E3 2011 – Sony Press Conference

We all know that Sony had a lot to make up for this year with the system hack causing outrage to millions around the globe, this major corporation really needed to impress to ensure that they maintain a strong fan base. A lot of people seemed to be questioning how Sony will tackle the issue of the hack in this year’s E3. Will they bring it up right at the start? Will they wait until the end and mention it? Will they ignore it altogether? What they ended up doing was most likely the best way to approach the situation, which was to get it out of the way right at the start. A formal and mature apology was made along with the guarantee that nothing of this sort will happen again. Once that was out of the way it was on with the show, and what a show it was!

Sony opened their show with a fantastic montage of music, game trailers and footage of the Playstation hardware itself. This was a fun and exciting way to start the show with the only problem being that much of the footage was in 3D, so really only those in the room could benefit from that. Of course this opening was very similar to last year’s Sony opening, but when you’re on to a good thing then why change it? Sony opened with only exclusive titles and continued to preview completely exclusive content for at least the first 50 minutes of the show, and then for much of the rest of the time as well. This type of emphasis on exclusives is what I have come to expect from E3 and Sony really didn’t disappoint.

The Uncharted 3: Drakes Deception demo was of very high standard which is of course what we have come to expect from Naughty Dog. The dynamic environment of the cruise ship in the demo was really breathtaking and only heightened my anticipation for the November release. Resistance 3 was next and looking good, followed by some information on the HD release of ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, two games which I am personally greatly looking forward to playing on the PS3. Sony then started really pressing the ‘Move’ for the rest of the show. The NBA 2k12 demonstration was slow and felt awkward as the whole crowd waited for the celebrity sportsman to score a point using the move controller. Medieval Moves: Deadmund's Quest was up next which seemed to be for the younger gamers. The demonstration here wasn’t very impressive, the move functionality seemed a bit shaky and the gameplay itself looked quite slow and not very challenging.

In the same way that Microsoft was really pushing the kinect this year Sony had a real strong emphasis on 3D throughout this show. I have a feeling this is because the 3D capabilities of the PS3 haven’t really been popular so far with most people not owning or being able to afford a 3DTV. They tried to tackle this with an interesting 3DTV bundle which could be good but it still seems pretty expensive for a 24” TV. This was followed by several announcement of exclusive PS3 content for many big games such as Bioshock Infinite and Battlefield 3 which are great selling points for the console, especially with such big titles.

After all of this you could tell that the whole crowd was just building with anticipation for the new Sony NGP. They finally got around to this part of the show and unveiled the stunning new Sony Vita. This really was a highlight for me as the idea of being able to carry around real PS3-style graphics on a hand-held console is thrilling. Also with titles such as an all new Uncharted title, Little Big Planet, Mod Nation Racers and Street Fighter X Tekken it sounds like they are on to a sure fire winner. I also didn’t expect there to be so much connectivity between the PS3 and the Vita which was an exciting announcement.

Overall I was very impressed with Sony this year. The sheer amount of exclusive games and content was even more than I ever expected. My highlights were the new Uncharted 3 footage and demo as well as the Playstation Vita. They could have had less emphasis on the 3D aspect as I really don’t think many people are interested in 3D gaming yet, no matter how hard they push the idea. In the end it was a great conference that went out with style with the addition of a group of traditional drummers on stage to wrap things up. 

E3 2011 – Microsoft Press Conference

My overall feeling from Microsoft’s conference this year was unfortunately resounding disappointment. It did have a few impressive and exciting moments, but the lack of anything unexpected and no real surprises made for quite a dull hour and a half. I was actually getting bored towards the end of this and kept checking the time which is not what I wanted during the most exciting games conferences of the year.

Before I go on about what let me down in Microsoft’s performance this year I’m starting with what impressed me in this year’s offerings. The show opened with two breathtaking and action-packed demos full of previously unseen gameplay. Both Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Tomb Raider kicked off the day’s events with a bang that unfortunately turned into a low sizzle by the end. Interestingly enough these two games which appeared to almost be Microsoft’s biggest selling points for the day are both non-exclusives. Anyone with a PS3 or a PC will be able to have a great time with these and since there appears to be no kinect functionality for either of them it’s hard to see why there was such an emphasis on them in a show about the Xbox 360.

The rest of the show, and in fact most of the show was based on the kinect which Microsoft seem to be pushing more than most people expected. It seems like Microsoft are now aiming kinect at families and trying to take over from the Wii as being the next “all ages gaming” console. This basically included a whole new array of kinect games for kids and a sort of ‘kinect sports’ which looked eerily similar to the opposing Wii Sports. Some of the new kid’s games did look great for the younger gamers out there, but the lengthy demonstration with the two children on stage playing Kinect Disneyland was awkward to watch.

