Thomas.minet

Sundays are for rolling a critical success. Before you reach toss the dice, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

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I am dad, hear me whinge. Too many games, not enough spare time, for all my non-work hours are spent kissing grazed knees, explaining why you cannot eat the food in that cupboard, constructing awful Lion King dioramas out of toilet roll tubes and being terrified that the next jump from the sofa to the armchair will go fatally wrong. I’m lucky in that my job to some extent involves playing games, so by and large if there’s something I really want to check out I can find a way to, but I appreciate that there are many long-time, older or otherwise time-starved readers for whom RPS is a daily tease of wondrous things they cannot play.

Now, clearly I cannot magically truncate The Witcher 3 into three hours for you, but what I can do is suggest a few games from across the length and breadth of recent PC gaming that can either be completed within a few hours or dipped into now and again without being unduly punished because you’ve lost your muscle-memory. … [visit site to read more]

(Quiet at present, because I'm busy clearing my desk before next week's trip to Seattle and Spokane.)

Some of you might have noticed the acronym TTIP in the news— TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Superficially it's just another free trade deal, with corresponding trade agreements being negotiated for the Pacific Rim and other zones. It's raised a lot of concern because it has largely been negotiated under conditions of heavy secrecy, with extreme measures taken to prevent leaks—despite which, drafts of the treaty have escaped and sparked huge controversy.

In particular, TTIP and the related agreements provide for binding arbitration to be imposed in disputes between signatory states and overseas corporations or investors—in effect delegating national sovereignty to an unelected private tribunal of lawyers.

So here's my speculation: there are worrying signs that nothing has been learned since the 2007/08 fiscal crisis—or rather, that the banking and investment establishment has concluded that moral hazard is a busted flush. We're in another investment bubble, the Chinese stock market is already in free fall, we've got food/water scarcity wars in the middle east, the Fed's Quantitative Easing program has ended and the Bears are getting Bearish ... the auguries are pointing towards a sequel to 2007, or something close enough to scare the pants off everyone. Meanwhile, the UK and Germany are governed by cynics who are still slapping themselves on the back for figuring out that austerity has the inituitive appeal of kitchen-sink economics for the illiterate, making it an easy sell to stay in power. And we're seeing a scary global rise in the militarisation of police forces.

So here's my open question: is it plausible to consider the secretive binding arbitration provisions in TTIP to be a pre-emptive move to prevent an assertion of people power by angry disenfranchised electorates after the house of cards comes tumbling down at some point in the next 5 years? TTIP is due to be ratified by next year, and once locked in, it would be really difficult for a government (however popular) to move unilaterally to demand an accounting of its creditors. Think Syriza in Greece confronting its creditors with a massive democratic mandate and being told to lube up and bend over—but on a global scale, with everyone in the same boat.

It's fairly clear that one of the defining characteristics of the 21st century so far has been the creeping installation of a system optimized to exclude public opinion from the levers of power despite continuing to pay lip service to principles of democratic accountability: is this another (and big) step in ensuring that democracy can't actually threaten the interests of the global financial sector?

Am I being paranoid here? Or not paranoid enough?

The photos we’ve seen the last few days of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons are stunning and monumental! Now, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center has just published on Flickr the first high-resolution photo of Pluto’s surface, which you can see below.

They also published this timelapse of photos as the spacecraft neared the dwarf planet:

Follow NASA Goddard for more photos sure to blow your mind.

Prix spéciaux

pour Ticket to Ride et Small World 2

(Tablette ou PC/Mac via Steam)

La fin de l’année approche ! Pour les fêtes, pensez aux versions numériques de nos jeux à succès.

Ticket to Ride et Small World 2 pour iPad et tablettes Android sont disponibles au prix de 2,69€ ! C’est la moitié du prix habituel pour Ticket to Ride et une réduction de 70% pour Small World 2 !

Vous jouez sur PC ou Mac ? Ne vous inquiétez pas, on ne va pas vous laisser seuls et abandonnés dans le froid… nous avons aussi 2 offres spéciales pour Small World 2 sur Steam. En ce moment, profitez du jeu au prix de 6,99€ – là aussi, c’est 50% de réduction par rapport au prix habituel. Ou mieux, soyons fous ! Prenez le « Complete Pack » qui contient le jeu de base et les 3 extensions « Cursed! », « Grand Dames » et « Be Not Afraid… » pour 11,49€ !

