Forza Motorsport uses a really cool AI system called Drivatar - it not only behaves convincingly (so no more brain dead path-none AI ala GT4) but you can train your own Drivatar that will in turn drive like you. I think the following quote brings home just how impressive an achievement this is:

Think about it … you’ve trained your Drivatar
to drive on 5 different tracks in 5 particular cars and now it is able to drive
all the tracks in the
game in all cars – though effectively it has never experienced them before.

Sounds great, can’t wait.

This is great. Black Cat are a great mod team, having created Thievery UT and Alien Swarm. Seems they’re now working on a commercial release called Alien Swarm: Infested based on the Source engine. I wonder if we’ll see it on Steam? Be nice to see games from other developers distributed with it.

I had no idea George A. Romero was even making this, but lo and behold there’s this trailer. Looks great! And by great I mean bad. But in a good way. Great!

As ever, The Shack is a goldmine of the comedy variety having just lead me to Darth Vader’s blog. Fabulous:

Bloody interrogation.  Imperial audience.  More leg woes.

It can be challenging to maintain your dignity as a dark tyrannical
overlord when the circuitry in your left leg constantly misfires,
threatening to send you off on a mad pirouette without notice. It
requires a serious effort of will to maintain my poise, the tendrils of
my connection to the Force reaching deep into space to feel out my
distant quarry and at the same time wrapped around the mechanisms of my
own body to keep them working.

Now, you can’t put too much stock in rumours, but it is nice that Nintendo definitely seems keen to ensure Revolution lives up to its name. IGN has a big old rumour post hinting at 3D projection as well as touch screen, wireless and tilt technology in the joypads. Crazy. Crazy in a good way.

With Nintendo seemingly planning some damn original ideas for their next console, Microsoft set to be first out the gate with the powerful Xbox 360 and Sony bound to trump them both in the graphics department (the Cell-powered PS3 should be astonishingly powerful according to some developer friends of mine) it’s going to be one of the most interesting E3 shows in a long time.

A mere 47,000 units, 1/8 of what Tribes 2 sold. Such a shame, particularly as that’s the main reason Vivendi are giving for dropping the patch. Certainly no reflection on the quality of the title - the story was top stuff and I enjoyed the multiplayer (but then I’m not one of the picky Tribes hardcore). Maybe the timing was wrong and I certainly don’t remember seeing any marketing for it.

Thankfully, the latest Vivendi/Irrational match up, SWAT 4, seems to have charted at number 10 in the US on PC, although Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich didn’t even make top 40 in the UK. A shame, though after trying the demo it did seem a bit too much like more of the same. Still, looking to pick up SWAT 4 (loved the demo) and can’t wait for Bioshock. Heck, now Ion Storm Austin is gone Irrational are the closest thing we have to a Looking Glass spiritual successor so I certainly hope they stick around.

Dear Nintendo,

One touch screen, one microphone, two bongo drums, two index fingers. This is what we call a no brainer so get cracking!

Hugs and kisses,

Pixel Kill

(And yes, that is a terrible Photoshop effort by myself)

Here’s something I didn’t know - the lead designer of Katamari Damacy doesn’t even own a PS2. No wonder it stands as practically the definition of out of the box thinking, the guy doesn’t really know where the box is in the first place! Plus, as this article reveals, he made a concious effort to try something different. Great that Namco took the risk on a new concept and it paid off.

FORT90 has a huge gallery of shots from the i am 8-bit gallery (you may have heard of it). Some surprisingly cool pieces in there though a couple are a little NWS.

While we’re on the subject of art, Cancelled Flight is a book/site with various artistic pieces on the theme of "pidgeon killing methods". More tongue in cheeck than it sounds, you may laugh.

The sneaking section in Sin. The fighting in Thief: Deadly Shadows. The stealth parts of No One Lives Forever. The puzzles in Ninja Gaiden. The racing sections in Giants.

What have all the above things got in common? Weak aspects to great games. I’m all for a bit of variety but sometimes it feels like a developer is banging a square peg into a round hole with efforts like this. A stealth level shoe-horned into an action game almost always feels horrible, ditto the puzzles in a kickass fighter like Ninja Gaiden.

There are exceptions - Chronicles of Riddick got both action and stealth spot on, but then they plainly made both a strong focus during development rather than adding in one of the other as an afterthought. Similarly, occasionally a nice diversion is welcome. The fun mini games in Jade Empire are a perfect example but they’re so minor that they don’t have to be anything but decent (which they more than are).

The lesson in this briefest of articles? It’s in the title. I’m all for developers trying something a bit different (look at Ritual and FAKK2 or Raven and Xmen Legends), just don’t do it half way through a game in a genre you’re already good at unless you’re really sure it fits. Otherwise it just becomes a jarringly weak link in an otherwise strong chain.

No really, we do. What a great name for a game, totally fits the fun, fresh feel (and of course the love) people have for the original. Hopefully this one will get a worldwide release this time, use Euros only got to play this gem on import. (Image and news gleefully ripped from the WorthPlaying)

Enough game linkage, time for a bit of a rant that’s been brewing for a while - do Microsoft even know what the hell they’re doing with their own OS anymore? In the time since Windows XP Apple have released multiple significant updates to OS X adding all kinds of neat features. Tiger, the latest, adds find as you type for all files on the system (a system called Spotlight) and plenty besides. Mac users get this, and plenty more, now. Windows will offer something similar, but Longhorn is well over a year away.

Then there’s Avalon which… er, accelerates the windows desktop and lets you do some 3D stuff. That’s really about as clear as it looks to me right now, and yet again Apple is already fully using modern graphics cards with Quartz Extreme.

None of this is lost on the ever-vocal Steve Jobs who’s laying into Microsoft for copying Apple. Well, nothing new there, can you say Trash C… sorry, Recycle Bin. Except unlike the horrid OS 9, having finally spent some time with it I can say OS X is lovely. Now all it needs is decent games support, but then it sounds like they’re finally taking that seriously now too.

I’m sure much of this perception is because the Longhorn PR machine hasn’t even started to spin up, but no matter how hard you look for early details it currently doesn’t seem to have much fuel at all.

So why, you might ask, have I not switched? Well, as it happens the Mac Mini actually looks more and more tempting by the day. At this point it’s simply a matter of cash (and the price on the Mini renders that a minor issue) rather than inclination.