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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

See my flickr set

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.)

I went to see Eastern Promises a few evenings ago (it was good but A History of Violence was better) and the walk to the theatre took me right by the set for The Incredible Hulk. The stretch of Yonge Street between Gerrard and Dundas, a busy area, was closed for evenings and nights for a few days while the film’s final showdown was being filmed in faux-Harlem. You would think that in this day and age of CGI a blockbuster of this sort wouldn’t need to close down such a busy street to do its filming. But no, here they are inconveniencing everyone but the Teamsters, the extras and the cops getting paid extra to sit around doing nothing.

My camera, and its new lens, was with me so I pulled it out, took a few photos and quickly packed it away. I’ve always been a bit self-conscious with the camera — more so with the large and bulky SLR — which is why the photos I’ve taken have been predominantly landscapes or cityscapes that involve few, if any, people. Most were taken in isolation where there was no reason to be self-conscious. It feels different in the city.

Anyway, with it packed away I made my way to the movie just in time for the 9:30 showing. The movie started a little after 9:50. Twenty fucking minutes of trailers and commercials. I thought “oh yeah, this is why I don’t go to the theatre anymore!” The shock was even more pronounced after seeing 31 movies at the film festival where I never had to endure more than two minutes of pre-film bumpers. But twenty minutes? For a film that I paid more to see than at the film festival? I think I’ll save the “cinema experience” for the next film festival.

On the way back I stopped by the south side of the film shoot for a different perspective. After taking a photo or two a group (gaggle?) of women walked by pointing and saying “Paparazzi. Paparazzi.” One of them pulled out a cellphone camera. I looked at them and said that I’m not. “I’m just a guy with a big camera.” They didn’t believe, said “paparazzi” one more time and moved on. If random women are going to be conversing with me on the street then I’m not sure if I should remain self-conscious or if I should wield that camera exclusively.

The action on the weekend wasn’t restricted to the screens of the theatres. I came across this scene on my walk home today. Commentary provided by some local slack-jawed bystander.

I have no idea what instigated this but the police swarmed in seconds. Pretty quick response time if you ask me. Later, walking through the scene I notice a considerable pool of blood on the sidewalk. And yes, the cop does kick the dude when he’s stuffed into the backseat of their car…

It’s that time of the year again. Only a week until the Toronto Film Festival starts up again and the excitement has just crossed the threshold from not palpable to palpable. This is my third year, so I’m still an amateur festival goer, but I’ve been ramping up my attendance nicely. From fourteen movies last year I’m going up to a potential thirty five. This is also the first year that I’m getting them in advance with a festival program and it’s all quite overwhelming. Buying individual tickets, as I have previously done, is easy. I just go online, see what hasn’t been sold out and try to arrange it into a nice schedule. This attempt to cram thirty-five movies into less than ten days is something else entirely.

I spent a good four hours on a patio yesterday afternoon making my way through the schedule and the 500 page program book. It left me feeling woozy. I’m sure all those beers had something to do with it too but I feel no less closer to my final list of first and second choice picks than I did before I received my order form.

That said, here’s a list of some of my stand-out films:

• Flashpoint: I saw SPL three years ago as my first ever Midnight Madness showing and it was such a blast. Flashpoint is a new Wilson Yip / Donnie Yen action movie to follow that up. Instant top of the list!
• The Edge of Heaven: I really enjoyed Fatih Akin’s Head-On. It was very raw and honest, I felt. Interested to see how he follows it up.
• Ulzhan: The description makes it seem like a mix of Paris, Texas with the films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Good enough for me.
• No Country for Old Men: Yeah, this will likely get a wide release but who cares? It’s Coen Brothers.
• Control: A biographical film on the life of Joy Division‘s Ian Curtis directed by the perfectly suited Anton Corbijn.
• Run, Fat Boy, Run: Yes, it’s directed by that David Schwimmer, but it has Simon Pegg and that’s all that counts. Plus, I tend to see too many depressing films so a comedy is needed.
• The Passage: The description calls it a an artistically rendered horror film that is “channelling” Alfred Hitchcock. Sold.
• Lust, Caution: Ang Lee’s film on pre-revolution Shanghai.
• Blood Brothers: A mob movie set in… pre-revolution Shanghai.

