Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Fun & Games

Kate bought me some DVDs and games for Christmas, and I thought I'd write a little about them here today. These are just the ones I've opened so far - there are more yet to be opened... :)

DVD - The League of Gentlemen

No, not The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - this DVD is the first season of the British comedy show. It's so long since we've seen this on BBC America that I'd actually forgotten about some of the characters and scenes, such as the well-meaning but cursed vet Mr Chinnery, who can't touch an animal without unintentionally killing it, and Pauline the JobCentre Restart officer who doesn't want any of her unemployed victims to get jobs, because if they all got jobs where would she be? We watched the whole first season in one evening and then I had no choice but to run out to Fry's to find season two. Damn funny stuff, if a bit OTT in places.

DVD - The Prisoner

Kate got me the entire series, all seventeen episodes on ten disks. I was about ten when this series first aired in the UK, and apart from (I think) one re-run on Channel 4 sometime in the 1990s, when I was able to watch a few of the episodes, I haven't seen it since then. Even after all this time I still remember many of the details. The surreal environment of The Village makes this series unforgettable. I've watched five episodes so far - I've been tempted to have a marathon and just watch one after another but I think that would just spoil it, so I'm pacing it and rationing myself. Even so I still can't wait to get to the last two episodes - I have never seen those.

DVD - The Kumars at No. 42

This show has been on BBC America but we'd never watched it until Kate bought me the DVD. Some parts are bloody hilarious - especially Sanjeev and his grandma Ummi.

Game - F.E.A.R.

I just finished playing this game through to the end the other night. Some parts are downright skin-crawling, hair-prickling creepy, such as one part where your character is in a deserted building and you turn to go down a ladder - and there, right where you were standing, is a little girl. Then you turn to your left just in time to see a soldier walking toward you in slow motion... and he whispers something and vanishes, and you turn back and the little girl has gone, too. However the game is mostly an FPS and there's a lot of action and some very tough enemies - even on the easy setting I lost count of the number of times I "died".

Game - Serious Sam II

Don't get this mixed up with Serious Sam: the Second Encounter. SS-II is a new game built on a new engine. It has all the great features of the first two Serious Sam games - the huge maps, the brilliant colours, wonderful attention to detail and level design, insane weapons and enemies and all the rest. This is the only game I know that mixes gory FPS shoot-em-up action with comedy (even if it is schoolboy-level comedy). Addictive as hell, too - I installed it the other night, only intending to play the first level to see how it looked... and ended up going to bed at 5am. Seriously.

Labels:

Monday, January 02, 2006

Snake Farm IV

I've done all I'm going to do with the Snake Farm video. I only had about 15 minutes of raw footage to start with and much of that was unusable because of bad lighting, bad sound, shaky camerawork and so on, and as a result I ended up with only two or three minutes of "good" footage. What I've done is basically a slideshow made up from 4-second segments, with a backing music track. You can download it from here if you'd like to see it - it runs a little over a minute and the file is a bit more than 2Mb - not particularly big.

As you might see from the link, I'm using savefile.com as the host - unlike VidiLife and YouTube, they don't mess with the video files and you can actually download them (VidiLife only allows you to view videos on their page or embed it in another page - there's no way for anyone to download a copy; YouTube also messes with your files but I can't say whether they allow downloads).

The Reptile Expo and the Snake Farm between them have been a great learning experience. These first two videos aren't exactly Hollywood quality but I've learned a lot about how I can improve my camera and sound work in future so I'm hoping that any other movies I create will that much stronger as a result.

I have ideas for two new projects. More on these later, when I've thought them out a bit more.

Labels: