All About the Nod · 18 days ago

Three More Months · 90 days ago

Me, Apparently · 181 days ago

Kim did a nice picture of me, and it's almost as cute as I am in real life:



This is all I can get around to posting these days, as work has been exceptionally busy. Silly hours have been done, many takeaways have been eaten, and quite unfortunately, some unwanted pointy man-breasts may be forming.

Tomorrow, a trip to the leisure centre for some much needed exercise, methinks. Probably followed by sitting on my arse playing Gran Turismo, whilst eating a pizza caked in lard and drizzled with dog urine.

Such is life. Or something.

Valentines Vomit-induction · 239 days ago

I had a nice Valentine's Day this year. Kim and I took the day off work and spent the day in Edinburgh, which is a really nice place. We had nice food, had a nice drink at a nice bar, and went to Edinburgh Zoo. I had my fancy new camera with me, and I took lots of photos of all the cute little wannymuls:









VOMIT VOMIT VOMIT.

Justification · 260 days ago

I get a ridiculous amount of spam on a daily basis, and I've no idea why.

I like to think that during the last 20 years of global internet spam, at least one man has been dumped by his girlfriend for having too small a penis, then spent a month and two days feeling suicidal over his emotional loss and physical inadequacy, then checked his Hotmail one day and read an e-mail with the subject title "Make New Wild Times with Your New Big Phallus", which led him to a genuine way of increasing the size of his penis, which then somehow actually enabled him to have New Wild Times with someone he subsequently met at a party, who eventually became the everlasting love of his life and the saviour of his will to live.

Knowing this would make me feel so much better.

2008 · 282 days ago

Happy new year. I hope you had both a good 2007, and a good new year's eve. If you did, good for you. If your 2007 was a bit rubbish, then I hope 2008 is better for you. If your new year's eve was a bit rubbish, then I hope you realise you're not the only one, and it doesn't really matter anyway.

I didn't post anything on here about resolutions at the turn of last year, but I do recall a conversation in which I unwittingly blurted some out. I said to Mark that at the end of year in which I graduate from uni, I'd like to live in a nice city, be working in some kind of design position in a games company, and have a nice (real, human, three-dimensional) girlfriend. It was quite a lot to ask for really, and I certainly didn't expect to end the year with all of them, but somehow I have. I'm very grateful.

Resolutions for 2008? Well.

Eat better. Eat less meals too late at night. Don't finish massive meals just because I feel like I should. Don't cook such massive meals in the first place. Exercise properly, at least once a week. Watch 300 for motivation...

Work on a cool game project. Make an interesting music video. Take some photos that deserve to be framed. Write more often, more impulsively, and at a faster rate. Get a drum kit and hit it with sticks.

Pass my driving test. Meet new and interesting people. Do more of the things I keep saying I'll do. Spend more time constructively, and less of it doing nothing.

Smile more. Work harder. Loosen up. Be great.

Waiting for Haze · 304 days ago

Haze is a new first-person shooter for the PS3, coming from British developers Free Radical, which was due to be out a few weeks ago. Despite having never played any of FR's previous games (unless you count the glorious Goldeneye), I've always had high hopes for it - high enough that I finally bought a PS3 recently, with its release date in mind - and guess what? It turns out that its been delayed, and I'm not going to be able to buy it, play it or rub the box between my thighs until after Christmas.

Disaster.

So whereas I was originally intending on playing it through and writing up some kind of review, I'm now going to ramble on about why I'm interested in it in the first place.



It's rare that I anticipate a game's release as much as I currently am doing with Haze - or at least, in the same way. It's not like I'm pining over a sequel to an established series, like I am with say, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Gran Turismo 5. The part of me that is interested in Haze is the part of me that wants to see more games go against the grain of the industry at large, and express interesting ideas in a unique way.

...Which might seem like an odd thing to say, because if you were to sum it up in a few words - the wrong ones, of course - Haze can end up sounding really generic and boring. It is, after all, an FPS game set in a futuristic war, where macho male marine soldiers run around and shoot people. If I didn't know anything more about the game, I'd no doubt fob it off as yet another piece of unimaginative tosh that I'm going to love to ignore, but Haze promises to have more going on. It's like an onion - to borrow an analogy from Shrek - where the typical shooty-shooty marine setup is only its outermost layer. What's more is that in this particular case, the mainstream-friendly veneer is integral to the tasty stuff underneath.

The marketing blurb tells us that the game is set in a fictional near-future of 2048, in which war has become predictably rife. A private military company known as Mantel have risen up to the challenge of saving the day, fighting against an apparently horrible, evil army of South American rebels trying to overthrow the government. The player takes control of Shane Carpenter - a brave and handsome white man in the Mantel army - whose new job it is to fly out to the jungle and shoot lots of other men, who are of course, much less brave, handsome and white. Shane and the player begin the game with the convenient assumption that they are doing The Right Thing.

To help soldiers like Shane in their efforts, Mantel have developed what they call a "performance-enhancement medication" called Nectar, which is designed to give them the edge during combat. Injected into the back of soldiers' necks during battle, it works in the game as a kind of powerup that among other things, helps us spot our enemies easier, aim more accurately, be aware of imminent danger, and perform lethal melee attacks up close.




So we have lots of men, war, guns and powerups. So far, so typical for videogames. Bear with me, and hold onto that precious onion analogy...

During the three days in which the story takes place, it becomes apparent that the Mantel corporation maybe aren't the noble saviours of freedom they claim to be. Indeed, when their super-macho advertisements are urging the public to join them and "Fight the Good Fight!", there's a clear streak of satire that invites comparison with the film adaptation of Starship Troopers.

