Just a quick note here to let Technorati know this blog is mine…

Technorati Profile

Yay – someone at TIGA has gotten round to updating the members list to include all the recently joined members (including us). We’ve actually been members for months now, but I had been holding off on publicising it on our front page, because with no mention of us on their pages it would look like we were lying. 😉

Anyway, I’ll edit our site later to include their logo and link.

P.S. Eek, just noticed – the link doesn’t even go to us. 🙁 Looks like its a cut and paste of the address above. Well, I’ve prodded them about it being .co.uk instead of .com, hopefully it’ll get fixed soon.

Sorry for the lack of posting the last couple of weeks, a combination of many distractions meant I never quite got round to writing. I’ve shifted gear recently and stopped focusing on the more risky potential contracts; instead I’m trying to concentrate on sorting out more solid things to make sure cash-flow works out. What does that mean for me personally? Well it means I’m learning C# for one thing, as it seems to be the language of choice for the majority of the software houses (in Edinburgh at least). It also means I’ve shelved the projects with less short-term potential (the little experimental games, etc.) to try and make the most productive use of my time. 🙂

Amen

I’ve finally got my hands on a couple of copies of Brave (one for my little cousin who I promised my free copy to, one for my own posterity). Of course, I don’t actually have a PlayStation 2 to play it on, but its nice to know that I have a copy and that 4 years of my life weren’t spent on something that I then lost without a trace! 🙂

For anyone who’s interested, I also have a couple of trailers of the game on the website – the official Sony trailer (34.4MB), and an unofficial VIS trailer (20.1MB) that didn’t make it to the public domain. Our internal one doesn’t have the dramatic orchestral theme (straight out of the bin marked ‘epic’ at Sony no doubt), but I think it shows the character and the feel better.

News in today that Peter Jackson’s production company will be working with Bungie, Universal and Fox. Good news I think – it certainly seems a better candidate for a game-to-movie conversion than Doom. Plus the Halo ring structure is kind of outdoors (discounting the unusual sky backdrop), so they get to set it in New Zealand and pump some more money into their economy. I always like to see the Kiwis get ahead (although I’m compelled to admit its because I’m secretly hoping they’ll all get so rich they’ll start giving away free plane trips over there).

Of course, game-to-movie conversions are always going to be at least a little cringe-worthy, even when the game story is good, the movie can’t fit everything in (like a book-to-movie conversion) and it loses its magic. At least movie-to-game conversions can expand on the movie’s plot and get you more involved in the world.

One good example I found recently though was the book that Raymond E. Feist wrote after the success of Betrayal at Krondor. I’ve never played the game (I know, I know, how can I call myself a gamer), but I can see the shape of the game in the book, and feel just how the various stages would map to quests and sub-quests; and how the character/group mechanics would work. You can even almost see the levelling mechanics at work in the character of Owyn. If only all medium crossovers were so effectively possible.