Que ce soit pour offrir à un ami ou pour vous, c’est le moment de profiter de ces offres spéciales sur Ticket to Ride et Small World 2. Ces offres sont limitées dans le temps, ne traînez pas ! Faites votre choix :

Pour iPad
- Ticket to Ride
- Small World 2

Pour Android via Google Play
- Ticket to Ride
- Small World 2

Sur Steam:
- Small World 2
- Small World 2 Complete Pack

Toute l’équipe Days of Wonder vous souhaite d’excellentes fêtes de fin d’année !

This is a video of Tony Hawk and Dave Carnie demoing that real Hendo Hoverboard that's coming out. I still have beef with Tony Hawk though because he's one of the people responsible (including Doc Brown himself!) for that other hoverboard commercial that was so obviously fake it blew my mind that every single idiot I know on Facebook thought it was real. I've since deleted all those old, stupid friends and made new ones. So far it's just me and the three fake accounts I use to interact with myself so I don't feel lonely, but I feel like 2015 is going to be a big year for new friendships. And I'm not just saying that because of the fortune cookie I got last night, because that shit read, "There's no such thing as an ordinary cat." Oh like hell there isn't! Tons of my friends have them. Obviously, I angrily demanded another cookie, which they refused, and I stormed out of there so angry I forgot my chow mein leftovers. My fortune should have just read, "You'll be skipping breakfast and lunch tomorrow." Hit the jump for the video.

Analog Addiction gave Icewind Dale: EE a score of 6/10 in a review. Overall, Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition is a well polished update to a fourteen year old game. The Infinity Engine paved the way for a lot of current role-playing games, and must be given its due....

Amazon a décidé de fêter l’été en lançant une offre qui ne se refuse pas… et qui devrait faire un paquet d’heureux.

A couple months ago we came across a new technology called Spritz. It’s a tool that helps you read faster. Given how far behind I typically am in my Old Reader queue, we thought it would be a good thing to try out in the application. We were so happy with the results that we’ve decided to roll out the beta Spritz integration to our users today.

To enable Spritz, you’ll need to go into your settings and click the Spritz checkbox. You’ll then see the Spritz icon in your feeds which you can click on (or use the ‘i’ hotkey). The first time through you’ll need to create a Spritz account, but after that it should be clear sailing and fast reading.

Here’s an article about the new functionality on TNW.

Let us know what you think!

Heck yeah, lift and separate those buttcheeks. That's what I want my ass to look like. This is a video demonstrating the depth of the character creation system for Black Desert, an upcoming MMORPG from Korea. You can fine tune pretty much everything, ALMOST down to individual hair length (but not quite). Want your pupils to shine with little stars? No problem. Massive penis with a dragon tattoo on your inner thigh? Sure, why not. Unfortunately, they spent so much time on the character creation system the game looks like it sucks. I'm kidding, the game looks awesome (video demo of that below as well). I'm thinking I might have to learn Korean so I can play. Kidding again, you don't need to know the language when you speak KICKING ASS. Okay, I think I'm ready. Here we gooooooooo! Wait -- what happened. "You just uninstalled the game." Shit! Keep going for the worthwhile videos.

This is a series of DC Comics superheroines as 1940's pinup advertisements designed by artist Ant Lucia. They will be sold as 18" x 24" prints for $15 apiece by Quantum Mechanix HERE. Man, it's hard to believe that back in the day pinups were like, some of the most risque images you could easily come across. Because now we have the internet. I have seen things that would make somebody from the 1940's head explode. And that's not a good thing either -- no matter how many children's cartoons I watch, I will never have that innocence back. Keep going for nine more.

Nothing To Hide‘s statements on privacy and surveillance aren’t subtle. This is a really interesting puzzle game in which you must dutifully spy on yourself, constantly ensuring that government cameras are able to see you wherever you go. And despite currently being in development, it’s entirely in the public domain, copyright free, for code, art, music, etc. “By giving up ‘power’ on my art,” says creator Nick Liow, “my art can have more power.”

