Month: November 2006

Today I talked to Dharmesh at new Gametraders store in Carillon City Arcade about the possibility of them supporting the MASSIVE by providing a Playstation 3 and Wii. It looks like it will be going ahead, but I’ll wait for more formal confirmation.

While there I took the opportunity to take a few photos. As many of you might know I’m fairly opposed to the (price gouging) retail practises of Electronics Boutique (EB), but I do sometimes pine for a specialty video game store (rather than just the games section of my local Target or JB Hifi). Game Traders seems to fit that niche.

Gametraders seems to be more for the rounded gaming enthusiast than EB. Case in point, EB won’t deal in US or Japan region games, but Game Traders routinely imports games for general sale. Check out this photo of their DS games:

Just looking at this section of the shelf, we see Elite Beat Agents (US version), Gyakuten Saiban 2 aka. Pheonix Wright: Ace Attorney – Justice for All (Japanese version), and Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2 (US version). Also catering to the more serious game collector, Gametrader stores deal in:

all formats from Atari to the latest systems, buying, selling, trading and renting

So, check them out. Tell them Nick sent you! 😛

Note: If you want to check out the PS3, visit Gametraders Garden City of Carillon City. They both have one on display!

The Wii just launched in the US and there are heaps of videos online from various launch locations throughout the US. Here are a couple of video clips that I particularly liked. I’m sure more mass-media coverage will be online (or on television) soon.

The general vibe seems to be very different to the Playstation 3 launch, which seemed to mostly consist of people waiting in line to buy a console to sell on eBay. In contrast, the people who lined up to buy a Wii seemed to mostly be gamers and long-term Nintendo fans. As evident in the video clips below.

The first clip is Joystiq’s coverage of the Los Angeles launch at Universal Citywalk. It’s a very professional video and includes interviews with a number of fans waiting in line. At the very front of the line is Jonathan Mann (aka GameJew, who I’ve talked about before). After buying his Wii, he sung “Wii Means You And Me” from his own “The Mario Opera“.

The second video comes via bits bytes pixels & sprites and is from the main New York City launch. It shows Triforce (clearly a huge Zelda fan), the first person to buy a Nintendo Wii fielding questions with Reggie (Nintendo of America President). He is very articulate about what Nintendo means to him personally and why he appreciates the Nintendo philosophy. (Actually, the video below is a better quality version of the same interview on bits bytes pixels & sprites; I found it by searching on YouTube).

Here’s one of Triforce’s responses from the video above:

The say Nintendo is about children. Actually, the very first Nintendo system was called Famicom; that means Family Computer. Nintendo has always been about the family. You know, they’ve always made games for everybody to play and enjoy, and I like that about Nintendo. They don’t alienate any particular gender, you know, or age, or demographic. It’s about getting everyone to play, and I hope you guys continue to work.

Overally, I was touched by how these people where. Clearly, I don’t know them personally, but I feel that we share a common philosophy that pines for gaming to be fun, friendly, inclusive, and universal. I’m looking forward to the Australian launch.

I didn’t really like the “tribal” design, but I do love playing around with calligraphy in Inkscape.

Here’s another possible design for OneTwenty paraphernalia:

I know it’s hard to read, but that’s kind of why I like it. If you don’t see it as a word, you regard it differently.

OneTwenty would like to have some shirts made up so that we can stand out at the MASSIVE. I put this together quickly, but it looks a bit too aggressive to me:

I don’t think it would suit a t-shirt or polo; It looks like it would be more at home embroidered down the front of an off-white cowboy shirt.

Update: Here’s what it might look like on a cowboy shirt:

Stupid pots with metal handles. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

I was using a silicon gripping thing too, but it wasn’t big enough to protect my entire hand. This is going to hurt in the shower tomorrow morning… dammit!

Update: Daily photos after the jump (may be pretty gross).

Continue reading “Burninated :(“

I love instructional videos! Frequent readers might remember how happy I was when I found out about VideoJug. More recently, I posted about Ramady’s Michael Jackson dance lessons. This morning I stumbled upon YouTube user Puissance‘s series of beatbox tutorials. He covers a number of fundamental and more advanced techniques in a fairly straightforward manner.

Here is his video tutorial on bass kick and snare while humming:

I’ve also embedded his tutorial for Rahzel‘s “If Your Mother Only Knew” after the jump. I always wondered how that “the beat and the chorus at the same time” thing works.
Continue reading “Pui City Basement beatbox tutorials”

I flew into Karratha on a Boeing 737. I was surprised as I thought that it was a fairly large plane to be flying to a community of only 10-12,000 people. The plane was rather empty; Heidi’s brother-in-law suggested that it would have been jam-packed going back to Perth (with mining workers returning for the weekend).

As I neared Karratha, the clouds looked amazing:

Read more about my trip (with photos!) after the jump.

Continue reading “My trip to Karratha (in pictures)”

This blog has been fairly quiet of late as I’ve spent the last four days in Karratha. (I’ll post a few images from my trip shortly).

NVIDIA have announced a new computing architecture which allows for direct access to GPUs. This is huge news for anyone in involved in HPC or games programming!

This should finally make the stream processing capabilities of GPUs available to a programmer without the need for them to refactor all processing into a computer graphics model. Current methods for stream processing on a GPU use image buffers to store data and process the data using fragment shaders, written in custom languages such as GLSL and Cg.

From the CUDA webpage (I italicised some key points):

Developing with CUDA
The CUDA software development kit (SDK) is a complete software development solution for programming CUDA-enabled GPUs. The SDK includes standard FFT and BLAS libraries, a C-compiler for the NVIDIA GPU and a runtime driver. The CUDA runtime driver is a separate standalone driver that interoperates with OpenGL and Microsoft® DirectX® drivers from NVIDIA. CUDA technology is equally supported on both the Linux and Microsoft® Windows® XP operating systems.

It’s great that they are using standard C. Hopefully it means that one can create libraries in C for use in higher level languages (like python or Ruby). I expect that the interaction with OpenGL will be through NVIDIA OpenGL extensions. This interaction alleviates one of my immediate concerns when I read heard about CUDA: that the GPU may have to be “locked into” GPGPU mode. Thankfully, it doesn’t look like this is that case!

Via Reg Hardware.

Pure Pwnage episode 12 is now available for download. They also have a new online episode viewer, but I expect that you will want to download it. There are no torrents listed on the website yet.

I’m downloading it now. Sweet!

Update: local download available from AusGamers.