Dragon Quest IX

Outside the giant Yodobashi-Akiba department store in the Akihabara district of Tokyo, hundreds of gamers gather each day, crowdsourcing the hunt for rare creatures and virtual treasure.

They stand, packed together in a cordoned-off area reserved for them, as store employees attempt to keep the sidewalk clear, ushering the players behind safety barriers. Everyone is holding a Nintendo DS and playing this year’s hottest new game: Dragon Quest IX

It’s a cartoony, easy-to-master role-playing game about grand adventures, but these players aren’t off slaying dragons. They’re swapping character data to meet other avatars and quite possibly collect valuable treasures.

Call it a massively multiplayer offline game.

“They get here pretty early in the morning,” said a 26-year-old player named Kawamura who stood away from the massive crowd but remained glued to his DS. It’s a scene that’s been repeated daily, albeit on a smaller scale, at hundreds of game stores, train stations and other convenient meeting spots all around Japan ever since the game’s July release. By harnessing a simple gameplay element to a previously existing capability of the Nintendo DS, developer Level-5 has created a sensation capable of drawing gamers together.

The items the Dragon Quest players are exchanging are treasure maps that lead them to hidden dungeons filled with monsters and treasure. When a player finds a map in the single-player game and then passes it along, his name will be attached, perhaps making him a mini celebrity.

Players seek several notorious maps in particular, said Kawamura. The “Masayuki Map,” named after the player who found it, leads to a dungeon full of nothing but King Metal Slimes, enemies that give the player copious experience points when they are defeated. Another map, called “Kawasaki Locker,” leads to a dungeon full of treasure chests packed with high-powered items.

The Dragon Quest players are mostly adults, although a few kids have cajoled their parents into bringing them to the meetups. Deo, a 9-year-old player, wandered back and forth between the cordoned-off area and his dad, who was sitting on a nearby bench — also playing Dragon Quest IX.

“You can meet a lot of interesting people,” Deo said, “and get items that you don’t already have.” The boy said his favorite item so far is the “Chiyoda-ku Map of the Gods,” named after the area of Tokyo in which Akihabara is located.

Reserved Area

Since the release of the original game in 1986, Dragon Quest has become a household name in Japan. It’s one of the country’s best-selling game series, and has moved close to 50 million copies worldwide. It’s played by kids, teens, parents and grandparents; the long-awaited release of a new Dragon Quest game is something of a national holiday here.

Except for some spinoff titles, the games have previously only been released for home consoles; the announcement that Dragon Quest IX would be released for the portable DS raised some eyebrows at first. But the crowds of people still milling about Yodobashi playing the game nearly three months later suggests that it was a savvy business move on the part of publisher Square Enix.

The game mode that’s fueling the Japanese crowds is called sure-chigai tsuushin, or “passerby communication.” It’s a brilliant concept for densely populated cities like Tokyo: If a player sets his DS on communication mode, then puts it into his pocket or bag, it’ll automatically search for other DS systems while he is walking around, riding the train or eating lunch at a coffee shop. When he opens his DS later, the player might find that the device has located other players that passed by during the day, and automatically exchanged virtual hellos. In a game like Dragon Quest, that means he’ll see the other player’s character, read a short message they wrote into the game and perhaps receive an in-game treasure from them.

The genius of sure-chigai, then, is that you don’t have to seek out other people who own the game. But the hundreds of people outside Yodobashi-Akiba know that you have to meet as many people as possible if you want the best treasures in the game.

Passerby communication has been around since the early days of DS. In the 2005 game Nintendogs, it was called “Bark Mode.” Another player’s virtual dog would join yours on the screen, and perhaps bring a present, like a chew toy. It’s been used in many other games since then, but nothing has ever caused a reaction like the Dragon Quest crowds.

