First Day of SIGGRAPH!

We finally get started! We were able to take the HOV lane in to the convention center, so we missed the traffic.

My first class is Massive Model Visualization Techniques. It has some good info, but a little dry at parts.

After a quick lunch we see Ed Catmull, president of Walt Disney Animation and Pixar, give the keynote.

His speech was entitled Managing the Creative Environment, and it had some details about the start of Pixar, ideas vs people, management style and more. It was really good!

Here is the room for the Ed Catmull speech earlier in the day:

Closer to the start of the speech we noticed a line forming down the hallway and snaking back onto itself. It turns out that the auditorium fills up quickly and everyone gets turned away. We go to the first overflow room, but it looks like the video feed won't show him. We end up at the Geek Bar watching another remote feed projected on the wall.

There was also some odd robots at the new tech demo.

After that I checked out the bookstore and caught the end of Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games: Part 2 to see some details on how Blizzard rendered Starcraft 2. Looks nice!

The exhibition floor isn't open until Tuesday, so we take off and bolt to the Autodesk User's Group and Party.

Technorati Tags: SIGGRAPH,Ed Catmull,robots,Blizzard,Starcraft 2

Desktop Tower Defense

I've been playing a lot of Desktop Tower Defense. It's a simple game, but very addictive. Your goal is trying to shoot all the "creeps" that are trying to get from one side of the screen to the other, and you do this by placing guns in what amounts to a maze-like configuration.



You are given all the time you want for the initial configuration, but once the game starts it doesn't stop! You spend most of your time frantically upgrading guns or placing new ones of different types. Some creeps are immune to certain guns.

It's fast and I'm addicted to it - check it out! It has gotten into a few game journalists' and reviewers' Game Of The Year lists as well.

Portal

I just started playing Portal the other night, and I'm hooked! Portal is a game that also acts like a technology demo. If you've played any first-person-shooter computer game you instantly know how the control scheme, but the twist is the Portal device. This will let you create portals on different surfaces that allow you to solve puzzles and complete levels.

I was going to just "check it out" a little bit when I started and before I realized what was going on I was at level 15 and it was about 12:30am - an hour flew by!



If you must know more, check out the wikipedia article, but beware - it contains spoilers.

I'm not even going to attempt to create more of a mini-review than this, but I highly recommend this game! It is bundled in the Orange Box, which is a fantastic deal (if you haven't already played/own Half-Life 2) in that $37.99 (lowest price I've seen it at Circuit City) gets you Half-Life 2, Episode 1, Episode 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2 (the latest revision of the granddaddy of class-based shooters...this time with sublime art direction). That's alotta gaming bang for the buck!

As I mentioned in the previous post's comments, a 2D Flash version of Portal is here.

Stacks of games

We just got to spend over $650 in games at lunch today. It's kind of surreal to be looking at a stack like this, but I don't mind!

Harmonica Hero

Someone sent this out today and I can't stop watching it!



Now I definitely need an Xbox 360!

Thanks Louis!

Katamari Damacy

Another game (for the PS2) that I love is Katamari Damacy. It's very simplistic, very stylized, and definitely not a typical American game. I'll just cut and paste from the wikipedia article to describe the story:

The game's plot concerns a tiny prince on a mission to rebuild the stars, constellations and Moon, which his father, the King of All Cosmos, has playfully destroyed. This is achieved by rolling a magical, highly adhesive ball called a katamari around various locations, collecting increasingly larger objects, ranging from thumbtacks to schoolchildren to mountains, until the ball has grown large enough to become a star. The game falls under both the puzzle and action game genres, since strategy as well as dexterity are needed to complete a mission.

You just use both the analog sticks to move the prince around collecting the objects. It's a great nonviolent game for kids, but it falls into the Japanese-absurdist-LSD-inspired categories, and some of the cutscenes and intros need some explaining.

I have not played any of the sequels, but hopefully they don't stray too far from what made the original so unique.

Guitar Hero 2

I got Guitar Hero 2 for my birthday, and I love it.

We have Dance Dance Revolution, which we all think is great, and I still really like Parappa the Rapper. Guitar Hero's basis is still the tried and true rhythm game, but the controller sets it off. It is a lot of fun.

I was going back and forth on wireless versus wired controllers. There was a guitar controller that I liked, but it was wired. I eventually decided on the wireless guitar, and it was the right choice. With kids, cords are a no-no, and with the wireless you can move around more and even sit back on the couch and play.



We had some friends over and at the end of the night we fired up Guitar Hero, and it was even more fun. I borrowed another wireless guitar from work (for, uh, testing), and we had some guitar/bass faceoffs. What's funny is if the TV volume is down far enough, all you hear is the clicking and clacking of the keys and the picks.

I have the actual Red Octane Guitar Hero branded semi-Stratocaster-style guitar, but you can pick up a generic guitar (in semi-Explorer-style) for about half the price, and I'll be picking up a second guitar pretty quickly.

I've heard a lot of jibber-jabber of how playing Guitar Hero can help your ability playing real guitar. As someone that's taking lessons playing real guitar, I don't see it. The closest I think one could get to Guitar Hero/real guitar synergy is maybe practicing with a metronome. Or light pattern recognition, but translating buttons to notes and chords? I don't think so.

More bees to love

The Halo 2 videogame had an elaborate Alternate Reality Game (ARG) called I love bees that tied in with the launch of the game. It involved real world people getting emails, text messages, phone calls, etc, from in-game entities, artificial intelligences, and other characters.

It looks like those crazy Bungie guys are at it again, but this time for Halo 3.



Click on the image or go to http://halo3.com/comic/ to check it out. I accidentally found the clue that lead me to more parts of the game.