I never did post a followup saying what I thought of the new Star Trek film I was all keyed up to see, and I thought, with the DVD release imminent, now was a good time.
In short: it was awesome. It was everything I expected, and more. I'm not a Trekkie (or Trekker if you prefer) by any stretch of the imagination, but I quite enjoyed ST:TNG in its day, and do own them all on DVD. I also watched a fair bit of the original series Saturday mornings on CBC when I was growing up.
On to the film itself...
The opening scene was the perfect birth scene for Kirk, born in the chaotic, adrenaline-filled rush of a space battle. It perfectly encapsulates everything the world has come to know and love about James T. Kirk. It also explains the adrenaline-junkie aspects of Chris Pine's portrayal, which I thought was a nice touch.
From that opening scene, the film never lets up, going from strength to strength. Seeing everyone as young cadets was great--we get the sense of them attending Starfleet without having to sit through any clumsy exposition. We get a nice sense of Kirk as a ladies man as well, and Kirk romancing a green lady was just icing on the cake (for fans of both the original series and fans of green ladies).
I will definitely be in line for the sequel if it goes ahead. There was talk about that before this first film was released, but I haven't heard much more.
A couple of minor quibbles. I know Anton Yelchin while born in Russia, doesn't speak with a Russian accent, but I think he should have gone for a more natural-sounding Russian-person-speaking-English accent than trying so hard for comedy. Chekov's accent was only rarely played for laughs in the original series. I also thought that while John Cho was good, he lacked the feeling of calm capability that George Takei projected as Sulu. That being said, all the characters were fresh-faced cadets in this film, so perhaps the gravitas is something we'll have the pleasure of seeing develop if more films are made.
Oh, and I only thought once about Sylar while watching Zachary Quinto do his stuff as Spock, which is a testament to how good of an actor Quinto is, and how much he made the role his, while still keeping faith with Leonard Nimoy's portrayal.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Friday, May 08, 2009
Welcome to Rivendell, Mr Anderson
I'm all keyed up to see the new Star Trek film, but I've been pondering the issues of casting actors who play an iconic role for which they're well known.
The subject of this post reflects what runs through my mind whenever I watch The Fellowship of the Ring and see Frodo waking up in Rivendell after the Flight to the Ford. I know that Elrond says "Welcome to Rivendell, Frodo Baggins", but because of Hugo Weaving's iconic role as Agent Smith in The Matrix (and its two sequels, but let's not mention those), the subject line above is what I hear instead. Oddly, I don't get that effect with V for Vendetta, possibly because Weaving's face is obscured and he has less of a measured and deliberate delivery than he does as both Agent Smith and Elrond.
Anyway, because I've only seen Zachary Quinto as Sylar in Heroes, whenever I see the trailer for the new Star Trek movie, I keep expecting Spock to slice open someone's head with his finger. As cool as that might be, hardly in keeping with flavour of the Star Trek universe. Equally, while I don't believe that Karl Urban as Bones is going to jump on a steed of Rohan and go galloping down the corridors looking for Gríma Wormtongue, that doesn't stop me from half-expecting it to happen.
Where I'm going with all this is that sad as I was to see Christopher Eccleston leave Doctor Who and gutted as I am to see David Tennant do the same, I'm sure they're right. Sigh.
The subject of this post reflects what runs through my mind whenever I watch The Fellowship of the Ring and see Frodo waking up in Rivendell after the Flight to the Ford. I know that Elrond says "Welcome to Rivendell, Frodo Baggins", but because of Hugo Weaving's iconic role as Agent Smith in The Matrix (and its two sequels, but let's not mention those), the subject line above is what I hear instead. Oddly, I don't get that effect with V for Vendetta, possibly because Weaving's face is obscured and he has less of a measured and deliberate delivery than he does as both Agent Smith and Elrond.
Anyway, because I've only seen Zachary Quinto as Sylar in Heroes, whenever I see the trailer for the new Star Trek movie, I keep expecting Spock to slice open someone's head with his finger. As cool as that might be, hardly in keeping with flavour of the Star Trek universe. Equally, while I don't believe that Karl Urban as Bones is going to jump on a steed of Rohan and go galloping down the corridors looking for Gríma Wormtongue, that doesn't stop me from half-expecting it to happen.
Where I'm going with all this is that sad as I was to see Christopher Eccleston leave Doctor Who and gutted as I am to see David Tennant do the same, I'm sure they're right. Sigh.
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Risorgimento Represso & sequel going commercial!
* End of day update * Yes, this was an April Fool's joke.
Now that all the negotiations and contracts are in place, I can finally announce this.
