March 2005 Archives

Forum Image-in-air3D, a french community of 3D graphists, made me the honor to request an online interview. Thanks Vincent for the great editing job !

In the current landscape of first person shooters for PC, XIII looks like a mutant.

While other titles reach for ultra-realistic, highly detailed graphics, this game is making a more clever use of current video boards capabilities.

Since its story is adapted from a famous european graphic novel, most of the game is rendered with a cell shaded look, with original use of comics conventions such as text bubbles, sounds, and layout of additional views into multiple squares.

The cell-shaded effect is smooth and well renderedthroughout the game,but it is not the only original use of graphics acceleration. Flashback scenes rendered with a shiny, flickering, black and white feel are a nice way to draw the player into a real story.

The story itself, with the unveiling of a global consipiracy, add a lot of this overall well balanced game. I found the game well balanced and very enjoyable, with a minimum of frustrating areas (which had mostly to do with trying to find out the weakness of some of the 'bosses').

It is so refreshing to see that this kind of creativity still exists. I can't help wondering, going through this game, about what truly original visual experiences will be available in the future - once the novelty of realistic lighting and high dynamic range glow will wear out.

I just watched What Dreams May Come (1998) ... and boy did I need to watch this movie again. I had forgotten how intense and poetic the text and the imagery are in this movie.

The text is of a rare quality in a movie of that scale, which makes it that much more enjoyable. It is the kind of text that reminds you what is really important in life, and if you can dig under the first layer of romantic quest of soulmates in the afterlife, it is a powerful tool to refocus away from what can become a dull daily routine.

As for the fantastic imagery... the major part of the movie is a succession of living paintings, from surrealistics to expressionists. There are so many details that it is difficult to take it all in with a single viewing.

I can only compare watching this living, breathing painted world to what I felt the first time I watched 'Pleasantville' : a brilliant expression of how something that could only exist in imagination can be translated on a movie screen.

This kind of visionary display is very different from showing dinosaurs or galaxies far far away. More than simply showing what can already be done with current visual effects, it hints at the kind of visions that are yet to come on screens.

Far Cry is the next title to check off on my list of games to complete.

Months after a rocky release, with a stable version and better video drivers, this game is a pleasure to play most of the time.

Overall, the game is nearly flawless. The story is engaging, with some plot twists and well scripted sequences. Paired with a captivating soundtrack and the brilliant graphics, it delivers the right balance to draw you right in the middle of an action movie such as Die Hard.

The graphics are just spectacular. If Doom III set the standard for claustrophobic lighting and Half Life 2 for scripted action and physics, Far Cry raises the bar for rencering vast, outdoor landscapes. Its jungles are deep, shaded, luxuriant places that deserve to be cited as a character in their own right.

This is also the only game I can think of with actually challenging AI. You just have to see how enemies react to your moves, change tactics and adapt to whatever you throw at them. In what other game can you create a diversion in one area and watch your enemies rush toward the noise as you discretely crawl around them. The level of unscripted behaviour in either mercenaries or creatures is high enough to ensure replayability.

And I just might replay it again, if it was not for some difficulty balancing issues that plague the game, especially near the end. Some of the last stages of the game are tedious and sometimes just plain impossible to go through without some kind of cheat code.

I just ran into another great source of daily high quality photographs, this time from National Geographic - Photo in the News. This kind of pictures provide a view on aspects of the world that would otherwise completely escape us. They are sometimes surprising, often unexpected and always fascinating. And they even come with a continuous RSS feed :)

10x10 / 100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time / by Jonathan J. Harris This site provides a mosaic of news photographs, updated every hour, and representative of the most talked about news of the moment. It offers a very visual equivalent to other graphical views of the news such as Newsmap or Google News. It is interesting to see how the absence of words can alter what looks interesting in news stories.