Thursday, February 11, 2010

The $10,000 Box. Wait, What?!?

Yep, someone paid about $10k for A BOX.

"John Park says: "Some woman had an old Nintendo and a few random games for sale. Turns out one of them was a super rare collectors dream game, so it went for around $13,000!"

Up for auction is an original Nintendo NES gaming system with 1 hand control. There are 5 games with it. They are, Family & Fitness Stadium Events in the original box with the dust jacket inside of the box, Major League Baseball in the original box with the dust jacket inside of the box, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 the arcade game in the original box with the dust jacket inside of the box,Super Mario 3 in the original box with the dust jacket inside of the box and the original game, Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt. I have had this stored in the closet for years for my kids to play but the way that electronics come & go and change from one year to the next they wanted all of the new hot items of their own now and now it's time to get rid of things that are no longer being used or wanted. This system worked perfect when i stored it but somehow over the years, we have managed to misplace the AC cord & the television hook up. I am listing this and selling without hook up but it I find them, i'll send them along with the rest at no additional charges to you. Please keep in mind though that any ac cord will work with this and the hook up from a VCR would hook it up just as well as the original cords!

Old Nintendo NES system and five games sell for $13,105 on eBay"

link: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/10/old-nintendo-nes-sys.html

Friday, February 5, 2010

Dante's Inferno Swag

Dante's Inferno Swag

Slow day at work and Kotaku is filling the void today. Came across a pretty effin sweet promo campaign for Dante's Inferno. They are embedding text art into the source code of various website's home pages. Here's the list so far:

www.kotaku.com

www.digg.com

www.dailymotion.com

www.wwe.com

www.gamespot.com

www.gamesradar.com

So load up those pages, view the source code, and look for the clues!

link to article: http://kotaku.com/5463668/latest-dante-stunt-buries-ascii-art-in-our-source-code/gallery/

Whoa! This Is MAJOR

Now, I never owned an original Xbox, but my upstairs neighbors took part in the first Xbox Live beta testing way back in 2003-04, and I got a chance to play around on that. It was mind blowing being able to play a console online and have your little mic with the baby voice turned on talking smack to Canadian pre-teens. So even I was a little sad when I came across this today (from Kotaku):

Microsoft's decision tonight to end online play for all original Xbox consoles and games marks the end of an era in console gaming. Let's take a minute to remember those titles who tonight gave their lives.

Being the first successful platform for online console gaming (sorry, Dreamcast), the Xbox was home to many good games that were made better by online multiplayer, and some great games that were made classics.

Games like these, for which the looming disconnect brings an end to their multiplayer lives (not to mention the life of any digital content purchased for them), and for whom we'll now observe a minute's silence.

Halo 2
Counter-Strike
Burnout 3
Burnout Revenge
Ghost Recon
Call of Duty 2
Dead or Alive Ultimate
Doom 3
Star Wars: Battlefront 2
Battlefield 2
Forza
Rainbow Six 3
Call of Duty 3
Mechassault 2
Star Wars: Republic Commando
Crimson Skies

Age shall not weary them. Now, back to Modern Warfare 2 and Halo 3, eh?


link to article: http://kotaku.com/5464855/we-shall-mourn-the-following-xbox-live-originals

Thursday, February 4, 2010

A Day In The Life: Videogame Lead Animator

Whilst surfing the internet for work related articles, I came across this one on a career development website. Presenting a Day In the Life of a Lead Animator

By Phil Scott on September 15, 2009

Jonathan Cooper is Lead Animator at Montreal-based BioWare. He has been doing animation for a total of nine years—five of those as a lead animator, and around 3.5 with BioWare. Originally from Scotland, he holds a Bachelor's in Design in Animation, but says that "no qualifications are really needed" to break into the industry—"just a really good demo reel."

8:00 am – 10:00 am: Flextime. Arrive at the studio. Check email, grab coffee and catch up with team.

10:00 am: Day starts. Monday typically begins with a Leads Meeting – 30 minute sit-down with leads from all disciplines (art, animation, programming, design & audio) and the Project Director to catch up with planned tasks and goals for the week. This keeps all informed with issues that may affect other departments.

10:30 am – 11:00 am: Multiple 5-minute (SCRUM) meetings to discuss schedule tasks with other teams, be it specific level-design teams, animation programmers, AI (Artificial Intelligence) programmers, character modeling etc. - whatever shares the most dependencies with animation at each stage of the project.

11:00 am: Short stand-up meeting with animation team (no sitting, so it goes fast). Each member goes over tasks for the day and what was achieved yesterday.

11:05 am: Open up 3D art packages and game engine. Either continue animations from previous day, or implement assets already created into the game engine to test, essentially playing the game to see how animations look. Fix animation-related bugs sent from the QA (Quality Assurance) testers.

11.30 am: Become frustrated with areas of the game where designers are using or placing animations/characters incorrectly. Take Notes.

12:00 pm: Go out for lunch. Talk excitedly about latest games, movies and other geek indulgencies with friends and colleagues.

1:00 pm: Walk around the team area, overseeing various in-progress animations or cinematic cutscenes, advising on visuals and their relevance to the greater game and story. Maintain consistency of style and quality with the rest of the project.

1:35 pm: Field crazy requests from designers making ludicrous requests for their own pet-projects within the game. Agree to less than 1% of them.

2: 00 pm: Work on a little team scheduling, as well as design-documentation for upcoming animation features to be prototyped in the game. Create pre-visualizations of concepts for visual aid within systems design meetings.

2:45 pm:
Afternoon coffee break. Again, wax lyrical about topical fanboy-isms internet memes.

3:00 pm: Group critique meeting. Full animation team in a dark room with a projector, watching renders of animations. Group critiquing allows everyone to grow by learning on all aspects, as well as leveraging the experience of the seniors in the team. Review character performances, cinematography, and in-game animation speed and "feel".

4:00 pm: Meeting involving design and programmers to either hash out a new gameplay feature or refine and iterate on a gameplay system already present in the game. Many notes are taken and everyone leaves satisfied with the result, with new tasks to bring up to the team in the following day’s stand-ups. Topics range from the highly technical (like how to get AI to behave correctly) to the pure fun (like how to make spaceships look even more awesome).

5:00 pm: Finally sit back down at desk to continue with this morning’s animation or technical tasks. Could be anything from creating a single gesture to be performed by a character within a conversation to a violent death at the hands of an enemy, or tweaking the weight of a character’s limbs when applied with physics.

6: 00 pm: Sit back and play the game, admiring the animation team's work. Get enthused by the level of quality across the board and use it to inspire the animators to do the same.

6:30 pm – 7:00 pm: Done for the day. Home now to play someone else’s games…

N.B. Jonathan adds: "If this seems like a lot of meetings, that's because there are a lot on our projects—mostly because they're some of the biggest in the industry."