Putting aside the array of children and family orientated games, the area in which kinect really shone for me was in Fable: The Journey, Ryse and Kinect Star Wars. These are the types of games I would be expecting from the 360 and also the type where the kinect can really be utilized to its full potential. Fable was especially impressive as the man on stage demonstrated how to cast spells using only your body. Another aspect of kinect that this conference was really pushing was in-game voice recognition. This was demonstrated live through Mass Effect 3 gameplay. While the gameplay itself looked great I can’t see myself ever really taking to this voice recognition. I don’t mind speaking while playing games if I am communicating with other people in multiplayer, but the thought of just sitting alone in my lounge room and talking out-loud to a single player campaign is just too strange for me. Not to mention the fact that in the ME series the voice recognition is used to make decisions, which are actually much faster just to click on rather than read out loud so in the end this feature makes things longer for you.

The voice recognition was impressive during the demo for Tom Clancy’s Future Soldier as it utilized a very intricate gun customization system. Again though I wouldn’t really feel comfortable speaking out loud to a TV on my own, or even with friends around… and I did notice that aiming the gun while using kinect seemed very shaky compared to say a controller or a mouse. Then of course we have the big title exclusives which are Halo 4 and Gears of War 3. The Gears presentation was very impressive but the Halo teaser didn’t really have much to it. 

Overall this year’s Microsoft press conference was a letdown with basically no surprises at all. The highlights for me were the Tomb Raider gameplay and Fable for Kinect but it felt like they were spending too much time focusing on kinect and didn’t have much else to offer. The amount of Wii-replica games to try and break into the casual and family gaming markets also felt like a bit of a cop-out. I hope the rest of the press conferences this year offer me a bit more than what Microsoft did.

-Sophie

Live Cattle Export to Indonesia

For many years now I have had a strong interest in animal welfare. Over that time I have watched countless undercover videos of animal cruelty filmed by activists, done school projects about animal welfare, joined countless online protest groups, written angry e-mails to people in Government etc. I would like to one day become much more involved with animal activism, attending protests and the like. When I heard yesterday that the whole country was reeling from this Four Corners investigation I just had to watch it as I generally try to stay up to date with everything happening in the world of animal welfare.

Now I must admit somewhat sadly that after all these years of watching and reading incidents of gross animal cruelty I have become quite hardened to it all. That’s not to say it still doesn’t affect me at all because it does, I still get enraged when I see any act of cruelty but after so many years of exposing myself to it so often I find that very few things shock me anymore. For this reason I felt that I would be fine watching this show, I wanted the information and the facts of what is really going on so last night I stayed up late to watch the repeat of Four Corners. The idea that I would not be shocked by this was grossly wrong, as what I experienced last night was one of the most horrific things I have ever faced.

I knew it would be bad, usually these stories don’t effect a whole country so quickly but the reaction I have been hearing all of the TV, radio and newspaper told me I was in for the worst. Throughout the 40 minutes or so of watching this story I had used up so many tissues from crying that I had to go into the bathroom and grab a toilet roll to use. I was physically shaking with anger and by the end I had what could only be described as a migraine from feeling so much rage and crying so much at the same time. Basically, watching this story really took it out of me in more ways than I can describe. The footage shown was far worse than I could have imagined in my worst nightmares. And the fact that my own countries meat industry supports it is one of the most shocking parts.

Lyn White of the foundation ‘Animals Australia’ is a woman who I admire greatly and I have been following her work for years, but last night I was reminded just how strong the human spirit can be when trying to defend those who can’t defend themselves. White and her team actually travelled around Indonesia, entering dozens of these terrible abattoirs and filming the footage for us all to see. If I thought the footage was hard enough to watch on TV I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for White and her team, standing right there amongst it all. At one stage they showed footage of them leaving one of the abattoirs desperately trying to clean all the blood of themselves before going onto the next one.

To me these people are true heroes of planet earth. What they would have had to go through to get this footage is so horrible that I can hardly imagine it, but what they did has had such a powerful and strong effect. Over the years I have been asked many times why I watch so much animal cruelty footage, how can I put myself through that? To me it’s simple, the reason most animal cruelty acts are covered up or ignored in this day and ages is because people simply don’t know about it or like to turn a blind eye. Most people live in a sort of happy bliss thinking their meat comes from happy healthy animals who felt no pain, or their eggs always come from perfectly healthy chickens out on some lovely farm. People can continue living in these ignorant little bubbles their whole lives until real life footage is thrown right in front of them, that’s the only time we see change.

