Club Silicon

Christmas

Hello all, Alex here reporting from fever central. I write this in bed after having been laid low with a fever and chest cold, one that Nicholas caught two days ago and that Mark caught 4 days before that. Despite the illness it has been a wonderful Christmas. Some pictures will be posted on the Brandon Family Website soon!

Joel and Cynthia Brandon

Joel and Cynthia Brandon are two of the best people I've ever known. Parents are like that, but in this case there's more unique qualities to them that I have come to know as an adult that would fascinate even the harshest of "camp family feel good statement" critics. I didn't grow up listening to popular music. Though I eventually was opened to a new world by switching my radio to a station that played a "Mister Mister" song that I enjoyed, I grew up listening to Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Sousa, Gershwin, Scottish pipe bands, Flanders and Swan, Stravinsky, and of course the Smothers Brothers. They had a record of "Cats" and one of Bob Dylan that I remember, but I was taught "serious" music first, at least according to my mother. As such I give credit to this a great deal for my compositional skill, though I consider it a foundation, not the final word in music that deserves respect. I also didn't read much in the way of comics (some, though), I was taught poetry, Shakespeare, and bits of the Bible (my mother would read excerpts from the book of Acts). I didn't watch sitcoms, I watched Britcoms. My father would teach me about oriental culture and my mother would teach European culture. My father would be supportive of my musical efforts with my first synthesizer, and my mother put me in piano lessons as well as church choir, and be proud but skeptical, giving me both satisfaction and a drive to prove myself; a perfect combination. I got the benefits of a classical education and the social training of a gentleman, and hopefully a smattering of writing skills along the way. While I have learned that a great deal of this knowledge is dying, it gives me the benefit of experience from many different sources. Throughout life I would hear such phrases as "all the other kids" and "well, most parents...". Generalizations indicating a sheeplike and stagnant mindset. Who wants to be like "most people"? A foundation of shared and familiar things is good, but it shouldn't permeate one's entire life. I'm glad I was raised differently and wouldn't have it any other way.

Therefore thank you, Mummy and Dad. Thank you for being the source of my creation. Thank you for being kind and patient as well as unusual and off kilter. It is one of my greatest and most constant wishes that I can show you the same love you have given me.

Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows

My efforts in the past two years as audio director at Midway Home Entertainment in San Diego have been the game pictured at left. Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows. Head to the website and listen to the music!

It was an extremely satisfying as well as an extremely dissapointing title to work on. It had major ambitions that ultimately had to be cut short, but gameplay that grew from uncertain to pretty solid from an action standpoint. My job was to make sure the sound, VO and music were up to snuff. The reviews are in: they were (except in the case of dear Greg Kasavin of GameSpot, who has lauded every title I've worked on for it's sound and music... so this time I'm a little confused).

Overall this is a great series to be a part of and I'm proud to have added to its folklore. As for the game itself, definitely give it a try as I truly believe it is a worthy addition to the Gauntlet line.

Angries and Passives

I have found that there are two kinds of people in this world: passives and angries. The passive prefers to communicate kindly and tactfully at all times, but the passive's mind does not naturally draw towards other things... the passive is introverted in any number of ways. The Angry will think often of others, but prefers to communicate through criticism and anger. This isn't to say that passives don't get angry. Passives get angry at anger itself and criticism. This is a yin yang system.

What fascinates me is the perpetuation of this behavior and refusal to either analyze or change it. The conclusion is that people are not far removed from animals, and despite our intentions, we're unable to move beyond our limited physical (brain) capacity. Our constant expansion is admirable but in many endeavors ultimately foolish.

Darwinia

 

In 1989 a company named Bullfrog created the first "God" game: Populous. This new genre let players influence, directly or indirectly, humans or other sentient creatures. It was a smash hit and along with SimCity (released the same year), paved the way for a completely new kind of strategic gameplay experience.

Last week "Darwinia" was released. Darwinia is a title that continues this tradition and combines it with realtime strategy wargames such as Warcraft and Command & Conquer. In such wargames one typically has resources that supply their forces and construction of armies, and tactical management of the forces themselves.

This is a very clever combination. Some forces you can control directly as you would in an RTS (realtime strategy) title, but some have their own motivations and you can only influence them by promoting those within their ranks to an "officer". I've only played the demo but it is quite enjoyable. The best part for me apart from this new mechanic is the art style. Because you control digital constructs a great deal of the appearance and setting seems derived from "Tron", and is very geometrically abstract. A welcome change from the "we have to be real to be cool" movement in games today.

The sound is well done too and has clever abstract design. There is also good use of localized ambience. When climbing towards the "cloud" level, lofty wind can be heard. When passing energy sources a comforting hum issues forth.

If Club Silicon had awards this would win this year's "most original" award. Check it out by downloading it from Steam!

Images courtesy of Introversion Software. Links courtesy of Mobygames.

"Back in my day..."

There are a number of things I imagined I would say to younger people as I got older. One of them was "when I was your age, this Legg Mason building was a field filled with tall weeds". I would be referring to an intersection of West Street and Cathedral Street in Annapolis, Maryland. I have revised these sayings a bit now. One of them is:

"Back in my day, we didn't have to worry about metadata, podcasting, RSS, XML, blogging, or WIKI... we had our C:> prompt, our memory addresses, our RAM drives, our PC Tools and our floppy disks, and that was enough!"

Indeed it was. Now that PCs are far more mass market, there is even MORE complexity. Fascinating, and utterly too complex for most people to fathom to retain any level of familiarity that yields those little things like optimization, and dare I say it, art.

Rather than continue to write to myself I'm going to try to evangelize this site a bit. We'll continue next with some sort of marketing drive.