:)

Old GoldenEye dev quite likes new GoldenEye remake!

I've just finished transcribing an interview I did with managing director of Crytek UK, Karl Hilton, who used to be very high up in Free Radical and before that was one of the team behind GoldenEye on the N64. So I had to ask him what he thought about the remake, here's what he had to say:

"Well I did see it at the E3 show and it looks like they've done a very authentic job. And if there's a market out there for people who want to relive the golden days of GoldenEye then you know...

"It's very flattering that people still think there is so much value in it. It's been a while since I last looked at it, but if you do look at GoldenEye - it's an old game and it looks it! I think people obviously have rose tinted spectacles when they think about it. It's very flattering that people have such fond memories of it to such a degree that there's still a viable case to remake it and that's great! And I suppose it benefits me because as long as people keep talking about GoldenEye then I can keep riding that bandwagon a little bit longer - every time you think that people have forgotten about it finally, it still pops up.

"It's quite incredible for a game that, you know, it does get into that pantheon of classic games that people continue to talk about years and years later. And the version I saw at E3 seemed like a very nice version.

"As much as I love that game you want to move on and do the next thing, and all of Free Radical was about us trying to, well not drop the GoldenEye tag, but do something that people would talk of with the same awe 'yes that was a classic game'. We think we did some really good stuff, obviously nothing achieved that level of notoriety."

And then Karl said: "Timesplitters has a fan base and there's an online community fr it and you know... that's not a dead franchise yet."

Is that a hint at Timesplitters 4?! Well Karl laughed and said: "I couldn't possibly comment on that."

Dammit!

Anyway here's some vids of old GoldenEye and the remake (I didn't make the vids obvioulsy):

Yeah I was right - Marvel Vs Capcom 3

It looks amazing

Sony's on Coke

Well how else would it have the confidence to go around the developers at EA and buy up exclusive content for Dead Space 2 and Medal Of Honor? And snide innuendo aside Sony has launched a promotion with Coca-Cola to help get brand awareness for the PlayStation Move - the wacky, wavy, wandy thing that is Sony's latest entry to the ongoing motion control debacle. It seems fine, though the Sorcery game didn't.

3DTV was heavily promoted with 3D versions of Killzone 3 and Gran Turismo 5 being shown - but the thing is I still haven't caught up with HDTV yet, so I can't even contemplate a 3D set until... probably around 2016, at the earliest.

Kevin Butler did a fine job of impersonating a Sony executive, by being kind of scary but kind of funny too. The PSP is still just not very good and there is still nothing on it that really makes me want one, especially as it gives me really bad hand cramp after a few hours.

But the highlight for me was Twisted Metal. I loved 2 on the PSone and this looks like it'll best that by a long way especially with all the online multiplayer it's got going on.

And that would appear to be that, even though the conference was about two hours long there really wasn't much else to see. So I'm moving along - Capcom's bound to have some awesome Marvel Vs Capcom stuff to show off!

Wii are not amused

So that's Nintendo's E3 conference over with. New Mario, new Zelda, new Donkey Kong, new Metroid, new Kirby, new Kid Icarus and the new 3DS.

Ahh there's nothing like Nintendo to bring back all the cynicism usually reserved for the most jaded of games journalists. Maybe it's the time I spent on CUBE and having to put up with Mario's stupid face going "It's-a me!" on the cover nearly every month. Or maybe it's the fact that Nintendo still hasn't come up with a new character in what seems like forever.

In some ways Nintendo has regressed it seems. Take new Donkey Kong Country - it's the same as old Donkey Kong Country. And new Kirby is old Kirby albeit with a texture gimmick. And new Goldeneye?! Really? Lets party like it's 1997!

...

But then there is the new 3DS, which doesn't need 3D glasses and has a slider so you can turn the 3D-ness up and down. Maybe I'm lacking in imagination, and having not played it yet, but I still can't work out how it's going to... work.

Overall then it was another Nintendo E3 press conference, and no one has been excited about them since 2004 when they unveiled Legend OF Zelda: Twilight Princess.

Sony's conference is on soon, I'm hoping for giant enemy crabs with weak spot that you can hit for massive damage! Etc.

