to play these games at home, but over at my friend’s, I could. The best were always the finishing moves. In this 2-hour (!) long clip, you’ll find each and every finishing move for every Mortal Kombat character ever, in addition to those of a shitload of other old school games that I’ve never even heard about. Nostalgia…
The first HD gameplay trailer of Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Looks pretty damn good, nice that they’re giving a bit of a dark, Conan the Barbarian like twist to it, after the fairytale world of Oblivion.
It’s been around on the interwebs for a while, still cool though. Pixels invade New York, turning it into a Space Invaders, Tetris and Frogger fantasy.
Some interesting visuals and sounds in this trailer. Download the beta here.
FRACT is an atmospheric adventure game set in an abstract forgotten world of analog sounds, samples and glitches. Myst + Rez with a heavy dose of Tron.
FRACT is a first person puzzle game – very much in the vein of the classic Myst titles. The player is let loose into an abstract world built on sound and structures inspired by electronic music. It’s up to the player to resurrect and revive the long forgotten machinery of this musical world, in order to unlock its’ inner workings!
Become a whistleblower yourself with this WikiLeaks flash game. Julian Assange must download secret files from Barack Obama’s computer, but the president is a very light sleeper. Enjoy!
Check out this cool Half-Life 2 for the Mac teaser trailer… combining the totalitarian atmosphere of the game with an old tv commercial introducing the Macintosh computer from 1984.
Wow, this is some information I’ve been looking for for a long time. According to psychological research from Canada, there is a connection between playing video games, and having really aware, colorful, vivid dreams. Also some people experience lucid dreaming, in which you control your actions and the events in a dream.
When I dream, it is often very vivid and “cinematic” – with huge landscapes, cityscapes, sci fi or fantasy themes, storylines, and that sort of thing. Like not always, but it occurs regularly, and it is quite enjoyable. It’s never lucid, though. Also, I play video games – not a lot, but once in a while, once every couple of weeks, and these are most often imaginative, storytelling, sci fi or fantasy themed games. So I’ve often wondered about some possible connection, and Googled it, but I never could find anything.
So this is revealing. Hope this line of research will be pursued.
Playing video games before bedtime may give people an unusual level of awareness and control in their dreams, LiveScience has learned.
That ability to shape the alternate reality of dream worlds might not match mind-bending Hollywood films such as “The Matrix,” but it could provide an edge when fighting nightmares or even mental trauma.
Dreams and video games both represent alternate realities, according to Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada. But she pointed out that dreams arise biologically from the human mind, while video games are technologically driven by computers and gaming consoles.
“If you’re spending hours a day in a virtual reality, if nothing else it’s practice,” said Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada. “Gamers are used to controlling their game environments, so that can translate into dreams.”
(…)
The first study suggested that people who frequently played video games were more likely to report lucid dreams, observer dreams where they viewed themselves from outside their bodies, and dream control that allowed people to actively influence or change their dream worlds – qualities suggestive of watching or controlling the action of a video-game character.
A second study tried to narrow down the uncertainties by examining dreams that participants experienced from the night before, and focused more on gamers. It found that lucid dreams were common, but that the gamers never had dream control over anything beyond their dream selves.
The gamers also frequently flipped between a first person view from within the body and a third person view of themselves from outside, except never with the calm detachment of a distant witness.
In een concept-verkiezingsprogramma van D66 is een volledige paragraaf te vinden waarin het zijn standpunt over games kenbaar maakt. De politieke partij wil de ontwikkeling van kunstzinnige games stimuleren. D66 vindt daarnaast ook dat de overheid zich niet mag bemoeien met de inhoud van games in het algemeen.
Dit heeft Control, een vakblad voor gamesindustrie, ons weten te vertellen. Volgens hun site heeft D66 meer dan genoeg aandacht voor de gamesindustrie. Opvallend is dat games in het hoofdstuk Media en Cultuur expliciet vermeld staat als ‘cultuur’. Het concept is geschreven door Ruud Hendriks, oud topman van RTL en Endemol.
Op het partijcongres in april zullen we zien of de paragraaf het definitieve programma zal bereiken.
A really cool 20-minute short movie by David Kaplan and Eric Zimmerman from Futurestates about the increasingly blurry boundaries between games and reality, and the questions this poses about identity.
Play imagines a not-too-distant future where video games have become indistinguishable from reality. These fully immersive games are nested inside each other like Russian dolls — each new game emerging from another and connecting backwards with increasing complexity. One moment, a player is a Japanese schoolgirl embroiled in a pillow fight with her girlfriends — and the next moment, the player has suddenly morphed into a scandalized state senator defending himself against a throng of angry reporters.
Synthetic experience competes with real experience as dream, fantasy, and memory begin to collapse into each other. Identities become elastic as the players consecutively inhabit completely different genders, ages, and ethnicities. They must confront a new state of “play” where the distinction between the real and the virtual blurs and their true selves are called into doubt.
Concerning action and movement in games, this sounds both promising and confusing (via Wired):
David Cage, cofounder of the French development studio Quantic Dream, thinks the standard control scheme used in games is a straitjacket. Most buttons on the joypad have a single purpose — say, firing a gun. “You press the button, you shoot an enemy; you get the same result through 20 levels,” he says. “To tell a diverse story, you need a hero capable of doing anything. One button needs to controlan infinite number of different things in different contexts.”
Cage’s game Heavy Rain, due out in February for the PlayStation 3, junks the one button-one action paradigm for something more flexible. As you navigate one of Heavy Rain’s four main characters through a moody neo-noir world, an array of constantly shifting options swarm around your character’s head like flies. These range from the heroic to the bizarre: Depending on the context, a single button might let you dodge a punch, discipline your child, or talk to a clown. And each decision can lead to a totally different story outcome. (The Heavy Rain script ran 2,000 pages long.) Call it a Choose Your Own Adventure for the 21st century.
“Chatbot” technology is being used in an attempt to solve one of “the last uncracked problems” in games design.
221b, released in the run-up to the new Sherlock Holmes movie, harnesses the software to allow conversations between players and in-game characters.
Gamers, who assume the character of either Sherlock Holmes or Dr Watson, must interrogate virtual witnesses and suspects to progress in the game.
Success depends upon getting the right answers from these characters.
“It’s our role to predict what you might know at that point in the game and the questions you might ask,” said Rollo Carpenter of Existor, which provided the technology.
“The ways that you might say things to them are almost unlimited.”
(…)
When a player interrogates a game character in 221b, Carpenter’s technology is used to analyse the question and to provide a relevant response.
Rather than attempting to create an exhaustive list of possible questions and the appropriate response, the characters in the game are capable of making a “fuzzy interpretation” of what is said to them.
Pattern matching is then used to identify the appropriate answer for any given input by a player.
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