… [visit site to read more]

Anyone who has a cat knows they have the marvelous ability to sleep wherever they want, however they want. These pictures will show you just how funny or weird their sleep positions can get.

There are quite a few peculiar facts about cat sleep. For instance, cats sleep for about 16 hours a day – that’s 6 years for a 9-year-old cat. Snoozing, from which they can freely wake up at any moment, takes about three quarters of their rest. Moreover, cats are crepuscular – meaning, that their most active hours are dusk and dawn.

Given how much they sleep, cats have plenty of time to try out some ridiculous positions and places to sleep. The apparent inconvenience of sleeping in a bowl or between books seems quite a normal thing if you need to stay alerted at any time and when you’re as flexible as they are. Most importantly, however, they are hilarious and adorable.

Image credits: Jamie Mitchell

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30 Cats Who Have Mastered The Art Of Sleep-Fu originally appeared on Bored Panda on January 6, 2014.

 

In 2010, Finnish designer Robin Falck wanted to build a place he could call his own. While hiking in the woods he found a beautiful location for a cabin. With mandatory military service coming up in less than a year, he knew he didn’t have time to build anything substantial that would require a permit. In Finland, you are allowed to build a small dwelling without a permit if it’s less than 96 – 128 square feet (depending on the location).

After designing the building during the winter months, Robin set out in June to build his cabin using as much locally sourced and recycled material as he could find. All building materials were carried in by hand and it took him two weeks to build. Falck estimates the cost somewhere around $10,500 (not including his own labour).

Robin says the angle and size of the window gives the interior a lot of natural light and that you can even see the stars at night! On the first floor is a lounge area with micro-kitchen while the 2nd story loft is for sleeping and storage. He named his humble abode Nido, which is Italian for ‘birds nest’.

[treehugger via Ignant]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Don't just buy a new video game - make one" - U.S. President Barack Obama helps kick off Computer Science Education Week 2013. ...

Isabella reporting,

One of Benjamin Franklin's most ingenious inventions was an unusual musical instrument he called the glass armonica, from the Italian word armonia, or harmony.

Most everyone has run his or her dampened finger along the rim of a crystal wineglass or goblet, producing an other-worldly, high-pitched echo (and often sending all pets scurrying from the room.) In 18th c. Europe, water-tuned wineglasses were combined in carefully tuned sets and "played" to the enchantment of audiences. Among those who enjoyed this eerie music was Franklin, visiting London in 1761. Franklin resolved to refine the concept of the water-tuned glasses into a more convenient instrument, and the result was the glass armonica. For more of the history, see this website devoted to the instrument.

While the new instrument was a great success with aristocratic audiences in the 18th c. – even Mozart composed for it – today there are only a handful of performers worldwide. One of them is William Zeitler, featured in the video here, who not only explains the armonica, but also plays several short pieces. If you're in the mood for more, here's a link to Mr. Zeitler playing the "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite - it's never sounded more wonderfully ethereal.

And if you're a fan of the paranormal/steampunk TV show Sleepy Hollow (yes, I've already admitted I'm a Sleepyhead, too), then you've already seen and heard a glass armonica. In the November 18 episode Necromancer, guests at Abraham's house were being entertained by a glass armonica performance. Could there be a more appropriate soundtrack?

So we see in the news again that PC shipments are falling. Doom! Doom! Abandon website! Or, indeed, perhaps not.

The estimated number of PCs shipped in 2013 is thought to be around 300 million, according to regular soothsayers, IDC. That’s the level in around 2008, and they’re not expecting that number to significantly rise… Or fall.

(more…)

This post is not about the day to day operations of The Old Reader or anything of that nature.  It’s about how our team came to get involved with RSS and how we see the future of this application and technology that we value so highly.

