Monday, November 21, 2011

Pax 2010

 
The first year we went to Pax East was amazing.  Id like to post this pic of the band we met and saw perform on stage called Anamanaguchi.



















Playing Asteriods in the American Archade Museum good times!






Im playing on the pinball machine!  yeah























Thursday, November 3, 2011

Free GTA & GTA2 plus Wild Metal

I was studying wireframing of game flow in my Game Proj Managment class and I decided to use a classic like GTA.  I wished I had played GTA with Rob and Joe when they were kids but I didnt have too much play time.  Joe told me that I bought him his first copy of GTA for the PlayStation up in NH
by Nanas house, at the Ames store.  He was pretty happy about it. He said it was about 1998 or 97.
Well Steve picked up an old copy for the PC but it didnt run very good on my PC. Then he found this:
http://www.rockstargames.com/classics/?id=2
Free download of GTA GTA2 and Wild Metal. I knew I needed to share on my page for later review.
Cool huh?
I noticed on the inside of the packaging the current font and style of the game was used.  This game looks like it was pretty cool and not so violent or offensive as the other version.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

GET's Game Night with Harmonix and Autodesk

Last night I attended a talk by the Art Director of Harmonix in Cambridge Mass at Microsoft NERD Center.

I cant tell you everything but Ill write a few things now and some more later.  The talk was 2 hours.  I have my notes in the car I can upload his name later.

At the end of the talk he revealed that Harmonix is looking for help from Game Artists.  The first thing he talked about was what they look for in a new employee. He went over the Art time for this week's release
Dance Central.  Each member had a profile, pic and he gave their educational background, their role in the game and what they did to get the job or what different jobs in Harmonix each person had. 

The biggest surprise for me is that he said the look for individual artists, with preferably a fine art background.  They like if the team has outside art interests and current shows, exhibits, bands, singing, sculpture etc.
He was an approachable guy. He gave his own background and how he had been art director, concept artists, animator etc.  He gave the roles of the team and showed the dual roles.  He surprised me with the fact that
Harmonix is a Max studio.  He said that the game they worked with not was a total change from the past titles with Rock Band and Guitar Hero.  He told about how Harmonix has a music based happy party company. He gave history of the different games that came before Guitar hero break through, how they had to record their own titles at first and that now days the company is happy to pay the artists on the musicians for the use of thier songs.  He said they work hard, the company pays high but the artists like to be included now. At first they didnt cooperate and they studeo had a hard time. There were over 100 people at the talk. He asked for raised hands on how many artists had 3DS Max focus and there were only 2 and I was one of them.  They said that they just like Max and the game ways about Max.  This game because of the dance moves they used MotionBuilder too.  He said it worked out great.
One feature that I found amazing is that this game uses the Kinect and the game engine they use their proprietary engine is for a rhythm based work they were capturing video during the gameplay from the whole game and at the end (here is a spoiler) the game engine actually renders the video during the opening for the final level.  Its crazy.  Im going to write this up for everyone but I can only do the stream of consiousness style from the event because I dont have my notes and I dont want to wait and not share it with all of you.
One other thing that I wanted to share is that the team even though they were disappointed somewhat about not doing a hard rock game was so happy to have a new interface function that was based on the player's action figure instead of the RockBand meters that take up to 75 percent of the screen with very little for creative backgrounds or graphics that they can now utilize the screen design to enhance the activities.
OK Im done for now. At the end he put up that the company was looking for about 6 new employees.  I love Harmonix they are very classy company in the Boston area. Great talk!  I won some Dance Central Sunglasses too.  Ha Ha

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Pax East 2011 Boston


Over the next few days there will be information from the trip to Pax East. We have video links, pictures from the expo floor booths, crazy characters and pics from the talks we attended. Looking forward to sharing the cool stuff we saw at Pax East this year.

Child of Eden Video from Pax 2011
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL-FidT0o6A&feature=plcp&context=C32b1b32UDOEgsToPDskIdfQeS6Lp0cju64FfYDiFe


Pax East 2011
Rock Band on the Floor
Linkin Park  Shawn's family band
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxGZ_6N3Ad8&feature=plcp&context=C3525438UDOEgsToPDskKqQGv8e6W_5ai_GCH-1vlU