I try to make it a habit to see every Western that screens at the film festival but it’s becoming a futile quest. There are only two Westerns this year. One is The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford , but that’s only getting the Visa Screening Room treatment and, no doubt because of Brad Pitt’s starring role, it’s already sold out. There’s also SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO and I do hope to see that, but I’d only count it as a half-Western. There has been some talk of a potential Western revival because of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and the upcoming 3:10 To Yuma remake. It might be true but I don’t think it’ll ever be anything more than a small blip on the film radar. When there are more movies about pre-revolution Shanghai than there are about the American (Canadian/Australian) frontier, it’s hard to call it a revival.

Amongst the many recent and upcoming architectural works happening around Toronto as part of the “cultural renassiance” (I don’t know about that one), the Royal Ontario Museum’s crystal has remained my favourite. I liked it during the concept (even if it invoked a little bit of the Louvre deja vu), I liked it during construction once it started to jet out over Bloor St., looming behind all the generic high-end retailers of Yorkville, and now that I’ve seen it from the inside I like it more.

After a concert and gala celebration, today (from midnight until the evening) was the free “architectural opening” of the new addition. That is a fancy way of saying “you can come inside and look at the structure, but ignore the fact that none of the exhibits are set up since we’re months behind schedule.” And much like their scheduling, their planning for the day was atrocious. It was a ticketed free event, which meant that you can get in for free so long as you got yourself a ticket in advance. Many people lined up last night, during and after the concert, to get tickets that they would use in the morning.

I was not one of those. After watching game 3 of the Stanley Cup finals, I was in no mood to venture out into that sweltering June humidity. I figured that I’d just take a chance with the morning weather instead.

After breakfast and a rather brisk walk, I was at the back side of the ROM. A hand written sign informed me “TICKETS AT BLOOR ST ENTRANCE”, so I wandered towards Bloor St. only to be greeted by a giant line. I took a spot and asked the lady in front of me if that was the line to get tickets.

“No, this is the line for those that already have tickets.”

OK. I worked my way around the line to Bloor Street and saw that there wasn’t a secondary line. Maybe the tickets were all accounted for? I went back to the end of the line, which was now further down University Avenue. “Excuse me, where do you get ticket?”

“You have to go to the back, I think. This line is for those with tickets”.

I returned to the back of the ROM, past the “TICKETS AT BLOOR ST ENTRANCE” sign and into the rear security entrance. “Where exactly do you get tickets?”

“You have to line up on Bloor Street.”

“But I was just there and they told me that it’s for ticket-holders…”

“It’s the same line.”

Back to the line I went, now ending even further down University Ave, and ignored everything and anything that anyone not wearing a “ROM” shirt said. I put my headphones back on, put the volume up and hummed along to myself Automatic crystal remote control, we come to move your soul

By the time my point in line made it to the Bloor St. corner it was clear that the ROM officials totally underestimated the turnout and that the ticket-holders line was the same as the ticket-getters line, to the dismay of all those that lined up beforehand to get them. I was glad I didn’t bother the night before.

Once inside, the building feels a lot more welcoming than menacing. Some might decry the lack of curves or, even, the lack of 90 degree corners, but I welcome it. Walls and pillars jet out of the floors at odd angles and disappear into the ceiling, illuminated. There are windows and gaps all around through which you can see other levels and sections of the crystal, all full of activity. Once the exhibits are installed this will unify them together in the space. The light and the openness will complement them well. The current spaces in the old building feel too much like the tombs from which the pieces of its collections were taken.