As a long time user of RSS and Google Reader, I’ve long appreciated the benefits of the technology.  Like many people, my use of Google Reader faded a bit as social media platforms took hold.  But, I’d always go back to Google Reader when I wanted to cut through the noise of social networks and focus on things I’m really passionate about.  Google Reader wasn’t my “second screen” application where I’d go to take a break from work.  It filled a much more essential need for me by providing these three features:

1.  Unread items are kept in a queue.  I don’t miss things.  No algorithm chooses what to show me or not show me.

2.  It’s an archive of blogs that I value and posts that I’ve read.

3.  I can follow whatever I want from anywhere on the web.  It embodies the open web.

For my professional career in web research and development, I can’t really live without these features.  I can follow twitter feeds or like Facebook pages, but I’m certain to miss important content from people who I highly value.  I need those items queued, archived, and I need to be able to subscribe to anybody on the entire open web.  I can’t be limited to those authors who choose to enter into private social networks and I don’t want to have to constantly check my accounts for updates.

So this leads me to how we got involved in The Old Reader.  When Google Reader shut it’s doors, my business partner Jim did some research and tried several services and suggested I’d like The Old Reader the best.  So we both moved on over.  I read some articles trying to understand why Google Reader would shut down and one really stuck with me.  It hypothesized that Google had been following the lead of companies like Facebook and Twitter by turning their backs on the open web and trying to build their own private/closed social networks.  It’s frankly hard to argue against this theory.

However, we see this trend of migrating from the open web to private networks as cyclical.  How long will it be before your Facebook stream is so full of promoted content, bizarre algorithmic decisions, and tracking cookie based shopping cart reminders that you won’t be getting any valuable information?  For as little as $60, a business can promote a page to Facebook users.  It won’t be long before your news feed is worthless.  So we jumped at the opportunity to get involved with developing and managing The Old Reader.  We believe in it.

As we’ve been looking to grow our engineering team at Levee Labs and The Old Reader we’ve met with a number of bright young people that are surprisingly unaware of RSS.  They say “I recognize the RSS icon, but haven’t really ever used it.”  Is it possible that there is a lost generation of internet users that are completely unfamiliar with RSS?  Are they unfamiliar with the idea of the open web too?  We believe that’s the case and we’ve been working hard to come up with ideas that’ll expose that generation to RSS, The Old Reader, and the open web.  It’s what made the internet great to begin with and it’s coming back.

Thanks for using The Old Reader!

 

 

 

In this beautiful shot by famous travel photographer Trey Ratcliff, we see a unique view of the Eiffel Tower on a lovely summer day in Paris. While photos of the iconic monument are quite common, I’m always drawn to photos that capture popular places in a fresh way. As Trey explains:

“I made it over to the Eiffel Tower for a big night of shooting, and arrived there just as the sun was setting. I have a few little special spots I like to visit around the tower that are not full of tourists and the like. This shot looks much more delicate, perhaps, than I did while achieving it. Unfortunately, this was one of those tricky ones where the tripod legs were splayed out like a flattened armadillo. I looked beyond redonkulous while taking it… Trey’s Tip: If the only interesting feature nearby is on the ground, well then you better get on the ground too. Get down and get dirty! People don’t like you for your clean pants anyway.”

 

 

 

I’ve been chased by many a dog, as an avid jogger. It’s always a situation where some person lets their dog off leash and thinks everyone should just know how nice their dog is. I don’t know your dog, man.

And that’s why I don’t like dubbing.

Bad news sells, so the media tends to focus on the negative things and ignores some of the things that make the world a better place. That’s why we want to share this list of 30 happy facts to remind you about the bright side of life.

Everything started when a Reddit user asked others to post facts that made them happy. This list grew rapidly because people couldn’t get enough of random facts about people and the world that make them smile. Later, Buzzfeed took this list and matched it to pictures adding a couple of new facts. Now, we’re having a go at improving it by adding a couple of our own finds.

What’s better than knowing that somewhere out there in the world, sea otters are holding hands, cows have best friends, and that there are monkeys in Japan that buy snacks from vending machines with change? What other happy facts do you know?

1. Sea otters hold hands when they sleep to keep from drifting apart.

Image credits: commons.wikimedia.org

2. When you were born, you were, for a moment, the youngest person on earth.

Image credits: Gonzalo Merat

3. The elements that we are composed of were formed in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are all made of star dust.

Image credits: Michael Shainblum

4. Cows have best friends.

Image credits: mare

5. A prison in Washington pairs up “death row” shelter cats with select inmates as part of a rehabilitation program. It seems to be a pretty wonderful thing for both the inmates and the cats.

