Archive for June, 2008
The Saxophonist
Sunday, June 29th, 2008He’s A Pirate
Friday, June 27th, 2008One of my friends, the manager of the Ateneo Rowing Team, showed this to me. It brought back a lot of good memories.
If you’re interested in signing up, feel free to contact the current captain through the details presented. The Ateneo Rowing Team takes anyone from any level, from beginner to experienced.
Honest thoughts on Urduja
Thursday, June 19th, 2008Urduja was alright. Not great, but not terrible either.
Wait, what am I talking about? For those who are only in-tune with what’s new from the other side of Pacific, ClickTheCity provides us with a good primer:
The Philippines has a pretty long history in animation, though few people really care to notice. Filipino animators have worked on the likes of Scooby Doo, Captain Planet and The Incredibles, providing talent for foreign outfits. Urduja is the first major effort to create a local animated feature, and though it still isn’t a full showcase of what we can do, it’s a pretty great effort.
The film tells a tale of Urduja, the legendary warrior princess of Pangasinan. Her father, the chief of the tribe, has fallen ill. Simakwel, an ambitious young warrior, seeks to gain the chiefdom by marrying the headstrong princess. But his plan encounters a hurdle when the dashing pirate Lim Hang arrives on their shores and saves Urduja from a Badjao arrow. Lim Hang and Urduja begin to play out a forbidden love, while Simakwel schemes to take back what he saw as his rightful place.
Being a locally produced animated feature film, I honestly did not expect Disney-caliber quality in terms of animation. There’s just no way around it; animation wholly produced here just isn’t ready to compete on a world stage yet. And it shows in the movie: the animation jumps from frame to frame in an irregular fashion, faces and bodies morph a bit during movement, and frames per second doesn’t stay consistent throughout the entire film. Sometimes scenes move along well, and sometimes they really don’t.
Another thing of note was the sound quality. During the first part of the movie dialogue was nearly inaudible due to great amounts of noise in the recording. Characters felt like they were far away from the scene they were actually in when they talked. Sometimes I even heard a bit of an echo in their voices. It sure wasn’t the cinema I watched this in. This led to a bit of confusion in the first part of the film, especially when coupled by a few snags in the animation. I really couldn’t understand what some of the characters were saying in the early segments.
What I didn’t expect at all, but enjoyed anyway, were the song numbers. In another moment of emulating standards set by Disney there were songs interspersed within the movie. Some of these songs were pretty forgettable (Kukut and Tarsir’s song comes to mind, which one could almost say tries to copy Hakuna Matata), although some were pretty good melodies as well, like the one sung by Lim Hang, even more so when you consider that Cesar Montano isn’t really a trained singer.
It lacks polish, and I definitely think Pinoys can do better. Still, at the end of the day no one can really say that Urduja isn’t something. The animation for all its odd hiccups serves its job of conveying the narrative. The dialogue, while a bit bumpy due to its mixing of old Filipino ideals with modern colloquial language, sees the audience safely to the end. And while the animators are still using a lot of ideas first made famous by Western studios, at least it’s applied to a distinctly Filipino milieu.
Urduja is definitely something to start on, and maybe years from now it will be looked back upon as the foundation of great Philippine animation. But for now, it’s just an alright effort.
Why is everybody kung fu fighting…
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
Disclaimer: Some spoilers may be up ahead.
The tagline said “Prepare for Awesomeness”. And yes, you had to be, because there was a smattering of awesome right there in the moviehouse.
Kung Fu Panda is the latest feature film from DreamWorks Animation. The whole thing is being billed as an homage to actual kung fu films, instead of being another cartoony parody of the genre. It’s a surprising tactic, and for what it’s worth, the content of the movie does have enough of that Chinese martial arts film feel in it to warrant such a billing. After all, the moves you see are based on real kung fu fighting styles. From the fights to the choreography, everything feels authentic and top-notch.
Animation, as you’d expect from a studio like DreamWorks, was silky smooth. It was like watching water flow from one container to another – no wrinkles or out-of-place frames. Especially in a movement-heavy film such as this the quality of the work is really brought to the fore. And lo, it passes the test of the audience with flying colors. Palette-wise the whole thing was vibrant. I especially liked the way Tigress’ and Tai Lung’s eyes, as well as the Hall of Heroes were colored.
The character voices were generally good. Jack Black lends his usual off-beat self to the character of Po. I thought that he didn’t veer too far from what he usually does in his other movies (namely School of Rock and Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny), so in that sense it’s a bit limiting. Still, few can argue that he also lends his tubbiness well to the Panda. It was great to see it translate successfully onto the screen. Angelina Jolie was great as Tigress, the character sounded perfectly confident and sure of herself. A few surprises for me, and maybe for you: Jackie Chan as Monkey, and Lucy Liu as Snake. I didn’t see those coming. However, the best surprise of all was Ian McShane as Tai Lung – his naturally menacing voice was a perfect fit for what I thought were some of the best lines in the movie.
The dialogue gets a bit contrived and cheesy sometimes, but it’s all right: I’ve come to regard these kinds of lines as a necessary evil especially when dealing with a General Patronage audience, because writers have to extend a moral to the story. Having said that, I think that this is my only real complaint about the movie. Otherwise I thought people were getting a lot of bang for their buck.
For an animated film touted as a real kung fu flick, I guess it gets by. But if you see it with the intention of enjoying animation at its finest as well as getting in a lot of laughs, I’m sure you’ll find this as a great movie. I certainly did.
New URL!
Sunday, June 15th, 2008I’m now operating this thing out of bluemechaoxide.net. Snazzy.
