So here’s what I’m going to do, there’s a few subjects i want to talk about, but i’d like to do each subject justice, so instead of trying to cram it all into one mega-post i’m going to summize here, and then i might elaborate in future posts, which will be linked from here if i do. Sound good?

Great. Let’s start shall we?

2008: A Recap

Two Thousand & Eight was, on the whole a good year for me, i was finally working in London, even if the commute was a bitch, i was enjoying my job and everything was peachy. In April i took Steve to Barcelona for his birthday, that was lovely. And in the summer we enjoyed a long weekend on the Norfolk Broads with our very good friends Andy & Debz.

I turned 22, which was pretty uneventful, and after the summer my personal life took a back seat to the large projects i was working on at work.

In September we finally moved to London, north London. We’re now living in a flat in a 100+ year old converted hospital, and we couldn’t be happier. My commute to work has gone from 2hrs 15mins to around 45/50mins. Bliss.

November was fun, i was taken to Moscow, Russia with work to meet the clients we were working with, needless to say we got drunk a lot, had fun and came home with a massive hangover!

Xmas 08 was, meh. in 2007 we decided to avoid it all and go visit our friends in Dubai, i really wish we had done that in 2008, instead we were shooting from London to Kent around Kent and back to London to try and fit everyone in. Not fun.

All Work & No Play

Work has been seriously intense, not long after joining AA|RF, the team i was a part of started to jump ship, then my boss left, then the rest of the team followed. I stayed, because after Impact this place was like heaven, so my new boss was my previous bosses boss (you following?)

This was great because me and Paul get on really well, and find it really easy to work together, it’s a great working relationship where we constantly challenge one another, i’ve learnt a lot from him, and can honestly say he’s become a good friend of mine.

Those are the good aspects of work, the not-so-good aspects are pretty typical for the Technology sector, but have had an effect on me none the less. Working 87.5 hour weeks, long projects, long hours. They all take their toll, after a year of it i’ve started to feel a bit exhausted, the time off i had at Xmas was the first ‘real’ break i’d had in a long time.

As for my future there, who can say? I’m still young, i’d like to travel and see the world. All i can say is watch this space.

Battlestar Galactica: Awesomeness

A few of our friends had recommended Battlestar Galactica to us, and it’s been something we’d been meaning to investigate, well luckily for us our friend Fang came to stay with us, and bestowed upon us THE ENTIRE FREAKING SERIES 0-3 on DVD. Thank you Fang!

We watched it, and got instantly hooked, on one day we consumed a staggering 16 hours of BSG, and are actively downloading new episodes from the US as they air.

BSG simply put, is one of the most amazing pieces of SciFi/Drama i have seen in a very, very long time. It’s exceptionally well realised and the main story arc is deep and complex, to the point were throw-away incidents in the early years have major significance much later in the timeline.

If you haven’t seen it, i strongly recommend it.

Burnout Paradise

Goog God Mother of Mary. This is easily the best game i have ever played. I actually didn’t realise how much i enjoy driving games until i played this. But it’s more than just a driving game it’s a free-roaming explorative landscape (which is huge) and you drive around finding races, challenges and so on.

The real catch though, is not just gameplay but the way in which the game incorporates online-gameplay. Normally in games you have to stop what you’re doing, go to some sort of “online” menu and find a game to join.

Not in burnout. Tap right on your D-pad a couple of times and you are seamlessly dropped into an online game. I mean super seamlessly. It’s technically amazing and makes it really rewarding to get in, get on and burnout.

I fucking love this game.

Boxee & Me (and you too)

Easily one of my most favourite bits of technology in 2008 Boxee is a customized implementation of XBMC which runs on Mac OSX, Apple TV, Linux & Windows.

What sets Boxee apart from other media center solutions is two-fold. First there is the built-in plugins, which cover hundred of online media outlets including BBC iPlayer, Hulu and MTV Music among many many others.

Then their is the social aspect of the service, you can add friends, recommend media, view their activity. It’s all very promising. Boxee is currently in an open alpha state, but stable enough for use. Oh and did i mention, it’s 100% free and mostly open source.

Last saturday me, my partner and a friend of ours were invited to participate in something which only a select few in the world were lucky enough to experience. We got to play on Sony’s next generation games console, the Playstation 3. What was even nicer was that this was not some sort of public or press event, oh no, we got the opportunity to play PS3 in the comfort of our good friends andy & debs front room. Fueled with pizza and larger we were set for a night weekend of awesome fun.