After the game’s release, players quickly surmised that they were likely to collect more maps if they milled about in locations where other gamers would be. Since Yodobashi-Akiba boasts one of the biggest gaming sections in Tokyo, players began collecting around the Nintendo DS demo stations on the store’s 8th floor. Soon the crowds grew so large that they were practically taking over the floor, and Yodobashi set up an official area outdoors (and banned playing the game inside the store).

Banned from playing indoors

Players also established an extensive wiki on the subject, logging various maps and their benefits. The wiki also lists locations where players can expect to find others using sure-chigai — and tracks shops that have banned it. Dragon Quest IX is currently so ubiquitous, though, that picking up new virtual pals just while walking down the street is easy. I couldn’t walk more than a block down the street in the Shibuya entertainment district without my DS filling up with new visitors.

As befitting a new Dragon Quest release, promotional activity is all over Tokyo. If you bring your DS to a McDonald’s restaurant, you can download a red clown wig, just like Ronald’s, for your character to wear. Square Enix has also been quick to jump on the popularity of sure-chigai tsuushin.

A new television commercial (embedded), which can also be seen playing in Japan’s subway cars, shows a guy and a girl hooking up because they both happened to be in sure-chigai mode. (”Oh, your birthday is next week?” he says when he sees her transmitted data.)

They’re soon joined by two more giggly Dragon Quest players, and they all become pals.

On the streets of Tokyo, I didn’t observe anything nearly this social happening in real life. Most players kept their heads down, filing new data away on their DS and scooping up more after seeing what maps they’d been given. While every player I talked to said they were interested in the game because you can “meet people,” nobody seemed to actually be meeting each other.

Then again, in a culture where randomly introducing yourself to a stranger is something of a breach of etiquette, perhaps there really is a deep appeal to being able to virtually encounter other people, if only in passing.

James Cameron’s Avatar

James Camerons Avatar

Background and details about Avatar:

The story’s protagonist, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), is a former Marine who was wounded and paralyzed from the waist down in combat on Earth. Jake is selected to participate in the Avatar program, which will enable him to walk. Jake travels to Pandora, a lush jungle-covered extraterrestrial moon filled with incredible life forms, some beautiful, many terrifying. Pandora is also home to the Na’vi, a sentient humanoid race, who are considered primitive, yet are more physically capable than humans. Standing three meters tall (approximately 10ft), with tails and sparkling blue skin, the Na’vi live in harmony with their unspoiled world. As humans encroach deeper into Pandora’s forests in search of valuable minerals, the Na’vi unleash their formidable warrior abilities to defend their threatened existence.

Jake has unwittingly been recruited to become part of this encroachment. Since humans are unable to breathe the air on Pandora, they have created genetically-bred human-Na’vi hybrids known as Avatars. The Avatars are living, breathing bodies that are controlled by a human “driver” through a technology that links the driver’s mind to their Avatar body. On Pandora, through his Avatar body, Jake can be whole once again. Sent deep into Pandora’s jungles as a scout for the soldiers that will follow, Jake encounters many of Pandora’s beauties and dangers. There he meets a young Na’vi female, Neytiri, whose beauty is matched only by her ferocity in battle.

Over time, Jake integrates himself into Na’vi’s clan, and begins to fall in love with Neytiri. As a result, Jake finds himself caught between the military-industrial forces of Earth, and the Na’vi, forcing him to choose sides in an epic battle that will decide the fate of an entire world.

In 1994, director James Cameron wrote an 80-page scriptment for Avatar. Cameron said his inspiration was “every single science fiction book I read as a kid”, and that he was particularly striving to update the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter series. Cameron saw his story as being about how advanced civilizations supplant indigenous cultures, in either actively genocidal or more unpremeditated ways, and was influenced by the story of Pocahontas. In Avatar, humanity extends that practice to entire planets. The premise of a paralyzed man whose mind is remotely controlling an alien body is very similar to Poul Anderson’s 1957 short story “Call me Joe.” In August 1996, Cameron announced that after completing Titanic, he would film Avatar, which would make use of “synthetic”, or computer-generated, actors. The project would cost $100 million and involve at least six actors in leading roles “who appear to be real but do not exist in the physical world”. Special effects house Digital Domain, with whom Cameron has a partnership, joined the project, which was supposed to begin production in the summer of 1997 for a 1999 release. However, that was not to be, due to the special effects he wanted ran the budget up to $400 million, which made the film impossible to be made.