Princess Natalie relaxes with Joseph Contreras, one of her caretakers. (Image credits: catster.com)

6. Blind people smile even though they’ve never seen anyone else smile.

Image credits: Sachiho

7. Turtles can breathe through their butts.

Image credits: TaraDSturm

8. The Beatles used the word “love” 613 times in their songs.

Image credits: inspirationaldaily.wordpress.com

9. Squirrels plant thousands of new trees each year simply by forgetting where they put their acorns.

Image credits: Irene Mei

10. Macaques in Japan use coins to buy vending machine snacks.

Image credits: o2worldnews.com

11. A BBC News program broadcast in 1957 ended claiming that spaghetti grew on trees on a farm in Switzerland. Many viewers believed the report and called the BBC asking how to grow their own trees. Their response: “Place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”

Image credits: Robert Couse-Baker

12. Norway knighted a penguin.

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13. In China, killing a Panda is punishable by death.

Image credits: Cute Baby Animals

14. Rats laugh when tickled.

15. The voices of Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse got married in real life.

Image credits: zimbio.com

16. Spiders can’t fly.

17. Sweden has a rabbit show jumping competition called Kaninhoppning.

Image credits: thowra

18. Gentoo penguins propose to their lifemates with a pebble.

Image credits: telegraph.co.uk

19. Dolphins have names for each other.

Image credits: Vitaliy Sokol

20. Kissing burns 2 calories a minute. Undressing burns 8.

Image credits: Jeremiah Kuehne

21. Puffins mate for life. They make their homes on cliff sides and even leave some separate room for their toilet.

Image credits: fourteenfoottiger

22. The Kingdom of Bhutan uses “Gross National Happiness” as an important national measurement.

Image credits: Adam Brill

23. When playing with female puppies, male puppies will often let them win, even if they have a physical advantage.

Image credits: Brian Whipple

24. Pigs’ orgasms last for 30 minutes.

Image credits: Source Media

25. A study measuring the effects of music found that cows produce more milk when listening to soothing music. They produce the most when listening to R.E.M’s “Everybody Hurts.”

Image credits: cbc.ca

26. There is a program that makes prison inmates responsible for training and raising seeing-eye dogs. Many reported that they felt like they were making amends for their past actions by working with the puppies.

Image credits: absencesix

27. Google, the periodic table, the structure of our DNA, and “Yesterday” by the Beatles are all ideas that were conceived in dreams.

Image credits: Sarolta Ban

28. There’s a superhero with a hearing aid called ‘Blue Ear’. He was created by Marvel Comics to encourage a little boy to wear his own!

Source: My Fox Boston

29. Good news is more likely to be shared through social media than bad news (wink wink, nudge nudge).

Image source: Jeff Van den Houte

30. Oops! We’re missing one. What other happy facts do you know?

30 Of The Happiest Facts Ever originally appeared on Bored Panda on October 17, 2013.

1. 15 Interesting Facts about Dreams
2. The Facts About Smoking [Pic]
3. 40 Maps They Didn’t Teach You In School
4. 20 Amazing Examples of Owl Camouflage

You can imagine how thrilled I was at the prospect of getting my hands on what everyone on the Internet was assuring me was videogames’ ‘Citizen Kane moment’. Although I ridiculed that cliché several years ago, I now understand – having done slightly more scholarly research – that the phrase ‘Citizen Kane moment’ is in fact wonderfully apt. Because before Citizen Kane was released in 1941, it is now clear to me, literally no good films had ever been made.

Movies such as Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935), Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), or Jean Renoir’s La Règle Du Jeu (1939) were basically clunky trash with low-res textures, the equivalent of 1990s-era ‘interactive storytelling’ on CD-ROM. Citizen Kane, bouncing heftily on to the scene like an enormous and perfect water balloon, caused all observers to breathe a sigh of relief – at last, here was a film director who knew what the hell he was doing. Citizen Kane was the equivalent of… well, apparently, of The Last Of Us.