Yet the crystal doesn’t forget about that old building. Inside the crystal there are signs of the old brick architecture, seemingly breaking through the white walls. Doorways and walkways seamlessly take you from one building to the other and in the central hallway it’s as if the crystal is hugging the old facade. It’s ying and yang, but as Andrew Blum writes, Like the city itself, they all connect—far more than they collide or coalesce. This building is a monument to that Toronto, and to its future.

Sure, it has its detractors, as expected, but the mood on the floor was positive. There was a lot of discovery and playfulness and when you consider that it’s going to be host to a large number of dinosaurs and, naturally, kids that’s a good sense to exude.

I’ll be posting more photos in my flickr ROM set over the next couple of days.

With the XBox 360 on the mend, I’ve been relatively gameless. Although it isn’t my only game device, it was my primary game device and without it I’m no more compelled to enter that secondary gaming world as I was when it was working. My Playstation 2 hasn’t been plugged in since I moved. The DS, home to games I’ve been meaning to play, hasn’t captivated me. The PSP is nothing but a portable Lumines device that comes out about once or twice a week when I’m on the train, and that’s only when the battery isn’t dead: which is every other weekend. And the PC? Winamp and SLSK and Firefox.

The benefit of this malaise is that I’ve been compensating with the other media forms, buying more books and music and movies than normal. It helps that there have been a number of really good releases lately like, last week, the Criterion re-release of The Third Man. I even went out to see a stage show. A nice local production. Legitimate theatre.

“Legitimate” in the Simpsons Planet of the Apes kind of manner. Though Evil Dead: The Musical is not entirely as spoofy and goofy as seeing Troy McClure sing “I hate every ape I see, from chimpan-A to chimpanzez”, it is equally awesome and catchy. Especially with songs like What the fuck was that?

A cult 80s independent horror film with Bruce Campbell turned into a musical? There’s ample potential for failure with that formula, but somehow the cast and crew have pulled it off quite magnificently. Evil Dead: The Musical is as awesome as it sounds, full of humour, catchy songs and gore. Lots of gore for a stage show, actually. So much so that the first two rows are considered the “splatter zone.” Though it does introduce a few new characters to keep things moving along, the adaptation is mostly faithful to the movie with most of the action taking place in a somewhat elaborate cabin set, full of clattering plates and talking moose heads and severed limbs.

Some of the song and dance numbers dragged on a tad too long, much like in Thriller, but they never crossed that enough already I get it line. A lot of it really has to do with Ryan Ward, who plays the lead role of “Ash” and makes it entirely his own. He’s not trying to mimic Bruce Campbell, but he definitely pays homage to his legacy. Many of his classic one-liners are repeated, to rowdy fan approval, but everything else feels like it belongs to Ryan Ward. He pulls it off and carries the whole bloody show with him, boomstick, chainsaw and all.

If going to a show where an orchestra plays music from video games makes me a nerd, then what does it mean when I go to two such shows in a month? After going to Video Games Live a month ago with (recap writing) Jenn, Saturday night I attended Play! A Video Game Symphony. The main difference between the two shows was the $50+ price disparity, which reflected itself in the quality of the arrangements, the guests, the size of the orchestra, the audience (and how it was dressed), and the lushness of the music. Maybe I’ll write a review later.

After the show, I went out to check out some Nuit Blanche exhibits. The first destination was by far the best, Fujiko Nakaya’s “Fog in Toronto” fog installation. It was really crowded and really, really muddy, but the experience was almost surreal. I took some photos!

The other stuff wasn’t as compelling. There were a lot of nice galleries open — and for the first time I saw the “Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art”, which was more interesting than I thought it would be — but those can be seen on any normal day without all the crowds. There was a tree wrapped in tin foil. OK. There was a wall with shoes on it. OK!? There was a projection of sheep on the Planetarium. OK. There was a projection of The Three Stooges on a wall, played at a fraction of normal speed. OK. There were some funky light things at Trinity Bellwoods and at the Drake and the Gladstone, but apart from that, there was only the fog. And it was muddy. But it was worth it.