Saturday, November 15, 2008

November update.

I suck at blogging, it seems. Or at least maintaining any kind of regular updates. My excuse, as always, is that the last couple months have been busy. Not as busy as last year, though. I've had plenty of downtime; I just tend to spend it doing constructive things like watching TV and playing video games. C'est la vie...

Well, I'm pleased to report that things are, for the most part, swinging along. It looks like the UofT Symphony Orchestra will be performing my piece "Fountain of Dreams" in January, which is fantastic news. Of course, since this is my eighth year at UofT, I'm careful not to feel too elated...it has been a LONG time coming. This was the first official orchestra competition the Faculty has offered during my time here, and I'm glad I was able to take advantage of it (though I spent a good deal of September kicking myself for not preparing an original submission...I guess that didn't matter in the end.)

I'm now juggling a few other projects -- a bass clarinet & piano piece for my friend Julia, a wedding commission for string quartet, an arrangement of Celtic tunes for Celtic band and orchestra. Cool neh? This is on top of my usual assortment of photocopying, programme-writing, arranging, and setup duties for the Mississauga Symphony. Not to mention my Saturday teaching and my 'directorial' role in the Sneak Peek Orchestra, which is actually starting to snowball -- not in a bad way, just in a slightly-out-of-control-yet-potentially-exhilarating/terrifying sort of way.

Through it all I managed to do things like beat "God of War 2," which took an astounding 22 hours (astounding not because of how long or short the actual game is, but how I managed to sink that much time into my self-proclaimed "busy" schedule.) The gameplay was about as fun (and, at times, as frustrating) as the first, but I was super impressed with some of the level design and cinematics this time around. The pacing was amazing -- you never felt like the game was segregated into action, puzzles, and narrative, as a lot of things were intermingled. Story was pretty exciting too.

It was also extraordinarily therapeutic, in a way only games like that can be. You'll know what I mean if you've played it.

Aside from that, I've also tremendously enjoyed "Order Up" and "World of Goo", both for the Wii. "Order Up" is a cooking game. You start off as a chef working at a burger joint, flipping burgers, frying fries, making omelettes, that sort of thing. There is brilliance in the design, both in terms of the physicality (how you use your Wii-mote to complete tasks like flipping eggs, dredging fish, chopping tomatoes and peppers, grating cheese, etc.) but also in the sense of urgency generated by these tasks, since time and quality are always a factor -- you want your customers to like your food so that they'll give you higher tips. The difficulty increases as your food becomes more and more popular; more customers begin to order, and at times you'll find yourself juggling three or four separate recipes simultaneously, forcing you to multitask quickly. As the game progresses you 'graduate' through a variety of restaurants until you end up working in a fancy motel, making filet mignons for snobbish clients with sensitive tastes. Awesome stuff.

"World of Goo" is a low-budget game designed by three people, and necessarily simpler, but also more difficult to describe. Basically an exercise in architecture and quasi-physics manipulation, your goal is to string together strands of 'goo' to build massive structures toward a certain goal. Each piece of goo forms the vertex of a triangle, and it is with these vertices that you can build infinitely varied structures. Of course, your structures are subject to various obstacles (gravity being the chief one), and so a certain amount of visual finesse is needed to figure out what kind of structures are ideal for achieving a certain goal. Again, hard to explain, but incredibly engrossing.

A sample of couple other games I've played recently:

"Mirror's Edge" (demo) -- fantastic premise and even better controls; basically a virtual obstacle course that's justified by a cool story, you basically run around the rooftops of skyscrapers, evading enemies and doing other cool shit. For some reason I'm not very good at controlling the camera angles on console games, so some of the effect was lost on me, but I'd definitely give it a second try once the full version comes out.

"Stranglehold" -- based on the John Woo movie, you play Chow Yun Fat, which is reason enough to try it out. The novelty of this game is that while you're shooting (and dodging) bad guys, you can actually activate and control the slow-motion effects that John Woo pioneered for the genre. Too bad I really suck at this kind of thing. But for those of you who, unlike me, can actually walk and look around at the same time, heartily recommended.

"Uncharted" -- this game is divided into two kinds of gameplay: shooting bad guys, and exploring. I LOVE the exploring part. The visuals in this game are on par with the imagination of Shadow of the Colossus, but they're rendered in greater detail because of the PS3 engine. Think Heavenly Sword. Unfortunately, as you all know, I can't shoot anything, which puts a damper on my progress.

"Rock Band" -- no need to get into this one, except that I'm determined to get better at the drumset, and I still won't sing.

"Unreal Tournament" -- almost as therapeutic as "God of War 2", and slightly more demoralizing, which is saying a lot because I f#$*ing wept like a baby while getting my ass kicked by Zeus. Seriously, I've played this online a couple times and what amazes me is that, unlike "Uncharted", "Stranglehold", "Call of Duty", and pretty much any other game that involves walking and looking around at once, I can actually handle the multi-tasking involved here, and yet I STILL get murdered. Yes, I know, the people who play online are living off doritos & nestea in their mothers' basement (wait, how am I any different??), but it's still discouraging to see ratios like "19 kills, 42 deaths" pop up at the end of a game.

Aside from all this, I've been revisiting Star Trek (TNG and DS9, mostly) and being very impressed.

This is unexpectedly long. Clearly I had a lot to share. Well...enough for now. I'll be seeing Quantum of Solace in a week and I hope to update then, along any of my musical progress.

3 comments:

JG said...

So much gaming... I don't know that I've played at all since, oh, the Smash tournament (July!). Craziness.

Must make up for it over Xmas.

Kevin Lau said...

Everything should be done in moderation, as always.

Having said that, the more things one can try in moderation, the better :P

Ladyjutea said...

Whazzis? Kevin has updated? I want to try that Order Up game!