Post-Natal elation?

So that's Microsoft's key-note speech at E3 over with. The best bit? A new smaller, quieter, built in wi-fi, bigger hard drive, black and shiny new Xbox 360! The worst bit? Everyone in attendance got one for free.

Of course I'm jealous! Mostly because it's supposed to be "whisper quiet" and that, if true, is a real improvement over the noisy bastard of a one I own.

Anyway! Fable 3, Gears Of War 3, Metal Gear Solid: Rising, a Gladiator style action thing from Crytek, and the obligatory Halo stuff.

And then there's Kinect. The rubbish new name for the already rubbishly named Project Natal. Now I'm not usually one to get suckered into advertising, except it seems when it comes to video game and in this case a shiny new(ish) peripheral. But for moments there I really was imaging that I would play with an updated version of Dogz. And that I was a sweaty woman in her early 20s and would obviously love to do some exercises in my white painted loft apartment in upper (or lower - whichever one is the nicest) Manhattan with a massive HDTV stapled to the wall while my ethnically diverse boyfriend/gay next-door neighbour battered the pixels out of virtual stuff. And that I could honestly get as enthusiastic about things as those two ladies who presented the floaty raft game that reminded me of Toobin'.

Then I remembered that I'm not any of that.

Bother.

Still tomorrow brings Nintendo's and Sony's E3 presentations. And tonight EA and Ubisoft are doing theirs. Will EA announce a good Def Jam fighting game? (No) Will I manage to stay up til 1.00am to see Ubisoft announce something about Beyond Good & Evil 2? (probably not)

Still, it's an interesting arm flailing start to this year's E3!

Tim Ingham defends videogames

And the audience agrees with Julie Peasgood



She's the author of The Greatest Sex Tips in the World and (quoting from Amazon) "Julie Peasgood won Best Erotic Writer at the 2007 Scarlet Awards, beating many other established sex writers."

It seems like she hates videogames because they're addictive. I've been playing games for years and I don't think they're addictive, they're a pastime, a hobby, something to fill in the boring bits with.

The fact is my Xbox has been packed away for the last three months or so and I haven't actually been able to play anything for any length of time since then, aside from being round at a few mates' and having a quick go on whatever. I haven't been feeling any sort of withdrawal from not playing it. (Though I am kind of worried about my GamerScore getting reset if I don't sign in to Live soon.)

That whole interview seemed to rail against common sense and three of the four could be said to be grossly ill-informed about the subject. Yes it's easy to pick apart their mistakes and lack of knowledge on the subject but the way the audience cheered left me feeling dumbfounded. Why did they 'boo' the Byron Report? Why does no one but gamers believe the Byron Report?

Kelvin McKenzie throws in the murder of Jamie Bulger saying that, of Jon Venables, "he was corrupted by it". And surely that's not true. There was the Child's Play thing (though there was no evidence that either Robert Thompson or Venables had watched it) but there was never any mention of videogames during the trial. Though he was allowed to play games at the Red Bank secure unit in St Helens after his conviction.

So what was the most violent game that Venables could have played when he was 10?

Well here's Wikipedia's list: Clicky!

So Mortal Kombat II... I don't know why I'm even going down this pointless road. Peasgood doesn't know about games, McKenzie admits he's not a "war gamer", and Titchmarsh should be out in the garden getting friendly with plants. Ingham does a great job but no one there wanted to listen.

Is there anything we can do about it? Nope.

Ultra Spoiler!

If you can't wait until the end of April when Super Street Fighter IV is released then here are all the Ultras for all the characters.





I've had the privilege of already playing SSFIV a few times. But once it comes out I'm sure it'll be taking up a hell of a lot of my time. Awesome.

Third Stike characters in Super Street Fighter IV

Ibuki, Makoto and Dudley are set to appear in Super Street Fighter IV. Personally I can't wait to get back to playing with Makoto who I used to use in Third Strike. This vid also shows of returning characters from the Aplha series.



And then ofcourse there's the hilarious Hakan, or as he will from here on be known as 'Oily Man'.

The defining Street Fighter III moments

It's this video that got me back into playing Street Fighter, because it so freaking cool.