In a word the Playstation 3 is phenomenal. It’s physical appearance is very smart, although the biggest of the 3 main next-gen consoles it is (in my opinion) by far the most aesthetically pleasing (with the Wii coming in a very close second) It’s top is curved and flows down to the front panel which is sparse and minimal with only a cut-out for the optical slot loading drive and two discrete touch sensitive buttons; power & eject. It’s majestically wrapped in a shell of super-polished black plastic (ala iPod) flanked with a burst of sun-bright chrome.

The machine is also exceptionally quiet when operating, you would find it difficult to detect the change in ambient noise between off and on, which is a hell of a lot more than can be said for the XBox series. This is even more amazing when you consider that the Playstation 3’s cell processor contains 9 active processing cores.

The SIXAXIS controller as well, is very very light, it hasn’t changed much in the looks department, there’s now a PS Playstation button in the middle. Turning the console on from the controller is a very cool feature though. The GUI is Sony’s XMB or cross media bar, familiar to anyone with a PSP, and it works very well in a larger format. The GUI is fluid and responsive and looks simply amazing in 1080p HD over HDMI.

Onto the games; available to play on this pre-release console were some unfinished games complete with their bugs and hiccups, but I’m not going to dwell on that because we were playing a pre-release console after all. The games we enjoyed were as follows:

• Resistance: Fall of Man
• Motorstorm
• Ridge Racer 7

Resistance: Fall of Man
This game is truly amazing, the graphics are simply breathtaking, every thing on the screen is so realistic looking, every surface and object is fully textured with stunning high resolution detail. The graphics this game pumped out move expectations of gaming more into the realm of full CGI film. They simply have to be seen to be believed, at times in this game it’s easy to mistake what your eyes are showing you for real life.

The game-play! Oh my the game-play! Nearly everything you see is reactive, in most shooter games it’s easy to distinguish between foreground playable objects and background drops which offer minimal or no level of interaction at all, in Resistance everything reacts, shoot a window and it’ll smash into a million pieces, quite normal, but shoot it from further away and you’ll fracture and splinter the pane of glass into shards, but every shot is different, not two fractures are the same.

Signs hanging overhead swing if you shoot them, fall off if you shoot them in the right place (try the hinges) discarded vending machine which serve no purpose other than to make the environment subversive are fully reactive, shoot it on the side at just the right angle and you can force the door to swing open, there are a million other examples of this level of interaction, simply put it’s amazing. Monsters never disappear, if something dies in an area it will still be there next time you go back.

The story-line as well is very compelling, more and more games are being crafted to such high standards of story-telling, it’s no wonder the film industry is looking to games for inspiration!

Motorstorm
The most fun ever. This game is the type of game that is perfect if you’ve got a few people over, it’s just so much fun. The premise is a motocross style race at mental speeds across a fictitious canyon landscape (it might not be fictitious but that’s not important) Again the graphics this game pumps out are truly stunning, mud and dust files everywhere, other vehicles react realistically if you bash into them, it’s high-speed madness!

This was the only game we played which took advantage of the new SIXAXIS controller’s tilt-control functionality, and although this was fun and a bit of a novelty, in this game particularly I feel that tactile feedback by way of rumble would have been a lot more fun.

One of the most fun things to do in this game is crash, when (not if) you crash everything slows down, your vehicle spins out of control and the camera goes into matrix style bullet-time, if you’re unfortunate enough to become departed from your vehicle then your character will bump around with amazing rag-doll physics.

The game is like watching a skating DVD; it’s great to watch people doing it right, but it’s so much more fun to see them fail!

Ridge Racer 7
We didn’t really play this one all that much, it did look a lot nicer than previous versions of Ridge Racer (I’m really into Ridge Racer for PSP at the moment) but it didn’t really wow anyone, it just felt like ridge racer. There were some nice motion blur effects on tail lights and what have you and the backdrops were of much higher quality than I ever remember, but I was put off by the voice over, she was an annoying whore.

Basically sony was right when they said that next-generation gaming doesn’t start until they say so, they’ve got an amazing piece of hardware, and if the first batch of games are any indication they’ve got some standard setting games also. Sony have gotten a lot of bad press for the PS3, but when you play it you can see that it’s worth the wait, worth the bad press. With no question of doubt or hesitation I’m getting one as soon as they hit our shores in March 2007. You’d be a fool not to.