Another reason I watch it is because this footage deserves to be seen. I greatly admire any animal activist who goes out of their way and into some of the most terrible places on Earth to film and photograph these horrific events. This barbaric animal slaughter and torture has been happening in Indonesia for over 18 years with millions of Australian cattle, but only now with all this raw footage provided by Lyn and her team are people finally taking action.

If anything positive has come out of this it’s the reaction that has come from this story. In just one day over 85,000 people have signed an online petition to put a total ban on live export which is a very impressive number. People have been calling up radio shows in tears about it, it’s been all over the news and the internet. This type of outrage on such a large scale proves to me that the general Australian public are not willing to tolerate such gross animal cruelty under our countries name and it shows that they care. Such compassion towards animals on a large scale like this is always a positive thing.

In the end this issue just like basically all other animal welfare issues will unfortunately come down to money. Time and time again money is put on a higher pedestal than the lives of millions of creatures who can feel pain and fear just as much as us. If you suggest banning live export all over the country straight away the industries are jumping to the same old song and crying “what about the money?”. Sure it may be a billion dollar industry but is it worth the suffering? The general Australian public seems to think not. 


-Sophie

thoughts of a film student: Females + the Film Industry

I just had to re-blog this post from the blog of my very good-friend Monique and I encourage you all to read it. It's an interesting insight into the fact that film is one of the last few industries where equality between the genders is still very unbalanced and in favour of men. Female directors are noticeably outnumbered by men, and not just by a little bit but by a ratio that is outstandingly large in this day and age. This is something that I personally, as well as countless other people would like to see change in the near future. Although I am aware that in saying that I am probably holding my hopes too high.  

thoughts of a film student: Females + the Film Industry: "It was probably going to happen eventually and writing about Jane Campion got me thinking about women in the film industry, so here’s my ran..."

2011 St Kilda Film Festival

A friend of mine who is a film student recently got two free tickets to opening night of the St Kilda Film festival. I was lucky enough to be invited along so last night, just like many other avid film fans we braved the extremely cold weather and rain to make our way to the Palais Theatre. Now I’ll admit, I’d never even heard of this short-film festival before but I’m not one to turn down anything to do with my love of film. Needless to say I quickly jumped on the opportunity to go as fast as I could.

The Palais Theatre really is a beautiful venue and definitely one of Melbourne’s finest. We arrived to see large crowds of cold movie film fans huddled outside as the Palais seemed to look even more magnificent shrouded in rain.

Six short films were shown that night and I was very impressed overall with each one although I did have a few stand-outs. I’m going to write a quick summary of my thoughts regarding each film.

There may be some minor spoilers.

Pop

Director: TOBIA ANDERSSON

Pop is a film that had really outstanding cinematography and direction. It looked beautiful from the opening second to the closing moments but I must admit that the story just didn’t grab me. As someone who greatly dislikes both hunting and chewing gum I found some parts of this film more frustrating than anything. Although I can appreciate and really enjoyed the fantastic way in which the father/ son relationship was developed without any dialogue at all.

Suburbia

Director:  ANTONIO OREÑA-BARLIN

This was one of the stand-out films for me. The sound editing was especially strong in this one and helped to create an extremely thick, eerie atmosphere throughout the whole film. The Palais Theatre was packed and throughout this whole film hardly anyone even breathed, the tension was strong which to me is one of the best signs of a good filmmaker. This film was powerful and very creepy all the way through and I enjoyed watching the audience reactions to some parts as much as I was enthralled with the actual short.

A Lost and Found Box of Human Sensation

Director: STEFAN LEUCHTENBERG

Even though this film tackled a very dark plot I found it very fun to watch all the way through. The beautiful Tim Burton-style imagery and animation worked well here and was at times outlandish while still remaining relevant to the story. I found that the music in this film is really part of what made is so memorable for me. While not being a musical by any means there was the odd song mixed in with the story which added to the overall quirky feel of this film. A lot of the designs, the robots etc felt really familiar to me here as this type of Burton steampunk style is appearing everywhere now, especially in animation. Even though it’s being used a lot I still found it quite effective here so it didn’t bother me.

Bee Sting

Director: HEATH DAVIS

I did enjoy this one but it just felt way too familiar to me. I think I have seen this exact same plot told several times before, whether in TV, film or something else. What saved this film for me was the brilliant acting and the directing. There were a lot of little funny moments throughout but in the end this story for me has just been done too many times before and I couldn’t really connect with it.

