my name is mwd

In which I explain why motorcycling video games are, and always will be, rubbish. I’d never been particularly interested in cars, until a friend of mine showed me how fun driving simulation games can be when you remove all the driver assists. Modern driving games, such as Forza Motorsport or Gran Turismo have wonderfully accurate physics simulations in them, and so become suitably challenging when you expose the underlying car. At that point I saw the joy of the challenge of driving well....

After a year and a half, the original M&L minecraft server has seen most of us burnout a little (amazed that it took that long), so Laura and I thought we’d mix things up, and run a second server that has monsters on, and is running the Tekkit mod, which includes all manner of engineering/magical based goodies. For an idea of what to expect, you could watch this informative documentary series on building a jaffa cake factory....

Very saddened today to hear that the peeps over at Inside Xbox have been given the boot. For those without an Xbox, Inside Xbox was essentially their own mini TV channel on the Xbox dashboard, with review shows, Q&A shows, etc. What always amazed me about Inside Xbox UK was how consistently good it was – managing to be a good mix of content and humour (weird humour, but good :)....

Laura and I have been running a Minecraft server for over a year now, with a small group of friends, and we recently all took to documenting all the stuff we’ve been making over on tumblr. It’s nice to see how our world has evolved over that time. The name comes from one of the early roads we made, which defined a lot of the pattern of growth over time....

In amongst all the wonderful talks at this year’s Playful was one that touched upon something that’s been bugging me recently – that despite all the open data that’s happening from the real world, there’s not enough coming from the play world. Paul Rissen’s talk was about the lack of linked/semantic data from the video games world – why couldn’t he get references to scenes in Red Dead Redemption to link them against the scenes in western films from which they draw inspiration, letting you hop back and forth....

Not that I’m behind the times, but here’s some thoughts on a video game from 2007. Mass Effect is one of those games that I kept getting recommended to me by not just video game enthusiasts, but also game designers and writers, so given the third instalment of the franchise is due out this christmas, I thought I better go and pick up the original game and get playing to see what all the fuss was about....

Video games tend to show you driving from the third person, and even if you get the option for first person, I’d wager a majority (outside Forza/Gran Tarismo) still use third person. So why don’t we drive real cars that way? Thankfully those fine scientists over at Rooster Teeth have done a little research in this area on our behalf:...

The Observer ran a very nice piece at the weekend on video game design and the psychology thereof, which I recommend you go read. One of the people they have discussing games and how people relate to them is extremely talented Margaret Roberston of Hide & Seek, where I have the good fortune to work on occasion. One such occasion was last week when a photographer from the Observer turned up to take Margaret’s photo, and she was asked to wear a bunch of the wonderful props that occupy the Hide & Seek office....

For a bit of fun over xmas, instead of augmenting reality with virtual stuff, I’ve done the inverse, and augmented a virtual reality environment, Minecraft, with real world stuff. I like the idea of ambient devices showing us information from the digital world without need for computers, and I like the idea in Minecraft that there’s a logic system you can use to build up control circuits, and this is a kinda mashup of both those ideas....

Getting killed in Halo Reach multiplayer sucks, but it sucks slightly less if you take out two other people and get your Totally Worth It achievement at the same time :)...

After over 6 months of working away I’m pleased to finally announce the first release of PlaceWhisper, a fun little app that lets you leave and discover virtual messages in physical locations. You can think of it as geocaching, but without the Tupperware :) PlaceWhisper is one of those apps I’ve wanted to use for ages, but no one else had written it. After being inspired by things like last years Hide & Seek festival, and the Playful conference (in particular Russell Davies’ talk), I decided I wanted to create something that let people have fun, so I finally decided to go make this app that no one else had got around to....

Last year Laura and I went to an amazing event on the South Bank in London called the Hide & Seek Weekender – a weekend festival of games for all ages, where you basically played lots of fun, and often silly, games with random people and generally had a very good time. Laura blogged about it here, and I put up some photos here. This coming weekend sees this year’s Hide & Seek event, again on London’s South Bank....