In June 2005, director Cameron was announced to be working on a project tentatively titled “Project 880″, concurrently with another project, Battle Angel. By December, Cameron said that he planned to film Battle Angel first for a summer 2007 release, and to film Project 880 for a 2009 release. In February 2006, Cameron said he had switched goals for the two film projects – Project 880 was now scheduled for 2007 and Battle Angel for 2009. He indicated that the release of Project 880 would possibly be delayed until 2008. Later that February, Cameron revealed that Project 880 was “a retooled version of Avatar”, a film that he had tried to make years earlier, citing the technological advances in the creation of the computer-generated characters Gollum, King Kong and Davy Jones. Cameron had chosen Avatar over Battle Angel after completing a five-day camera test in the previous year.

Cameron’s early scriptment for Avatar had circulated on the Internet for years. When the project was re-announced, copies were subsequently removed from websites. In June 2006, Cameron said that if Avatar was successful, he hoped to make two sequels to the film.

From January to April 2006, Cameron worked on the script. Working with Paul Frommer, linguist and Director of the Center for Management Communication at USC, he developed a whole language and culture for the Na’vi, the indigenous race on Pandora. In July, Cameron announced that he would film Avatar for a summer 2008 release and planned to begin principal photography with an established cast by February 2007. The following August, the visual effects studio Weta Digital signed on to help Cameron produce Avatar. Stan Winston, who had collaborated with Cameron in the past, joined Avatar to help with the film’s designs. In September 2006, Cameron was announced to be using his own Reality Camera System to film in 3-D. The system would use two high-definition cameras in a single camera body to create depth perception.

Filming and effects

Avatar was filmed using newly developed 3D virtual cameras, which would produce stereoscopic 3D images simulating human sight. In December 2006, Cameron explained that the delay in producing the film since the 1990s had been to wait until the technology necessary to create his project was advanced enough. The director planned to create photo-realistic computer-generated characters by using motion capture animation technology, on which he had been doing work for the past 14 months. Unlike previous performance capture systems, where the digital environment is added after the actors’ motions have been captured, Cameron’s new virtual camera allows him to observe directly on a monitor how the actors’ virtual counterparts interact with the movie’s digital world in real time and adjust and direct the scenes just as if shooting live action; “It’s like a big, powerful game engine. If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can. I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature and go through it on a 50 to 1 scale.” Cameron planned to continue developing the special effects for Avatar, which he hoped would be released in summer 2009. He also gave fellow directors Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson a chance to test the new technology. Spielberg and George Lucas were also able to visit the set to watch Cameron direct with the equipment.

Other technological innovations include a performance-capture stage, called The Volume, which is six times larger than previously used and an improved method of capturing facial expressions. The tool is a small individually made skull cap with a tiny camera attached to it, located in front of the actors’ face which collects information about their facial expressions and eyes, which is then transmitted to the computers. This way, Cameron intends to transfer about 95% of the actors’ performances to their digital counterparts. Besides a real time virtual world, the team is also experimenting with a way of letting computer generated characters interact with real actors on a real, live-action set while shooting live action.