Risorgimento Represso and its unreleased sequel are going commercial! Activision are releasing a "Lost Treasures of Inform" compilation to celebrate Zork turning "5 binary years old", i.e. 2^5, or 32 years old. The packaging looks just like the Lost Treasures of Infocom, but with the -com crossed out and "rm" written in.
The idea is to package all the classic Infocom games along with some of the best that the community has come out with over the years. This was all planned for Zork's 30th birthday, but didn't quite come off in time. Apparently, there's still quite a few people at Activision who love the Infocom stuff, and are frequent lurkers in r*if-land. They've had a new compilation planned/in the works for quite some time, but contacting all the different community IF authors and getting rights has taken a while, which is why they've been so silent on the idea of re-releasing any of the Infocom games.
The per-copy royalty isn't huge, but just the privilege of having two of my games (if I can finish Risorg's sequel in time!) released on the same CD as some Infocom classics, as well as the best of the r*if community is just awesome.
Based on sales of previous compilations, Activision expects to sell about 50000 copies... not huge, but they don't have many expenses apart from packaging. Royalties are paid out at $0.05 per game, so with two games on there, I should do all right out of it.
I don't have the full list of the other titles that will be on there, but I know works by noted community people like Emily Short, Andrew Plotkin, Quintin Stone, Adam Cadre, Adam Thornton will be present, along with a host of other names you'll recognize.
Anyway, sorry to drone on so long tooting my own horn, but now that I can finally share this info, I wanted to be the first to break it.
Now that all the negotiations and contracts are in place, I can finally announce this.
Risorgimento Represso and its unreleased sequel are going commercial! Activision are releasing a "Lost Treasures of Inform" compilation to celebrate Zork turning "5 binary years old", i.e. 2^5, or 32 years old. The packaging looks just like the Lost Treasures of Infocom, but with the -com crossed out and "rm" written in.
The idea is to package all the classic Infocom games along with some of the best that the community has come out with over the years. This was all planned for Zork's 30th birthday, but didn't quite come off in time. Apparently, there's still quite a few people at Activision who love the Infocom stuff, and are frequent lurkers in r*if-land. They've had a new compilation planned/in the works for quite some time, but contacting all the different community IF authors and getting rights has taken a while, which is why they've been so silent on the idea of re-releasing any of the Infocom games.
The per-copy royalty isn't huge, but just the privilege of having two of my games (if I can finish Risorg's sequel in time!) released on the same CD as some Infocom classics, as well as the best of the r*if community is just awesome.
Based on sales of previous compilations, Activision expects to sell about 50000 copies... not huge, but they don't have many expenses apart from packaging. Royalties are paid out at $0.05 per game, so with two games on there, I should do all right out of it.
I don't have the full list of the other titles that will be on there, but I know works by noted community people like Emily Short, Andrew Plotkin, Quintin Stone, Adam Cadre, Adam Thornton will be present, along with a host of other names you'll recognize.
Anyway, sorry to drone on so long tooting my own horn, but now that I can finally share this info, I wanted to be the first to break it.
Monday, March 30, 2009
MAME cabinet non-update
A brief update on the MAME cabinet is probably in order after all these years.
Short story--it remains stalled pending basement development. I put it on hold a number of years ago until I had more of the basement finished.
Actually, we now have our combined media room + playroom area finished in the basement, and after I install the baseboard trim in there, finishing up the MAME cabinet is probably next on the agenda.
It's a good time to tackle that--with the new TV downstairs, that frees up the 27" Toshiba that I bought for the cabinet to actually be used for the cabinet.
All that's really left is installing the TV, the fans, painting it, and then installing the marquee and display plastic (already cut and fitted). Oh, I also still have the coin door to slap in there. So there's not really a lot of work to do, and now that I have the media room done, there's a corner to stick the cabinet in all ready and waiting.
Pictures will, of course, follow once this stage is reached.
Short story--it remains stalled pending basement development. I put it on hold a number of years ago until I had more of the basement finished.
Actually, we now have our combined media room + playroom area finished in the basement, and after I install the baseboard trim in there, finishing up the MAME cabinet is probably next on the agenda.
It's a good time to tackle that--with the new TV downstairs, that frees up the 27" Toshiba that I bought for the cabinet to actually be used for the cabinet.
All that's really left is installing the TV, the fans, painting it, and then installing the marquee and display plastic (already cut and fitted). Oh, I also still have the coin door to slap in there. So there's not really a lot of work to do, and now that I have the media room done, there's a corner to stick the cabinet in all ready and waiting.
Pictures will, of course, follow once this stage is reached.
Friday, January 16, 2009
A neat Ask/Tell change
* EDIT * In order to alleviate some reading confusion, the below post is in regards to Risorg2, a sequel to my first game of Interactive Fiction, Risorgimento Represso. Specifically, this post deals with some methods I came up with during development for simplifying Ask/Tell conversation topics for characters within the game.