Dan Sultan – Old Fitzroy

Director: RHYS GRAHAM, NATASHA GADD

I haven’t listened to much of Dan Sultans music before and I really ended up enjoying this song. I liked the idea for this music video, clean and simple yet it never really felt boring or too repetitive. While this was about Fitzroy specifically I felt like it really captured the feel of all of Melbourne.

Bear

Director: NASH EDGERTON

This film really was a wonderful way to end the night. I hadn’t even read the plot for this so I had no idea where it was going from the beginning, but I found myself being constantly surprised again and again and laughing out loud many times. I found that the very end was quite predictable, but that fact that I never knew where the film was heading up until that point kind of made up for it. The acting was great in Bear and I think the pacing really helped to make it as funny as it was. This film was in some ways quite dark humour but so laugh out loud funny at the same time. This one definitely makes me want to check out other work by this director.

~

Overall I loved my night at the St Kilda Film Festival and I wish I could have seen more than only 6 films. I would really like to keep attending this event each year in the future as it really is a great showcase of local and even some international talent. 

Spider Sculpture – Part One

In my sculpture class at the moment we are required to create a piece using only found objects. This means using anything we find around the house, or even just things we find laying around on the streets or out in nature. One of the main rules we have to follow is that we can’t go out and specifically buy objects with a particular design in mind, we just have to utilize what we can find.

For mine I have decided to include another one of my hobbies, which is archery. Over the years of being in an archery club I have gone through many sets of arrows and have at least two old sets I no longer use. My teacher loved the idea of incorporating the old arrows into my piece or even making the main sculpture just out of arrows. After a while I decided that what I want to do is create spiders. I haven’t decided yet whether I will create one large or a series of smaller spiders with them. I am still working on the planning and all the details but that is where I am heading with this project now.

Above are a couple of photos from my art journal with a few quick sketches of possible spider ideas and a couple of print-outs of two massive spider sculptures by Louise Bourgeois. While I admire her work greatly and have been inspired by her spiders I see myself moving in another direction. While her spiders have quite an organic feel to them created by the curved and free-flowing legs I would like mine to have a more stiff, solid and almost robotic look to them. The straight-edged nature of the arrow is bound to help me with this.

At the moment I am still planning how exactly I am going to do this, and whether my spiders will have colour, whether they will have bodies or just legs and whether they will have the traditional 8 legs or maybe more or less for a more unearthly feel. I will post an update on these spiders when they are ‘hopefully’ completed.

Below is a photo of the two sets or arrows I will be using for this piece. 

Game Review #1 - Batman Arkham Asylum

8.5/10

Batman: Arkham Asylum is the first Batman video game that I have ever played. My experience with gaming is that usually when games are based off films or comics they are often subpar to their original gaming counterparts. Arkham Asylum however offered me a truly exciting gaming experience that I was hooked on from the very first cutscene. 

The story of this game is just as good, if not better than many Batman films I have seen, and with just the right amount of cutscenes throughout the single player gameplay you do almost feel as if you are watching part of a Batman film. The setting of this game is of course the mental hospital/prison of Gotham itself which is Arkham Asylum. This is a setting that can be both endearing and frightening throughout the game and is often brought to life by the games fantastic use of sound. A lot of detail was put into the sound design for this game and it was worth it, the sound effects are sometimes eerie and add layers of atmosphere to certain areas. An example of this is one part of the game where Batman is walking down a corridor and a woman's voice is heard reading out notices on the loudspeaker, only for her voice to become distorted and slowly turn into Joker- controlled laughter. 

The gameplay is quite easy to pick up on after the very unique opening level/ tutorial and remains easy to use throughout the game. The fighting is especially easy to pick up on, although it can be hard when trying to take out attackers in stealth. The detective mode in the game was highly addictive and I often found myself using it even when there weren't any enemies near. Throughout the game Batman has to try and decode a series of riddles left around Arkham by The Riddler. Some of these are as easy as just searching down question mark shaped trophies, but others are a lot harder. I had a lot of difficulty figuring out many of the riddles that were in certain areas because I really didn't figure out how to actually solve them until I was close to finishing the game. I really think it should have been explained more clearly at the start how were supposed to solve the riddles. 

Also, as far as ways that the game could be improved I also believe that it would benefit from having a small on-screen map. I often got frustrated having to click 'select' every few seconds to see if I was going in the right direction as it was very time consuming when you had places to be. 

Overall though this was a fantastic game and the positives far outweigh the negatives. With all the extra riddles and the challenges for Batman to tackle then this is a game that you can really continue to play for a long time, and one which I believe has a very high replay value.