Shane is a good guy, and soon enough he begins to question whether or not he's fighting on the right side, or for the right reasons. He realises that the war he's fighting is all fucked up, and actually ends up switching sides part-way through the story, to join the Rebels in a fight against Mantel.

When Shane defects, and is no longer under the influence of Nectar, everything seems to change. We see that for all of the game up until now, Nectar has had the rather sinister effect of filtering our perception of what's going on. Without it, the previously sunny and idyllic South American jungle now looks colder, and bleak. The game's gung-ho rock music changes to a more sombre orchestral score. It used to be that when we killed enemies, Nectar would remove them from our vision to help us focus on other targets; but now the corpses stay in plain sight. Whereas the rebels always seemed to go down quickly and quietly before, now the soldiers on both sides scream and writhe in pain as they are wounded and killed; leaking blood and dying longer, more agonised deaths.



As the scattered corpses of soldiers, rebels, and civilians re-appear, the Haze of the game's title begins to fade away. Nectar was designed to make Mantel soldiers the perfect soldiers - focused and efficient in combat; dehumanised, desensitised, and even addicted to the killing - and it's no coincidence that it does this by transforming the aesthetics of war into those of a videogame.

Haze, it seems, has something on its mind, and an itch it wants to scratch. While I suspect that FR aren't setting out to make any explicit statements with it, it seems they're more than willing to ask some interesting questions. Questions to do with what some gamers are doing, when they enjoy the military fantasy of following orders and relentless killing in FPS games. Questions about what some developers are doing, when they turn immersive experiences of violence and war into a mindless entertainment cashcow. It seems like a rare admission of moral creative responsibility, in an industry that sometimes seem to thrive (and even depend) on not giving a shit about the shit it puts out. And I like that.

I have to admit: the cynic in me says that Haze isn't likely to turn out as amazing or subversive as I want or imagine it to be. Especially given the inevitable compromise to be made in order for it to be widely accepted among typical FPS gamers, my hopes are so high that they're probably impossible to reach. But even if it ended up a bit rough around the edges, or flawed in its execution, it will have at least tried to say something, and to be about something that actually matters - and not enough games do even that.

Midway Newcastle · 391 days ago

1. I'm not a student anymore.
2. I don't live in Middlesbrough anymore.
3. I now live in Newcastle.
4. Newcastle is good.
5. I've got my first real job.
6. The job is in the games industry, and it's a nice job.
7. I get free drinks.

Good news, it seems, comes in one big lump.

I now work at the Newcastle studio of Midway - home to the peerlessly brilliant Robotron, the increasingly crap Mortal Kombat series, and the recently released, John Woo-inspired Stranglehold (which I won't comment on for now). My job title is Junior Designer, and I do a lot of mission scripting in the Unreal 3 engine, which despite its monkey bus driver-like quirks [often taking a while to respond, crashing a lot], I'm very pleased to be using. Kismet, the engine's new visual scripting system, is good stuff.

We're currently working on the game of The Wheelman - an upcoming and fairly typical-sounding Vin Diesel film, and therefore a pretty high-profile game featuring guns, cars, explosions, mild language and baldness. Especially for a first job, it's a nice, big and interesting project to be part of, and after a Summer of worrying about possible unemployment and disapproving parents, I'm chuffed with how things have worked out.

Things finally feel like they're on the right track.

Review: Transformers · 437 days ago

Transformers (2007) is what happens when you give a camera to a cretinous, obnoxious teenage boy with a hundred and fifty million dollars. It is genuinely the worst, dumbest and most frustratingly badly-made film I've ever seen at the cinema. Until now, I had no idea you could pack so little story into such a painfully long "film", have so many scenes that are totally generic and irrelevent, and make a group of massive fighting robots so dull to watch.

At the risk of appearing rude to the friends I saw this with, I was close to leaving the cinema about three times, during what may well have been the most immoral 150 minutes of my life. I say immoral, because when we hand over our money to see films this shit, we are funding something worse and more depressing than terrorism.

Do the right thing and avoid it like the plague.

Photo Interlude · 456 days ago

Here are some of the things I've been up to in the last couple of months, that serve as a small part of my sorry excuse for being shit and not posting anything:



I went to see the Chinese opera production of Monkey: Journey to the West, at the Palace Theatre in Manchester. It was very good. Kim fell asleep on the way there.



I went to London, and to the Tate Modern.



This is Mark, looking at some stuff.



During some touristy walking around central London the next day, Mark and I randomly ended up bumping into the gay pride parade, and then following it to the main event.

We did all this in a totally manly way, of course.



After losing Mark in the crowd, and being unable to phone him because the battery in his mobile was flat, I stood around a lot taking photos of random people.



I ended up standing around for over two hours, and got really fucking wet.

Wah.

The Terminal · 526 days ago

After too many hours of things going wrong with my computer, my internet connection, Adobe Premiere and Google Video, I've finally managed to create a gameplay video of my Half Life 2 level, and get it posted online. It's best viewed in my portfolio.



www.essell.org/portfolio/leveldesign.php

Ten Thousand Words · 535 days ago

I recently stayed up all night to finish a piece of work and hand it on time, and I like to think that I'll never have to do it again in my life. That would be nice.







It's my final dissertation for my Games Design degree, focusing on the level design process for Half Life 2. I'm fairly satisfied with it, although I think it suffers a little from being torn between speculating on the theoretical design considerations involved, and reporting on the practical process of developing my own level. I'd have preferred to focus much more on the former, but it hasn't been my impression that Good Academic Writing is necessarily the best way to grab the marks on this one, due to the nature of the course.

That, I suspect, will be a rant for another day.