I’m busy preparing my dissertation for the our presentations on Monday morning, but I just wanted to do a quick website update post to highlight a couple additions.  Most of the update consists of videos in the Master’s Projects section.  There are videos of both final projects I did for our DirectX Programming classes as well as my project for the Console Programming class.  Each are fairly short, focusing on demonstrating each project in motion.

There will probably be another dissertation update after Monday, hopefully with a video and screenshots of the project in its near-final form.  At this point in time, it appears that the project will be successful, hopefully my supervisor and second reader feel that way as well.  Since I have more to do, I better wrap up this post.  The new videos are posted on the page mentioned above as well as after the break.

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This website was created specifically to show off my own work and since my current project is my Master’s Dissertation, I decided that it was about time that I wrote an update.  I have been making small updates to the official dissertation page, but that mostly discusses what the project idea is about.  It has come time to give an update of the project’s actual progress.  For information about the goal of the project check out the aforementioned page, because I won’t be going over that type of thing here.

The first thing to note is that controlling the music and changing game objects based on the musical events are both working features right now.  The examples I have running are extremely simple, but more will come.  The first screenshot, shown above, shows the early level example.  The goal cubes are used to motivate the player through the level, changing the colour of each one by touching it.  The visual style is obviously minimalistic, and won’t be changing significantly, but it is all that is needed to demonstrate the project’s goal.

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I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the original Unreal Tournament.  There is something about the original’s unbridled ass-whoopn’ that has never quite been matched by any other game.  The game was violent, blunt, and unforgiving.  The arenas were rough and dark, abandoned structures given a second life as the perfect places to watch competitors fight for their own.

The games that followed (2003, 2004, III, and Championship 1 and 2) never retained that feeling.  The environments became overly intricate, even delicate looking in some instances.  The players went from simply dodging to flipping and twirling off walls.  These are supposed to be hardened warriors, not ballerinas!  Nevertheless, these games have added some great things to the series and still provide a fun, competitive gaming experience despite how far they have strayed from the original game.

Even with the series’ advancements there is one thing, or rather a collection of things, that the Tournament has never gotten: a true sports game treatment.

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Making it to the end of a game has always been a significant milestone.  Many early arcade games didn’t even have “endings”.  They were often a constant barrage of harder levels until the player finally succumbed to the difficulty and hopefully got their name on the high score sheet.   Most older console games didn’t have the ability to save your progress and provided a limited amount of lives.  So even if a game had a story, getting to the end in single session was challenging, to say the least.

In the time since then gaming has made many changes, including saving, checkpoints, difficulty levels and regenerating health, that have made it somewhat easier to reach a game’s conclusion.  With the popularity of multiplayer, some stories are also getting shorter as more development time is spent focusing on online features.  Some game still make it difficult.  Fallout 3, Oblivion, Far Cry, and now Dragon Age all push the length of a single player story to the extremes.  But the point of this article is not to talk about how the difficulty of games has changed.

The point is that reaching the end of a game usually takes a certain amount of dedication from the player and it should be a momentous occasion. Unfortunately, sometimes it is not.  An unsatisfying ending can really tarnish an otherwise good game.  So I’m going to take some time to jot down my thoughts on what a good ending should have.

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After the previous two albums, I’ve come to learn that there is a certain state of mind a person has to be in when listening to a new Brand New album.  This is especially true when the person is a fan.  Each album manages to sound almost nothing like the one that came before, which is both a good and a bad thing.  It is good because they don’t get stuck in one sound so each album is fresh.  It is bad because if you loved the last Brand New album, there is no guarantee that you will enjoy the new one.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the first album, but Deja Entendu and The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me have permanent spots on my list of favourite albums.  So when it finally came time for a new album I was excited enough to preorder it with a shirt before I knew what the artwork would look like, but deep down I was nervous.  I dodged all of the leaks and had only heard “At the Bottom” before I got Daisy.  After over a month of listening, the time has come to write down my thoughts.

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It is important to know that I am a big fan of Harmonix and my music gaming platform (yes, platform) of choice is the Rock Band series.  I have also played several of the post-Harmonix Guitar Hero games, but they just don’t provide the same level of enjoyment for me.  It is also important to know that as much as I have enjoyed these types of rhythm games, there is no doubt in my mind that the video game market is seeing a few too many of them right now.

I also haven’t played DJ Hero.

So then why am I writing about DJ Hero?  I am writing because of all of the new music titles being released since The Beatles: Rock Band, this is the most interesting idea.

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Was NHL 09 the best sports game of 2008? I hope not.

This story was originally written in July of 2009 for a video game blog idea that has not become a reality at this point in time.  Rather than leave it in limbo, I thought it would be a decent first post on my personal blog.  Stay tuned for another NHL story talking about how NHL10 met or didn’t meet my expectations.

Ever since the release of NHL 09 I have had a confusing opinion of it. On the one hand I have played countless hours of the game, but at some points I don’t know that I’ve hated a game more. Normally this wouldn’t be that significant, but the fact that the game won 12 Sports Game of the Year awards leads me to believe that some publications are letting some things slide that I simply cannot stand. So I decided that I finally have to write this down before NHL 10 hits the shelves and hopefully corrects all the points that have been driving me crazy. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the blog section of the website!   I will be using this space to talk about three main things:

• Video Games: Specific games, general issues, random thoughts.
• Music: I don’t know music like I know games, but I still like to talk about it.
• Site Updates: Alerts and extra information about updates!

So it will be a fairly general blog, but hopefully it develops some sort of structure.  Since I am not as knowledgeable when it comes to music I am often speaking from the heart, not from a technical background, so go easy on me.

Spencer Congdon