Imagine my surprise, then, when The Last Of Us turned out to be – well, very much like other videogames. Here is a guy with a beard, sitting on a sofa. His daughter gives him a nice watch for his birthday. He is grumpy and not very grateful. Then the zombie apocalypse breaks out. I cause some avatars to rotate and move forwards a bit, and I find myself being encouraged to press certain buttons in response to symbols flashed on the screen, so that the predestined narrative can play out as intended. Yes, there are QTEs – apparently, no amount of merciless ridicule can dilute their authoritarian popularity among videogame designers who fancy themselves cinematic auteurs. Like I said, it’s a videogame.

Anyway, eventually my daughter dies, because the game wouldn’t let me even try to run away from the guy who shot us, and we fast-forward 20 years. Now my beard and hair are a bit grey. After some tutorials on how to use the totally unexplained aural superpower I have somehow acquired – I can ‘see’ zombies and humans through walls by listening carefully – I find myself in some prettily decrepit venues, randomly murdering a lot of men.

If I’d paid more attention to the dialogue I might know exactly why I am murdering all these men; in any case, murdering them I am. Like I said, it’s a videogame.

I’m not saying it’s not fun to be introduced to all these new ways of murdering men. I can murder them with bullets, of course, but they don’t hand out bullets like candy around here. I can also murder them by sneaking up behind them and pressing a button in response to an onscreen symbolic prompt, and then pressing another one to strangle them until they are dead. I can even bash them with planks or stab them with shivs. If I get into a one-on-one fistfight, I can just keep mashing the action button until the bearded fellow – with whom I don’t for a moment identify – smashes my enemy’s skull open on the handy corner of an iron box. At one point my partner minces and dances right past a guard, no more than a foot from his nose. He doesn’t notice her at all. Like I said, it’s a videogame.

I try to open a door. ‘NEED KEY’ appears on the screen in red text. I guess I’ll have to look for a key, not exactly a revolutionary mission in interactive entertainment. I go happily in search of the mandated item.

Oh, look, here’s a broken-down truck full of crates. I wonder what’s in the crates? Could be food, could be weapons. No doubt something useful. I try to look inside the crates. I can’t. Like I said, it’s a videogame.

At length, The Last Of Us does furnish some wonderfully tense setpieces of stealth and hurried weapon-building improvisation, and it has a rare heft and thunk – one of the most convincing illusions yet of heavy (and not ridiculously acrobatic) flesh moving around through hard, solid environments. Mechanically, though, it is hardly without obvious inspiration, playing somewhat like a mash-up of Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid and Arkham City. Like I said, it’s a videogame.

The Last Of Us does represent the consolidation of some kind of advance, at least, in that now an ‘adult’ or ‘mature’ videogame is no longer one that features scantily clad women whose obsessively coded breast physics take up 90 per cent of available clock cycles. Instead, people praising The Last Of Us for its ‘adult’ or ‘mature’ qualities seem to take those terms to imply something relentlessly humourless and grim, a sub-Cormac McCarthy trudge through the bleak post-apocalypse.

Personally, I found all the blades of grass far more affecting – as a beautifully silent symbol of life’s indomitability – than the much-bruited subtlety of the relationship between Bearded Grump and his daughter-substitute. Maybe, indeed, the aspiration to seamlessly downbeat bleakness represents only a slightly later stage of adolescence than bug-eyed breast fixation. Still, progress is progress. And, like I said, it’s a videogame.

The post On The Last Of Us and videogames’ apparent ‘Citizen Kane moment’ appeared first on Edge Online.

Aujourd'hui, mon voisin m'a réprimandé pour le mégot que j'avais jeté sur le trottoir. J'ai justifié cet acte par : "C'est bon, c'est la première fois." En rentrant chez moi ce soir, j'ai retrouvé ma boîte aux lettres pleine de mégots accompagnés d'un mot : "C'est la première fois que je le fais..." VDM

French game developer David Cage isn’t enjoying his trip on the London Underground. It’s 1998 and he’s southbound on the District Line. Destination: Wimbledon, home to the Lawn Tennis Association and also, more importantly, the HQ of Eidos Interactive. In a backpack he carries a PC – a monster of a machine, powerful enough to run the demo of his passion project Omikron: The Nomad Soul.