It’s like a new house, almost everything is new. Even the Feedburner account. So yeah, unfortunately those few people who have subscribed to me, you have to subscribe again.
Anyway, everything works like I want it to, so there’s really no complaining from me.
Update your RSS readers and bookmarks!
HOWTO: Fix your Guitar Hero strum bar
Saturday, June 14th, 2008Let the playing commence again.
In a previous post I said I couldn’t play Guitar Hero anymore due to the fact that I wrecked the strum bar by playing one too many shreds. What was happening was not all clicks (physical upstrums or downstrums) were translating into strums in the game, virtually making the whole thing unplayable. I had actually stopped playing for months before I decided to try and fix things – I wouldn’t shell out money for a new guitar. As it turned out, it’s not impossible to fix by yourself. Why I didn’t look for the answer sooner I’ll never know.
A little searching yielded this thread on the ScoreHero forums. Basically, I loosened the four screws circled below and tightened them back. Voila, strum bar worked like a charm again, no more missed strums.
Never mind the arrows, they were already there in this picture I stole.
What’s weird is, now all my scores are higher. Way higher. I pulled off 30,000+ more points on Jordan on Hard. I somehow squeezed another 32,000+ points out of Jessica on Expert. The rest of the scores are up by an average of 3,000 points. Credit it to (too much) muscle memory. Or maybe I just magically stumble onto the optimal Star Power paths now.
Adventures in impossible constructions
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008Echochrome. I’ve been looking at this PSP game for a while, and it looks very fun. With gameplay revolving around traversing geometric objects by turning them into impossible constructions, it’s just like my current obsession. It’s also remarkably similar to Fez, at least in terms of moving the camera around to create new dimensions in the playing field.
I dreamt I was swimming.
Friday, June 6th, 2008
Game of the Month #3: Guitar Hero
Monday, June 2nd, 2008I no longer play Guitar Hero. But that’s due in no part to it being a terrible game. I don’t play anymore because I wrecked my little plastic guitar by playing too much. Strictly speaking my fake guitar still functions, but the strum bar won’t register every single strum anymore; its sensors have conked out due to massive shredding abuse. I love this game so much I literally played my controller to destruction.
But enough about my guitar, let’s talk about the game that needed it. For the benefit of the minute percentage that have not heard of this game, Guitar Hero, made by Harmonix, is another one of those addictive rhythm games. It requires you to hit colored buttons on your guitar that represent frets on a real one, in time with the appearance of these colored notes on screen. You have your regular notes (single buttons) as well as your chords (two or more buttons at the same time). Sometimes you have longer notes that you have to hold down buttons for. The game also requires you to strum the strum bar when it’s these notes’/chords’ turn to be played. You also have a whammy bar to “bring on the funk with.” It’s just like playing a real guitar.
The guitar.
The game.
The series has exploded since that first outing, translating into sequels – Guitar Hero 2, Guitar Hero: Rocks the 80s, Guitar Hero 3, and a couple of outings on handhelds, an expansion in the form of Rock Band – as well as millions of dollars worth in sales. But I’ll choose to focus on the first game, as it was the one that introduced me to the series and the one that sparked a fire to choose the hardest difficulty I could play.
The original game was released in 2005 and it was instantly a smash hit. No other game at the time allowed you to rock along with anthems like I Love Rock and Roll, You Got Another Thing Comin’, Stellar, Spanish Castle Magic, Cowboys From Hell and Bark at the Moon, among others. This was the first draw of the game: the pulling power of the songs. They were (mostly) famous, tried and true rock and roll hits which already passed the test of time. Almost everybody knew them, if not by heart, then at least they thought so. Simply put, they were great choices for songs.
The next thing that hit you as you looked upon the highly stylized presentation was another factor that set Guitar Hero apart from the other games in its genre: it had its own personality. Other games offered you bright pulsating neon colors to the beat of the song, and possibly abstract visualizations if you were lucky. Still other games took it up a notch by offering vivid and memorable characters (Gitaroo Man, PaRappa the Rapper). Guitar Hero took the cake. You saw it in the rough and edgy fonts. You saw it in the eye-popping colors. You saw it on the loading screens. You saw it in the characters with their eyeliners and glam rock get-ups: this was a game made by rock fans, for rock fans.
A real motley crew.
You could choose from “make as many mistakes as you want” easy up to “please kill me now” hard. This choice available to the players was a good thing, because it added replay value. If you thought you mastered one song already, you ought to try it on the next difficulty level and see if you could still play with the addition of an additional button to the mix. Or even aim for a full combo, which was basically pushing every note in the song at the proper time, and nothing else (very difficult). This range of difficulties made the game accessible to all levels of play, from the casual gamers to the hardcore shredders. It made virtually anyone and everyone be able to rock out with a guitar. Which was perfect, since the game was basically made with multiplayer in mind.
In gameplay is where Guitar Hero shines. Hit the notes correctly and in time, and the crowd cheers you on. Do badly and the crowd boos you off the stage. If you manage to stave off having your show unceremoniously interrupted by angry rock fans and successfully build up your Rock Meter you can unleash Star Power the way all the big rockstars do it: you literally tilt your plastic guitar upward in some sort of rock god homage. Boom, instant double score multipliers. It’s that kind of constant balancing act between epic-ly failing and rocking out massively combined with the tactile sense of holding a guitar in your hands that keeps players coming back.
Star Power: a lifesaver when you’re in a real bitch of a situation.
Learning timing had never been as rewarding as what Guitar Hero made people feel. And that brings us to the main objective of the game in the first place: to offer that sensation of being a rockstar in the comfort of your own living room. And who wouldn’t want that?
The Digital Luddite said it best:
What people look like playing
What they look like in their minds