Tristan and I have been getting in some multiplayer Halo 3 action of late, and here’s one of the more amusing outtakes :) This was mostly an excuse to play with Bungie’s Pro account. Bungie run an excellent game tracking site for the Halo games, but with the Pro account you get the ability to take saved games and extract clips of them as movies via the website. On the XBox you can watch your most recent games and take screen shots (like the one below), and also save video clips, taken either from first person or using a controllable camera....

People are celebrating this weekend. A lot of people are celebrating this weekend. That’s right, it’s time for Grifball! I hate posting too many Halo related things, but this has a limited lifespan :) Each weekend there’s a special game on the Halo 3 multiplayer servers, and for the long easter weekend it’s Grifball. Normally you need to be in a league or such to play this game, so for those of us without our own community, here’s a chance to have a go....

If you don’t read Light blue touchpaper, the blog by the Computer Lab’s Security Group, you probably should. The Security Group are well known for having a different view on the world that enables them to see the flaws in supposedly secure systems that even otherwise smart people would miss. Appropriately for xmas though, they’ve posted an interesting analysis of fairness in online games. The nub of the argument is that for online games that rely on very finely tuned maps and character metrics, any small variation in the players set up can have a large implication in their likely success....

Doesn’t quite trip off the tongue the same way that WiiMe does, but with the new XBox 360 Dashboard release you’re forced to have a little avatar, so here’s mine: Hmmm…. :) The new Dashboard has plenty of swooshy new graphics, which are cute, but don’t really make a big difference to what you can do. But there is one huge benefit of the new update, which is you can install games onto your XBox 360’s hard disk....

I’m the kind of person that thinks a computer isn’t complete unless it comes with a compiler, and that you’ve not used a computer until you’ve written some programs for it – that probably makes me a bit of a luddite these days I suspect. It also means I’ve been disappointed with games consoles. I suspect the way that most young people today come in contact with computers is through games consoles, and they’re pretty much a read only medium – there’s no way for people to easily create their own content, and also importantly no way to share anything if they had created it....

Neil and I (and a friend of Neil’s) went along to Salute yesterday, a quite large wargaming event in London. Basically 4 floors of stalls and demo games for you to wander about. If you wanted to spot dumpy men with large beards, this would have been heaven to you ;) Having only ever played Warhammer 40K it was interesting to see some of the other games, and I picked up a few bits and bobs that I’d not have seen otherwise....

I finally got around to taking some pics of the various Warhammer 40K stuff I’ve painted up. Not exactly works of art (either the photography involved or the painting), but I thought I might as well put them up. I am quite pleased with the models in the first few pics, which were fun to paint, as they have a lot more detail then the others. At least it keeps me off the streets :)...

I’m gradually getting to grips with Warhammer 40k. Although I’ve been building up a 40K army for a while, I’ve only recently been getting out to play the game. After about 10 games now I have had my first resounding victory, which is good. I don’t expect to see a massive turn in my fortunes on the table, but at least I can have a bit more confidence :)...

The new version of the Warhammer 40,000 rules came out today, so I went along to the (very) local Games Workshop store to take part in the battle fun. Amongst the new things in the 4th ed is a fast version of the game, called Kill Team, and we had a 6 teams all fighting to get past each other and my army to a target, which was excellent fun. Looking forward to more such games in the near future…...

I finally gave in to the urge to get back into Warhammer 40,000 - the futuristic wargame from Games Workshop. I used to play back when I was in high school, and I really enjoyed painting the models, but I was naff at the game. Eventually I lost interest, but recently a number of things have reminded me of the hobby and made me want to try and get back into it....

Hot off the comp.arch discussion mill, looks like the PowerPC might be at the heart of the next generation XBox. I’d speculate that this is down to either cost reasons or heat disserpation reasons. An ix86 always struck me as a bad choice for a console, though it obviously made good sense from Microsoft’s point of view, as it let them leverage all their existing skills and programmer base. Xeons make cool server processors, but a games console could probably survive with something lighter....