2009 June | The VidZone Network Blog

June 25, 2009

The King is dead. Long live the King.

I was in a funk all day. I woke up late, groggy, in the early afternoon. I ate lunch, did a little internet surfing, but after only a few hours being up and active, I didn’t feel much up for anything and could only go back to lie in bed. Around 6pm, I read an email header on my phone that said Michael Jackson had suffered from cardiac arrest and had been rushed to a hospital.

I thought that in itself was tragic but didn’t think much more about it. “Hopefully they fix him up,” I thought as I drifted off for a few more hours of sleep.

I woke up some time after 9pm and started up my time-delayed DVR recording of So You Think You Can Dance, and the start of the show began somberly as Nigel began eulogizing. “These things happen in threes.” I knew Ed McMahon and Farrah Fawcett had died; was Michael that third? Is it true? (more…)

Carl @ 11:53 pm
Filed under: Music, Personal — Tags: , —

June 23, 2009

The Queen’s decree on pop music

Conveniently, Maxim’s interview with Lady GaGa in their July 2009 issue comments on pop art and the active aim of being shallow.

The Lady GaGa experience is a tough one to wrap one’s head around. Is it high art? Cap? Straight-up cheese?

Warhol said art should be meaningful in the most shallow way. He was able to make commercial art that was taken seriously as fine art, to use something simple and shallow to take you to another planet. That’s what I’m doing, too. When you listen to a song like “LoveGame,” is it communicating my soul to you? No. My music isn’t me jerking my dick off all over a piano trying to feel something. I make soulless electronic pop. But when you’re on Ecstasy in a nightclub grinding up against someone and my music comes on, you’ll feel soul.

Not every piece of work has to be cerebral or challenging. Often times the primary goal is to be fun and evoke simple joy. Doing anything more on top of that will just weigh down the experience, forcing the audience to work when all they ever wanted was a quick fix.

Think about punk music. Though many bands have some sort of political agenda the music itself is a raw expression of passion.  The instrumentation is generally pedestrian and more or less sounds the same between songs.  It’s banging and thrashing, screaming and shouting.  But regardless of the particulars, you get the sense that whatever the band is singing about, they feel very strongly about it and want you to get riled up with them.

Songs boil down to being delivery mechanisms for emotions, feelings, and moods.  What’s so wrong about “shallow” games that act in the same way?

Carl @ 3:03 pm
Filed under: Music, Techniques — Tags: , , , , , , , —

June 11, 2009

The secret to “good” pop music

A few of my friends look at me weird when I say I listen to pop music, recommending that they check out the new Britney Spears album. Possibly my favorite era in music during my young life is during the late ’90s to early ’00s between when grunge rock faded away and rap became Top 40 radio mainstream.

Let me explain how I listen to music. When I first hear a song, I listen to “the big picture,” the overall feeling of the song and not yet analyzing the little details like lyrics and composition.  In later passes I dissect the components of a song and analyze each individually.  It will take at least four playthroughs before I’ve actually really “listened” to a song.

For me, a “good” pop song is one that I will let play through without wanting to switch to another song.  In other words: inoffensive.  It doesn’t have to actually be good or great, just not bad, just “good enough.”

After all, getting past “no” is often the hardest, most important part.   Everything past that is gravy.  That’s the lesson.  In order to reach the widest possible audience, you don’t necessarily have to figure out how to appeal to every kind of person, just offend as few as possible.

Carl @ 1:39 am
Filed under: Music, Personal, Techniques — Tags: , , , —

Back from E3: Quickie wrap-up

Highlights:

Zephyr attention: Tremendous turnout to check out our project. Met and chatted with a lot of people, from studio devs wandering the show, other indie devs, media outlets large and small, digital distribution portals, and senior/executive staff from mega-publishers.  Interestingly, we received a notable amount of interest from composers.  I’m sure most of them were just looking for a project to work on, but I asked a few of the more exciteable ones what drew them to our project in particular.  Our aesthetic had a lot of fans.  People love steam-punk and/or pirates.  They also noticed our Skies of Arcadia influences.  Unfortunately while we were out at lunch on the third day, a trio of Japanese SEGA folk demoed our game, each taking one of my cards.  Boy, that would have been a stellar group to talk with.

Forza Motorsport III: There were a trio of cockpit setups with three-screen panorama, 5.1 audio, and force-feedback wheel. One of them even had a full motion base that MS custom-rigged.  I spoke with one representative and he said he wasn’t familiar with the consumer-standard D-Box that’s already being used for Blu-Ray and PC; I directed him toward their booth.  One of my biggest peeves with FM2 was the sort of lackluster graphics.  That is no longer a concern, and I’m sure everything else will be great as always.

