Critter Crunch
Fans of the Toronto independent videogame scene should immediately be directed to the Playstation store. Capybara’s Critter Crunch is now available for download and purchase. I can’t vouch for the game itself, being Playstation-less over here, but I can vouch for the company so give them your hard earned money.
Nuit Blanche Chiptune Performance
The all-night art fest Nuit Blanche hit Paris last weekend. During my wanderings I came across some projected videos, a couple installations, and a giant disco ball. It wasn’t all that inspiring. To make matters worse, I made the classic Nuit Blanche mistake of heading out too early (basically, anytime before 2am) so anything of any possible interest was flooded with people. After a couple hours of this, I grabbed a crepe near Les Halles, got on the Metro, and called it a night. I didn’t even make it to midnight (by comparison, last year I was out to almost 6am.)
In a prime example of “grass is always” greener mentality, the Toronto event this year seemed more interesting. More large scale work, more Big Names™ if you’re into the Big Name™ artists, and, apparently, an impromptu guerilla chiptune performance near city hall by jefftheworld, amongst others. A lot of it is captured in jefftheworld’s YouTube channel. “So Empty, Space” is embeded below.
Personal Maps
I’ve been keeping a map of (most) walking treks through the city of London and where I’ve been eating and drinking (not often.) It’s all from memory, so it’s not all accurate, but it gives a good sense for how and where I’ve been spending my time here. Yes, I have walked a lot.
By comparison, here’s a map showing all the places I ate at (and drank at) and took take-out food from in Toronto, from January up to the time I left. The interesting thing about this map is how local it is.
Note the scale in comparison to the London map. Something could be said about a one’s habits in a city they’ve long called home. You get into a groove and don’t really venture out too far. Being in a new country, I haven’t found all those home comforts yet so I go around seeking them. Either that or there really is shit all to see in Toronto.
Last Weekend In Toronto
Well, that was it. Last weekend (not this current weekend) was the last weekend I spent living in Toronto.
That weekend was also Gay Pride in Toronto and, as was the case last year, I was right in the middle of things. My apartment was in the centre of it all with my front door clogged with revelers, my street closed to traffic and my living room windows giving me a decent view of one of the main concert stages. It was loud, it went late and it gave me headaches. I don’t mind the event as there’s plenty of people watching to be done and roasted corn (made right outside my apartment) to be eaten but, this year, it felt very disconnected. I was disassembling furniture and packing boxes and archiving old CDs and cleaning out old nooks to the sounds of a DJ and thousands and thousands of loud and celebratory people.
I needed an escape so I headed down to the Dundas streetcar stop, rode it through downtown and Chinatown and Little Portugal, walked down Ossington to Queen West and hopped through a few art galleries. Queen West was unusually quiet for a Saturday afternoon. Down there I checked out the Evolution: 30 Years of Computer Games exhibit at Interaccess. Despite the huge party happening outside my door, I chose to spend the afternoon by crossing half the city to go play video games on computers from the 1980s in an art gallery. This is a good summary of my tendencies and interests.
The space was small but it covered a wide range of hardware and software, most of it on systems that I have no familiarity with (I started with the NES so I didn’t have any of those 80s computer systems.) You can see some blurry shots of the items on display in my flickr stream. I played, or merely touched, every machine except for the Microsoft Flight Simulator and the one playing Gears of War: it was a Games For Windows sponsored event. What struck me the most is that, despite the improvements in visual fidelity and processing power, game design hasn’t changed much from what was on display there. The real change was in the hardware and user interface design.
Playing a Space Invaders clone is familiar and easy until you do it on this controller. Everyone knows Tetris and how fun it can be, but they don’t know the pain that comes from playing it on a clunky, unresponsive 80s keyboard with some totally arbitrary key mappings. Rampage is a classic game that hasn’t aged well — it sucks — but it sucks that much more when using this bloody thing. Hell, in a fit of Simpsons-esque lunacy, I couldn’t even get this game to work. Pressing “any” key would bring up another screen asking me to press something else. Hitting that would bring me back to the “press any key” prompt screen. Repeat until capitulation.
That’s the most obvious improvement in gaming over the last three decades. Games, especially on consoles, just work. Even the bad games. You don’t have to deal with clunky controllers and C64 load prompts and awkward, slow storage devices (one game there was running off of a compact cassette.) You just put it in, grab the ergonomic controller and go. It’s why I’m not entirely sold on the Playstation 3, it seems to be a step backwards in some regards.
Anyway, after that diversion I headed home along old familiar streets. I stopped by at Chippy’s along the way for some Herring and ate it at Trinity Bellwoods. After that I walked along Queen West and down Bathurst to King St and through the downtown core past the Eaton Centre through Yonge-Dundas Square by the old Sam’s sign accross Ryerson University back to the crowds around my apartment on Church St. These are all well-traveled routes but on that day they felt different. Condos were sprouting where there were none. Old favourite restaurants were boarded up with “for lease” signs in their windows. Stores and signs had changed all over. This is normal life-of-the-city change but it all feels sudden and drastic when noticed for what could be the very last time.
I’ll be back in Toronto. I’ll visit. Maybe I’ll work here again. The hope, however, is that I won’t. This is entirely dependent on what I do over the next four months, but it’s the goal. I don’t hate the city, quite the contrary, but I’m done with it. It doesn’t feel the same anymore and it doesn’t feel like it’s for me. Toronto is like one of the controllers for those old videogame systems: nostalgic, full of memories and fun to play with occasionally but I wouldn’t want to be stuck with it. It’s time for something more ergonomic, something that suits my matured tastes. I fly out on Monday.