In January 2007, Fox announced that the studio’s Avatar would be filmed in 3D at 24 frames per second. Cameron described the film as a hybrid with a full live-action shoot in combination with computer-generated characters and live environments. “Ideally at the end of the day the audience has no idea which they’re looking at,” Cameron said. The director indicated that he had already worked four months on nonprincipal scenes for the film. Principal photography began in April 2007, and was done around parts of Los Angeles as well as New Zealand. The live action is shot with the proprietary Fusion digital 3-D camera system developed by Cameron and Vince Pace. According to Cameron, the film will be composed of 60% computer-generated elements and 40% live action, as well as traditional miniatures. The performance-capture photography would last 31 days at the Hughes Aircraft stage in Playa Vista, Los Angeles, California. In October, Cameron was scheduled to shoot live-action in New Zealand for another 31 days.

To create the human mining colony on Pandora, production designers visited the Noble Clyde Boudreaux drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico during June 2007. They photographed, measured and filmed every aspect of the rig, which will be replicated on-screen with photorealistic CGI. Around 1000 people worked on the production.

Music

Composer James Horner will score the film, which will be his third collaboration with Cameron after Aliens and Titanic. Horner recorded parts of the score with a small chorus singing in the alien language Na’vi in March 2008. He is also working with Wanda Bryant, an ethnomusicologist, to create a music culture for the alien race. The first scoring sessions were planned to take place in the Spring of 2009.

Manchester United vs Manchester City

What a fucking joke that game was. I think the referee is a United fan. What a big load of biased pish. The FA is a disgrace, stop fucking spending money on holidays and sort the discipline of football out. These referees are shit and start embracing technology.

Giant Space Bubble

The Bubble Nebula

Called the Bubble Nebula, this eerie, translucent sphere is created by fierce winds from a superhot star 40 times the size of our sun. Moving at nearly 4.5 million miles per hour, stellar winds whip the cloud of gas around the star into a near-perfect bubble, which stands out from the rest of the more stationary gas in this emission nebula.

Located 7,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia, the bubble is about 6 light-years in diameter and glows pink because of the red, hot gas that surrounds it. The first clear picture of the Bubble Nebula was taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 1997, and this new image was captured in July by the South Common Observatory in Britain.

Super Mario

Here are 10 things you may not know about our favorite video game character Mario:

* Mario was first seen in the video game Donkey Kong, but he was called “Jumpman.” He was also a carpenter then, not a plumber.

* Mario was named after Mario Segale, the landlord of Nintendo of America’s office, who barged in on a company meeting demanding an overdue rent.

* Shigeru Miyamoto drew Mario as wearing a cap because he found drawing hair difficult. He also drew in the moustache, because it was easier to see than a mouth in the crude video game screen resolution back then.

* Mario and his younger brother Luigi are known as the “Mario Brothers.” This means that Mario’s last name is also Mario, so his full name is Mario Mario.

* Mario is voice-acted by Charles Martinet, who crashed the audition for “an Italian plumber from Brooklyn” character. Here’s an interview with the man:

* Mario’s nemesis is Wario (a combination of “warui”, the Japanese word for bad, and Mario). Similarly, Luigi’s rival is Waluigi. Both are also voiced by Charles Martinet.

* Mario has appeared in over 200 video games so far, has sold over 193 million units of games (all of the Mario series) and even has his own TV cartoon show. Super Mario Bros. 3 alone grossed over $500 million in USA.

* TV Schmeve, you’re nothing till there’s an opera done on you. In 2003, Jonathan Mann of California Institute of Arts created The Mario Opera, a rock opera:

* Super Mario Bros. theme music, written by Koji Kondo, is known worldwide. It has inspired countless fan-renditions, including one played by Zack Kim on two guitars (viewed over 4 million times on YouTube!), played by Jean Baudin on 11 string bass, beatboxed by Greg Patillo on the flute, and played by the Oregon Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra on the trombones.

But my favorite is this one by Play! symphony orchestra:

* Mario is the most famous character in the history of video games, and perhaps is the most famous character ever. In a 1990 poll by Marketing Evaluations, Mario was found to be more popular (and recognizable) among children than Mickey Mouse.