Great eats: The show allowed for a sort of FIEAn mini-reunion, and we were escorted to a slew of great dining spots.  There was heavenly Italian at C&O’s Trattoria, melt-in-your-mouth lamb french dips and spicy garlic fries at Cole’s, and a table-filling assortment of dim sum at Empress Pavilion.  Lastly, we made a pit stop at In & Out burger before catching our flights out.

Disappointments:

Being clueless: We spent the vast majority of our time demonstrating our game at the IndieCade booth, and we’re absolutely flattered and grateful for the attention.  However, that duty and the lack of a fast, reliable internet connection meant I couldn’t really read/watch what was announced, and we couldn’t spend too much time going hands-on with what was on display.  People at home knew a lot more about E3 goings-on than I did.

Activision booth: Where were all the games?  It was an impressive booth thanks to the massive screens running a loop of trailers plus the stage for celebrity appearances and DJs, but the only noticable play stations were Tony Hawk: Ride and Blur at the front.  I was really looking forward to getting hands-on with DJ Hero.  Most stuff was being show behind closed doors.  However, it was funny to see the Ghostbusters standing in line to meet Stan Lee.

God of War 3: It wasn’t that it sucked, it’s that I didn’t see anything new or noteworthy after spending a combined hour or so of my limited “goof-off” time budget standing in line and playing the demo.  The presentation continues to be fantastic, now using a lot more depth-related effects.  However, it failed to showcase any of the sense of scale that was teased by the early trailers.  (For that, Bayonetta’s bridge battle helped make it Best of Show for me.)

Carl @ 1:21 am
Filed under: Games, Personal — Tags: , , , , , , , , , —

June 6, 2009

Xbox Live 1 vs. 100 beta impressions

1 vs. 100 (XBLA)

This could be a problem.  I’m a trivia fiend, and I could easily see myself becoming addicted to this game.  Similarly to Grid, you can earn points simply by participating.  Even if you’re a complete dolt, you’ll still be making positive progress.

There are one of three groups you could wind up in: The One, who is the active contestant; The Mob, who wins prizes if The One gets stumped; and The Crowd, who consists of everyone else participating.  The Mob starts off as a group of 100 players.  As individual members fail to properly answer a question, The One climbs their way up the prize ladder.  The One has a few “lifelines” which include polling the highest scorer, accepting the majority answer of The Mob, or accepting the majority answer of The Crowd.

What frustrates me is what I think I can attribute to lag or being physically too far from a server.  When answers are presented, less points are awarded as time clicks down until the player finally buzzes in.  Even when I know it’s the final choice and mash the button well before it’s revealed, I can’t ever score higher than 190 (out of a possible 200).  Those milliseconds absolutely do matter.

Players are given the ability to cheer, jeer, or dance by tapping the Y button and scrolling through various actions.  Behind you is also interactive lighting, which I call the “hype meter.”  It rises as you perform an action, but for a while I couldn’t figure out how to enter the last bar.  Or how one of the other players was dancing.  It turns out you’ve really got to mash on the button quickly, however once the dancing is initiated, you can slow down again.

Favorite thing: Xbox Live Primetime brings with it the ability to schedule pop-up reminders for events.  It’s fully integrated with the Xbox Dashboard, just like download and friend notifications.

Least favorite thing: The outcome of this question:  (Note: the answers are labeled to match the Xbox controller’s buttons in order from left to right.)  “What is the 24th letter of the alphabet? X. A A. X B. B”  Of course I hit the X button intending for the answer “X.”  About 1/3 of the mob also made the same mistake.  Stupid trickery!

Carl @ 10:41 pm
Filed under: Games — Tags: , , , , , , , , —

June 2, 2009

E3: Zephyr ready for sail

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After an annoying Direct X issue, I’ve got Zephyr up and running at the IndieCade booth (#652, South Hall).  You can find us in the rear left of the hall.  Just look for Natsume’s cute stuffed baby giraffe at the Afrika kiosk.

Ing picked me up from the convention center after work, and took me over to Culver City, where I met up w/ Chuck and Corey. After picking up Jeff from the airport, we headed over to C&O’s Trattoria on Venice Beach for the best Italian food I’ve ever had.  I had them toss on some fried calamari onto some angel hair past w/ a simple olive oil, tomato, basil sauce.  Matched with indulgent, flavorful garlic knots, it was all perfect.  Unfortunately Victor gets into town Tues. morning, so he missed out.  However, plans have been made to keep up the FIEA mini-reunion each night, particularly on Chuck’s birthday.

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Carl @ 2:17 am
Filed under: Games, Personal — Tags: , , , , , , —