The Madrid chapter of the IGDA is working now, with a little page, and preparations are underway for a first meeting. Thanks to the organisers, and complete encouragement for everyone to drop by the forum and at least say hi. Don’t be shy!

This may be interesting…

I started playing Shadow of the Colossus… it’s simply amazing, a game like no other. The scale of the Colossi and the way you climb up on them makes most other 3rd person games feel as primitive and flat as, say, classic 2D scrollers. It’s quite hardcore, and breaks pretty much every rule of game design.

Serenity is a plain old fun sci-fi adventures movie. Everything in it is fairly simple and predictable, but the result is very entertaining, and deserved much better success at the box office. I never saw the TV series, but after seeing this movie I know I will.

If your eyes are sore with all the bumpmapped glory of the latest FPS shader fest, check this out! Kenta Cho’s site has a collection of impressive (and incredibly simple) games for several platforms. Vector graphics at their finest!

Let’s hope so. Go go Penny-Arcade!!

Edit: And the story goes on!

I hereby proclaim Quake 4’s awesomeness. Call me a fanboy (you would be right), call me unsophisticated (not far from the truth), but if you like to shoot bad guys with big weapons, this game is plain fun. Graphics and atmosphere are excellent, weapons feel good, sound gets the job done. Missions are reasonable classic styles like go to point B, keep A alive and such, but they provide a good excuse to shoot more Stroggs and save the universe. Again.

It’s basically Quake 2 with Raven’s production know-how and Doom 3 technology. I only miss the fantastic soundtrack that Sonic Mayhem did for Quake 2.

Ok, so I have a few blogs linked in my page. Over the past week, the first two of them have left their jobs, and precisely in that order. What does that say about me, or them, or anything? 🙂 Are Joel Spolsky and Raymond Chen next in line? Hm… nah I don’t think so.

Anyway, if you need some game consultancy work done, I’m sure you can’t go wrong with Jamie Fristrom.

The Intergalactic Medicine Show seems an interesting experiment by Card, who is both one of my favourite sf writers of all time, and someone whose political ideas usually make me puke.

So Ubi Soft has released a short PC demo of the King Kong game… 2 months in advance??? Granted the demo doesn’t exactly spoil anything, but with probably the biggest movie license this year, do they really need to get the hype up so early? Aren’t they running the risk of making the game "old news" by christmas?

Anyway, the demo is short, but interesting to watch. Textures are a tad bit too sharp, to the point of becoming noisy. I tried 640×480 with full antialiasing, and it looked better; unfortunately the Radeon 9800 FSAA doesn’t support alphatest properly (and they use a LOT of alpha testing), so noise is still a big factor. However, the XBox version should look great on the TV. The camera work during the Kong fights is great, very cinematic without being disruptive. Gameplay is heavily scripted, and certainly not up to God of War standards. Great sound, no interface icons, all of it emphasizing the "experience the movie" feel of the game rather than the gameplay.

You can grab it here if you have a Fileplanet subscription.

http://www.compfused.com/directlink/944/ is amazing!

Sometimes nostalgia hits me hard:

Dedicated to Turbo_Bit!