FITC and Flash
FITC Toronto was in full swing over the last weekend and it struck me with a severe case of deja vu. Annual conferences like this, if you attend them frequently enough, are strange beasts. Forgotten names are brought up, faces that are seen once a year show up and all the lunch time (in)decisions and presentations feel awfully familiar. There are always interesting bits and pieces and insights to take away from some of the talks, though it’s often a bunch of stuff that can be seen on the presenters’ website anyway.
But it’s a great place to network and find work and, with my upcoming ronin lifestyle, it couldn’t have come at a better time.
One of the main presentations at FITC, every year, is the Adobe keynote. It is often the same predictable thing. They show some weird, little side tools (this year it was kuler), some new Adobe Labs stuff, they boast about the adoption rate for the latest version of Flash player (video traffic this year) and they show new features from the perpetual next version of the Flash authoring application. This year they focused mostly on improved animation tweening controls, a modified timeline and some native rigging and 3D tools. Nice features, but they should have been in the previous version of Flash. Or, more accurately, they should have been there before they alienated their animator (read: non-programmer) demographic.
A preview of some of the motion tween features in Flash 10. See the rest of my FITC 08 pictures here.But it’s all part of the Madden philosophy: getting people to pay for a constant stream of incremental updates and fucking over those that don’t by restricting the compatibility between the new versions. Fuck you Adobe. Everyone would be perfectly happy if you released upgrades half as often with twice as many features, but you couldn’t milk that now, could you?
Even those files that are saved as “Flash 8″ documents don’t work for me because I have the audacity to have “Flash 8 Basic“. Unable to open document with this version of Flash because it contains screens
? Seriously? Screens? Who uses “screens”? No one. The file has no screens. You’re just trying to fuck me. Damnit. I’m sick of it. You win. I give up. Take my money. I am upgrading today.
But this better be the last time.
Earth Hour
Earth Hour is a crock of shit. It’s an insignificant gesture that amounts to nothing. An 8.7% drop in power usage sounds significant, but what does it really mean? Assuming that there isn’t any statistical error in that number (there likely is!), an 8.7% deviation from the hourly average amounts to an annual deviation of 0.0009932%. Basically insignificant. A number so small that things like National Night Out, where people are encouraged to keep all their outside lights on, will likely cancel it out. Then again, they don’t have the marketing push that Earth Hour does.
Google’s temporary black on white design was emblematic of the problem. In their own about page they acknowledged that black screens on LCD monitors actually consume more electricity than white ones. It’s a shallow showing from Google when you consider just how much power their data centres consume and what kind of environmental impact they have.
To make a real difference — an 8%, if not more, annual drop in consumption — you have to do more than a symbolic gesture. Ban incandescent bulbs. Get all the massive corporate towers to shut off their lights when not in use (something they should be doing for Lights Out anyway). Get retailers to dim their glaring lightshow storefronts turned off. Get people to use public transit and get the government to invest in it, especially the dilapidated TTC (who are in a legal strike position as of Tuesday and, if they do go on strike they will be bring more cars onto the roads.)
And Earth Hour isn’t really about that. It’s about the marketing. The WWF, along with Leo Burnett Australia (the Australian office of my current employer), spent a lot of money on a very extensive campaign to promote this. It is a feel-good campaign that can be exploited and flaunted (which they’re very much doing).
Ironically, the best thing about Earth Hour was when they shut off all the obnoxiously bright and distracting advertisements and TV screens that surround Yonge and Dundas. Now that is a cause I can get behind.
Zombie Walk Toronto
Sunday afternoon was the annual Toronto Zombie Walk. I didn’t partake but I was down to take a picture of the quite organized horde of zombies shuffling up Bathurst Street, sticking to the sidewalk and obeying all traffic signals. They might be undead but they aren’t barbarians!
Apart from one kid getting completely freaked out — his parents had to reassure him that it wasn’t real — the actual walk was kind of dull. The real amusement happened away from the main route with the straggler zombies. There’d be guys casually walking down a street talking on their cellphones with their shirts completely covered in blood and girls with putrid makeup on their faces and blood covered stockings boarding streetcars. The looks those people would get were worth the price of admission alone and because they weren’t part of a giant procession many onlookers had no basis to dismiss it as part of an event. I saw plenty of confused and scared people on the streets that day.
Montreal International Game Summit
I’ve been contemplating going to the Montreal International Game Summit at the end of November. In part because I want to participate in Kokoromi Collective’s Gamma256 competition and event but mostly because of the great speakers and sessions they have lined up. I could also stand to visit the city even if it is in the end of November, but the $500 price tag is keeping me at bay and that’s not even counting accommodation and transportation.
Of course I could just skip that and wait for the (considerably cheaper) Toronto Independent Games Conference, but just as Toronto’s game development community is a pale shadow of Montreal’s, TIGC is a weak replacement for MIGS. To this day I don’t understand why our city’s game development community is so non-existent. All we seem to get are cheap consumer events.
At the same time I really do hope that the Toronto event is a success and picks things up. The city might not be able to woo the big name, triple A publishers and developers but maybe it can foster a grassroots independent gaming scene. Metanet’s success and the success of Jonathan Mak’s Everyday Shooter will hopefully mark the start of such a scene.
(And hopefully I can somehow get myself in there too.)