The skill it takes to parry all of Chun Li's Super is something I still haven't managed to do, let alone keep a cool head when one bit of chip damage would end the fight, let alone air parrying the last hit and then working in a killing combo. It amazed me at the time and still gives me chills when the crowd goes mad.

But then again it can go the other way. Check out the technique!

Television Analysis

Television news is a very different thing to radio news. Obviously this is to do with the whole pictures aspect of television news. You’ve got to plan it all out well in advance – what the story is, who you can interview, are they willing to be interviewed on camera, and everything else that needs to be brought together for a mere one minute and twenty seconds of news.

In the first week I started working on a story about the council having a meeting about whether or not it should charging people to pick up their garden waste. It’s a free service at the moment but it costs the council money. Before I headed out I got a radio interview with Councillor Lisa Northover over the phone. Unfortunately phone interviews look rubbish on television especially when all you have to show is their picture and a caption explaining who they are. But I think it’s very difficult for us to get decent interview in the time we have to put everything together as it takes some amazing coordination to get a story, get an interview, get out to do it, get back and edit the piece. I don’t think this story had particularly high news values but it was interesting getting the views of the public with a few vox pops and having them play against (and with) the views of the councillor.

I cheated a bit for the general views, instead of getting footage of actual garden waste I just filmed some leaf litter in Bournemouth gardens, it looked pretty messy but it would have been a better idea to have got something that was actually moving to film. While it did fill the visual gap for when the interview was playing it still didn’t look very interesting. If I had a bit more time I could have perhaps persuaded someone in a nearby garden to do some gardening. But time was a difficult thing to manage especially as I agreed to go out and get some general views of a building about a mile away for another member of our group. I thought the teamwork here would help bring the bulletin together but when I got back it was decided they didn’t need it, so it was a totally wasted trip. I was pretty impressed with the speed I managed to get my package edited together and ready for broadcast. The presenter intro was a bit light hearted and my piece to camera seemed somewhat forced but it got the story across succinctly.

It was a shame that we didn’t broadcast on time and that stories were dropped and others not used due to some technical difficulties.

For the second week of the television news days I wrote a story about the planned protest over the reduction of the speed limit on the Wessex Way and the slow car convoy that would be happening on the weekend. This involved filming the Wessex Way and the already slow moving traffic on it. I got some good close ups of the speed limit signs which I then timed to appear whenever they were mentioned in the script. Unfortunately I couldn’t get an interview with any of the councillors I rang or with the organiser of the protest, Steve Old, so instead I had to go with just a graphic and statement from the council that was on a press release. In terms of on-the-day relevance this story was probably premature, the protest was the Sunday following our Wednesday broadcast. I imagine that if anyone had seen it they would have forgotten all about the protest until they just so happened to be stuck in a traffic jam on that Sunday. It might have been better to have been on a Friday bulletin as a fore warning of what was going to be happening.

The strength of television news lies with the pictures. The ability to convey a story and see it happening before your eyes is very powerful and with live broadcasts it happens instantaneously. The weakness this though is that the pictures can be manipulated to tell different stories as well as the script being able to tell people what to think about what’s happening on the screen. There is a very good example of this on Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe program detailing the different reporting methods of news teams covering the Haiti earthquake disaster.

Team work is essential. Whether it be for operating a camera or getting some shots for other members on the team the whole group really has to pull together. Unfortunately I’m not sure that we did coalesce all that well. Because everyone was working on their own story there was little time to be all that helpful to others. But initially when deciding the stories to be covered, the running order and how long each story should be then everyone has to pitch their ideas and help decide on the news worthiness of each item.

Another problem I faced was not having a car and having to rely on buses to get out to a story and back again. It can get very frustrating waiting about but at least it does give you a chance to work on your script before you get back to studio. Obviously this isn’t a problem for proper news programs but definitely something to think about when you’re doing it yourself.

I think the difference between online video and television is narrowing. Thanks to broadband everyone can stream video easily these days and although the screen size is much smaller online the way you set up shots doesn’t need to change that much. The rule of thirds still applies and you still have to put up captions to identify people. Online has the advantage of usually having both video and text beside one another so you can read the story then watch the video for moving pictures.