Cage is, understandably, on edge. The rig on his shoulder is heavy, but his hopes weigh heavier still. He desperately needs this to go well; across the Channel, Cage’s start-up company Quantic Dream is running out of time.

Omikron began with an impossible vision. Cage, a professional musician with a background in commercials, wrote an initial, 200-page concept document outlining the kind of game he wanted to play.

“I was dreaming of a game with an open-world city where I could go wherever I wanted, meet anybody, use vehicles, fight and transfer my soul into another body,” he tells us. “When my friends read it they said: ‘David, this is impossible. It’s not technically feasible, don’t even think about it.’”

Visionaries don’t waste time wringing their hands over something as passé as feasibility, however. It didn’t matter to Cage that PC 3D cards were still in their infancy. He took the money he’d made from scoring commercials, hired a team of six friends with development experience and started production in a sound-proofed studio that once belonged to Belgian singer Jacques Brel. There were thick doors, no windows and everyone was crammed into a 15m square space.

Cage insisted on paying the team, not for altruistic reasons, but so that he could be the boss. “I wanted to be able to demand something of them, ask them to be there on time in the morning and work long days.” They went into instant crunch mode, having just six months to make the impossible demo; if they didn’t finish it before then, Cage would be broke and the dream would be over.

In the penultimate week of development, Cage got on the phone and asked publishers in the UK if they were interested in seeing his realtime 3D demo. Eidos said yes and when John Kavanagh, the VP of product development, saw the impossible demo with its dynamic city environment and motion-captured, canoodling pedestrians he signed Quantic Dream immediately – just three days before Cage’s start-up money ran out.

Omikron: The Nomad Soul showcases more ideas in its first ten minutes than most games achieve in their entire duration. Released in November 1999, two years before Grand Theft Auto III popularised the 3D open-world concept, Omikron invited players into an awe-inspiringly dynamic, futuristic city. It also featured a story about demons, hell and the transmigration of souls. “It’s the world’s first Buddhist game,” quips Phil Campbell, who was then senior designer at Eidos. “Buddhist with guns, I call it.”

Set in a totalitarian city ruled by a supercomputer and replete with RoboCop-style satirical ads (“Drink Quanta Cola, the energising drink with radioactive quanta extract”), the game possessed a subversive, cyberpunk edge. Imagine The Fifth Element crossed with Liberty City and a dash of Parisian red-light district Pigalle: among the supermarkets, temples and libraries are strip clubs populated by kabuki-faced pole dancers and sex shops crammed with dildos. The subversive quality seeps into the story too: starting out as a cop interrogating enemies of the state, you eventually join the resistance. One avatar’s terrorist is another avatar’s freedom fighter.

“There were many new ideas, probably too many,” admits Cage. “I wanted to mix different genres but I wouldn’t say we were 100 per cent successful.” Seesawing between adventure game, RPG, firstperson shooter, 3D fighting game, and the odd bit of driving, Omikron was about ten games in one.

It didn’t always work, not least the switches between third- and firstperson perspectives for the awkward shooting sequences. “I’m in the 15 per cent of people who can’t play games in firstperson because I get sick,” Cage explains. “Initially we wanted to have the shooting in thirdperson because firstperson gives me headaches and we didn’t think it fit with the style of the game. But Half-Life was very successful at the time and Eidos really pushed for firstperson. I think it was a mistake.”

Flawed as it might have been, it was flawed genius. Campbell, who’d later leave Eidos to join Quantic Dream as its chief creative officer, was among those who were wowed by Cage’s vision. “I went out with him at E3 and got him drunk, worming my way onto the project,” he recalls. “We invented an alter-ego for David, calling him ‘Foggy.’ It was primarily intended to start the cult of ‘David Cage’!”

Designing the parameters of an open world wasn’t easy. A lot of questions came up in development: would players be able to drive the game’s taxis – ‘sliders’ – and use them to ram-raid shops or police mechs? Would they be able to start fist-fights with passers-by? Ultimately, none of those options was pursued and Omikron’s open world shipped mayhem-free – to the detriment of its potential profits. “Perhaps GTA got it right, at least from a commercial point of view,” muses Campbell today.