I struggled with my original Risorg with the idea of being able to ask characters about everything in the game. I go for the complete experience, and it always seems wrong to me when the guy in the shop north of the town square either claims to know nothing about objects in the town square or has some equally silly response of "There's not much I can tell you," or "I don't think you need to worry about it."
Real people don't act like that. Ask a merchant who's got a shop in the market square what he thinks of the market square and darn right he'll have an opinion.
Of course, with Risorg1, trying to do this resulted in LOTS of quoted strings in characters 'Ask' routines, even to the extent of running into Inform limits. I compromised for game objects by having NPC's Ask routines run WordInProperty on the common game objects I wanted to ask them about. This worked okay, but with collisions from time to time, and still meant a lot of coding. There were also holes, as I wouldn't put a WordInProperty for every item into every character's Ask routine.
In between Risorg1 and Risorg2 development, I played around a lot with ways of attaching topic information to the objects themselves. After a fair bit of work, this is working *really* nicely. For objects in scope & held, we now get nice things like this:
So we get the regular parser disambiguation for items in scope, which is nice. This ends up calling an item.information() routine within the object, and the parameter passed is the NPC doing the asking.
So each object that I've got of class "Askable" just lists all the NPCs and their response to the item. It makes it really easy to do it this way. Previously, with each NPC, you had to think of all the items in the game and code responses. Now, with each item, I just think of all the NPCs (a much more manageable number) and make sure the ones I want are accounted for in this object.
The other nice part is if you ask about a game object that isn't in scope, WordInProperty is then used to try to find a game object being asked about. If a game object is found, the same information routine is run.
So in the socks/carpet example above... if the carpet had been left outside the shop, asking about 'threadbare' would have resulted in the socks getting matched. Asking about 'threadbare carpet' would result in the carpet getting matched, even though it's not there. A simple TestScope in the carpet's information routine allows me to craft different responses from the shopkeeper if the carpet is not in scope.
Finally, if no match is provided by any object in the game, it falls through to an AskGeneral action that matches quoted words within the NPC, in the same old way.
All in all, it's a pretty neat and tidy solution and lends real verisimilitude to the game, being able to ask NPCs about any object in the game.
Of course, all this being said, I'll release the game and someone will promptly find the one object that they can't ask person X about.
I struggled with my original Risorg with the idea of being able to ask characters about everything in the game. I go for the complete experience, and it always seems wrong to me when the guy in the shop north of the town square either claims to know nothing about objects in the town square or has some equally silly response of "There's not much I can tell you," or "I don't think you need to worry about it."
Real people don't act like that. Ask a merchant who's got a shop in the market square what he thinks of the market square and darn right he'll have an opinion.
Of course, with Risorg1, trying to do this resulted in LOTS of quoted strings in characters 'Ask' routines, even to the extent of running into Inform limits. I compromised for game objects by having NPC's Ask routines run WordInProperty on the common game objects I wanted to ask them about. This worked okay, but with collisions from time to time, and still meant a lot of coding. There were also holes, as I wouldn't put a WordInProperty for every item into every character's Ask routine.
In between Risorg1 and Risorg2 development, I played around a lot with ways of attaching topic information to the objects themselves. After a fair bit of work, this is working *really* nicely. For objects in scope & held, we now get nice things like this:
>ask old crone about threadbare
Which do you mean, the threadbare red carpet or the threadbare woollen socks?
>socks
"Definitely not interested in buying," says the old crone. "I've got a drawerful of my own."
So we get the regular parser disambiguation for items in scope, which is nice. This ends up calling an item.information() routine within the object, and the parameter passed is the NPC doing the asking.
So each object that I've got of class "Askable" just lists all the NPCs and their response to the item. It makes it really easy to do it this way. Previously, with each NPC, you had to think of all the items in the game and code responses. Now, with each item, I just think of all the NPCs (a much more manageable number) and make sure the ones I want are accounted for in this object.
The other nice part is if you ask about a game object that isn't in scope, WordInProperty is then used to try to find a game object being asked about. If a game object is found, the same information routine is run.
So in the socks/carpet example above... if the carpet had been left outside the shop, asking about 'threadbare' would have resulted in the socks getting matched. Asking about 'threadbare carpet' would result in the carpet getting matched, even though it's not there. A simple TestScope in the carpet's information routine allows me to craft different responses from the shopkeeper if the carpet is not in scope.
Finally, if no match is provided by any object in the game, it falls through to an AskGeneral action that matches quoted words within the NPC, in the same old way.
All in all, it's a pretty neat and tidy solution and lends real verisimilitude to the game, being able to ask NPCs about any object in the game.
Of course, all this being said, I'll release the game and someone will promptly find the one object that they can't ask person X about.
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