Here is a clip of the first week's news:

Radio Analysis

The demographic for South Coast Radio (age 40 plus in Hampshire, Dorset and the Isle of Wight) is similar to that of Solent Radio’s, so it’s aimed a slightly older audience than Fire FM and has a bit of a wider radius of listeners. Fire FM being transmitted across Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch makes it closer to the other radio station we produced bulletins for, Talbot FM (age 16-30 in South East Dorset). So South Coast Radio has more similarities with BBC Radio Solent with both the target audience and the broader areas it covers.

When deciding which stories to report on the news bulletins these aspects have to be taken into account. In the first week of the radio productions days we had a good mix of stories for the South Coast area and demographic. The story I reported on was about the rise in youth unemployment which, despite being a story about youths, was more aimed at parents who would be concerned how their children might be affected after leaving school.

To do this I researched a report about how school leavers were finding it difficult to find jobs and I interviewed Charlotte Hill from the UK Youth organisation who commented on the story and gave some views from her organisation’s point of view. For these bulletins there isn’t much time to put together a package so it was a quite a short script followed by some snippets of the interview. It was succinct and I think it fitted in well with the rest of the bulletins we put out on the day.
As I was presenting it really drove home the way radio scripts are written, that they have to be short sentences with punctuation so the presenter can take a breath and get through it without stumbling over difficult words or similar sounding syllables.

In the next session the group produced bulletins for Talbot FM which is aimed at a younger audience and covers a smaller area. I tried to do a story on the Imax coming from a different angle with an interview with Brian Jenner who wants to save the building rather than it being demolished. Unfortunately the interview didn’t record, even the second time I did it, as there was something wrong with the desk. But I was still able to write a story using quotes I had written down during the interview. I also wrote a story with vox pops on whether students agreed with a report that using the internet too much made you depressed, which really fitted in with the target demographic.

The writing styles between the two stations is quite different. Much more formal for South Coast and for Talbot you have to jazz it up a bit for the younger audience while still getting the information across but in a way that would appeal more.
This is further exemplified in the podcasts. For the South Coast podcast we did short discussions between the presenter and the reporter as they acted as specialists for the story, while in the Talbot podcast it was much more a group discussion bordering on a chat between the team. They were quite different from the podcasts I’d done before for the magazines I worked on, these usually went on for an hour and structured very differently. I think the shorter podcasts work better because it keeps things moving and you’re not listening to long winded arguments or explanations that go on forever.

The challenges faced in radio news production are the speed at which you have to get the news out there. If you’re doing local stories then you have to really hope that you can get the interview or get out to a place where the news is happening and then of course you’ve got to write the story, edit the clips and get it to the presenter so they have time to read over it, to prepare for the bulletin. Another challenge is creating pictures in people’s heads. Obviously the language used in the script can do this though it is easier to be more descriptive in a package rather than just in a straight news story. But descriptive words can help a great deal not just because of the word itself but also the inflection the presenter can put on the words themselves can make it sound all the more interesting.

For my package I had trouble trying to fit in clips to help the story along. I had thought that maybe I could have used some audio from the two films I mentioned in it, Avatar and Alice In Wonderland, but when I had them there they seemed completely out of place and while Alice has some recognisable catchphrases such as “Off with her head” Avatar really doesn’t. So in the end I left them out. I had also thought of using the Imax signature tune or jingle but I think that not many people would recognise it and again no matter where I tried to fit it in it just seemed awfully out of place.

But I think I have managed to create a picture in people’s imagination of the Bournemouth coast and that there is something in the way. The interviews I got with the organiser of the Demolish The Imax party, Graeme Sweetapple, and with Bournemouth Councillor Stephen MacLoughlin certainly paint the picture about what they want done with the Imax building and the ideas that came at the end of the meeting should hopefully put the pictures into people’s minds about what the site looks like now and how it might look in the future.

I do wish I’d been able to use some clips or some music at some point to try to liven it up. But everything I tried just seemed to break the flow of the package and sometimes it’s best not to try to shoehorn something in if it’s really not working. As it stands at least it’s informative and the interviews are pretty clear.