For Cage, such concerns were trivial. Unlike Rockstar’s anarchic mafia sandbox, Omikron maintained a rigid sense of itself as an emotional, ambitious epic. The problem was that an open world didn’t lend itself to the demands of linear drama.

“It’s very difficult to forge a real sense of narrative in an open world,” the designer explains. “As a player you want to explore the world and drive around it but it destroys any sense of pace in the story. That was the first lesson from Omikron: if I want to tell a good story, I need to give more constraints to master the pace and rhythm of the narrative, otherwise the player can destroy it.”

David Bowie didn’t play videogames, but he knew a lot about virtual identities. He’d been Ziggy Stardust, The Thin White Duke and, once upon a time, just plain old David Jones. When he saw Omikron, he knew he wanted to be part of it.

In early development Cage had scribbled down a list of artists he’d love to have compose the game’s score. Björk, Massive Attack and fellow trip-hop band Archive were all on the shortlist. So was Bowie.

“We put him on there although no one thought we’d even be able to talk to him,” laughs Cage. Instead, Bowie responded immediately to their approach and came to Eidos with his son, Duncan Jones, an avid gamer and the future award-winning director of Moon. Not just content with writing music for the game, Bowie wanted to inhabit the virtual space and offered his services. “I can see now how a game like Omikron can jolt you into an altered state – with few of those messy side effects!” he joked in an interview with Playboy. He contributed ten original songs to the game.

Bowie also spent a month in Paris, where Quantic Dream filmed him with the help of a French motion-capture studio. He played two parts – the youthful lead singer of The Dreamers, an underground band who held furtive concerts in the city’s clubs; and the older Boz, a blue-skinned, digital entity who leads the resistance fighters.

“We wanted to capture Bowie doing his signature moves,” recalls Campbell, a paid-up, lifelong member of the singer’s fan club. “But he didn’t think he really had any signature moves so he gave us his choreographer [Edouard Locke] and we captured him doing ‘Bowie’ routines.” They also captured guitarist and regular Bowie collaborator Reeves Gabrels; the rest of the band members were hand-animated. Cage then spent 30 hours on each concert, filming the mo-capped avatars within the game engine using a virtual camera.

It was the first time a real-life performer had gigged inside a videogame, a decade before GTAIV’s comedy clubs. Bowie’s dual role also tied into Cage’s obsession with schizophrenic identities, something that was only underscored by the game’s fluid shifting between avatars. Like Fahrenheit and Heavy Rain, Omikron experimented with the emotional potential of such perspective shifts.

Cage particularly liked the early moment when the player, occupying the body of policeman Kay’l, beds his wife. “The idea of being in the body of a guy and making love to his wife – when she believes you’re her husband, even though you’re not – was a very strange position to be in. That’s exactly the kind of thing that I try to explore in all my games today. How can we put you in the shoes of someone else?”

Bowie, a legendary chameleon, totally understood the pleasures of the virtual realm and its Dorian Gray potential. He even roped in his wife Iman, who appears as a bodyguard. “He sometimes joked about leaving his Bowie character in Omikron forever,” says Campbell. “He would have totally transcended to the digital side – and ‘come out the other side’ as just David Jones again.”

For a game with such ambition, Omikron’s commercial fate was painful. “The titles I create seem to be too weird for the American marketing guys,” says Cage. “In the US, Eidos didn’t support the game at all, which was really disappointing. The big sales were mainly in Europe, where we sold between 400,000 and 500,000. It was too arty, too French, too ‘something’ for the American marketing department.”

Omikron remains a key game in the evolution of open-world environments. Yet it also marked the arrival of a unique talent. “David Cage really is an auteur in the classic, French, Truffaut style,” argues Campbell. “He has such a strong vision that’s been there since day one.” For his part, the designer believes Omikron is the genesis of everything he’s done since. “The seeds of Fahrenheit and Heavy Rain are definitely in there,” he says. “They were conceived in reaction to what I discovered making this game. I’m really proud of it but what I learnt making it was what made me decide to choose another way.” Like Omikron’s nomad soul, Cage’s restless creativity remains constant, whatever its host.

The post The Making Of: Omikron: The Nomad Soul appeared first on Edge Online.

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CEO of nDreams writes for GamesIndustry International on the problems with free-to-play