Guitar Hero 5: Courtney Loves Sues Activision

Courtney Love, the widow of former Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, has threatened to sue publisher Activision for breach of contract over her late husband’s appearance in Guitar Hero 5.

“For the record this Guitar Hero shit is breach of contract on a Bullys part and there will be a proper addressing of this and retraction,” Love said on her Twitter account, later adding: “WE are going to sue the shit out of ACtivision we being the Trust the Estate the LLC the various LLCs Cobain Enterprises.”

Activision has since issued a statement to various news outlets, including Kotaku, defending Cobain’s depiction in the game. “Guitar Hero secured the necessary licensing rights from the Cobain estate in a written agreement signed by Courtney Love to use Kurt Cobain’s likeness as a fully playable character in Guitar Hero 5,” the publisher said.

Activision vice president Tim Riley also told the Guardian: “Courtney supplied us with photos and videos. She picked the wardrobe and hairstyle, which turned out to be the ‘Teen Spirit’ look, then we went back and forth over changes – some subtle, some not so subtle.”

However, Love’s attorney, Keith Fink, told VG247: “Activision’s statement is not accurate in suggesting that they were given an unfettered use of Kurt’s name and likeness. The agreement Activision has with the trust doesn’t grant them the right to use his name and likeness in ways that denigrate his image. We are demanding the trust take appropriate action to protect Mr. Cobain’s image and would hope Activision would do so on its own accord and prohibit users of the game from singing songs of others.”

Former Nirvana band members Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl have also expressed their unease over the use of Cobain’s likeness in Guitar Hero 5, telling the Associated Press: “While we were aware of Kurt’s image being used with two Nirvana songs, we didn’t know players have the ability to unlock the character. This feature allows the character to be used with any kind of song the player wants. We urge Activision to do the right thing in ‘re-locking’ Kurt’s character so that this won’t continue in the future.”

Halo 3: ODST

As the new Halo game is due for release I thought I would troll the tinterweb and pull some facts about the upcoming game Halo 3:ODST:

Halo 3: ODST is a new standalone expansion for the legendary first-person shooter video game Halo 3. Players assume the roles of human UNSC soldiers known as Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (ODSTs) during the events prior to Halo 3.

Bungie initially conceived ODST as a small side project to produce in the lull between Halo 3’s completion and Halo: Reach. Instead of featuring recognizable characters such as the Master Chief from previous games, the developers focused on the ODSTs. Story director Joseph Staten penned a detective story utilizing film noir settings, design, and characters. Composer Martin O’Donnell abandoned his previous Halo themes to create a quieter, jazz-influenced sound. During development, the game grew in scope to that of a full-sized game.

One thing which is apparent is that Halo 3 has created a multiplayer sensation, luckily ODST packs them same and then some:

ODST’s multiplayer offering is identical to Halo 3’s, and will ship with a total of 24 maps. Maps consist of the original eleven Halo 3 maps (Construct, Epitaph, Guardian, High Ground, Isolation, Last Resort, Narrows, Sandtrap, Snowbound, The Pit, Valhalla), the Heroic map pack (Foundry, Rat’s Nest, Standoff), the Legendary map pack (Avalanche, Blackout, Ghost Town), the “Cold Storage” map, and the Mythic map pack (Assembly, Orbital, and Sandbox) as well as three new maps (Citadel, Heretic, Longshore). The exclusive maps are also counted as “Mythic” maps and are tied into Halo 3’s achievements. The Halo 3 multiplayer does not require Halo 3 to play and ships on a separate disc.

ODST also contains a new game mode called Firefight, wherein players take on increasingly difficult waves of varied enemies. Firefight will include new medals as well as the ability to co-op with up to 4 teammates over Xbox LIVE or System Link. Each player has a set number of lives and the game ends upon their depletion. There is no time limit, no limited number of rounds and no maximum number of kills. Skulls will be incorporated into Firefight as a means to increase the difficulty and provide variation. The maps used in Firefight will be unlocked as the player progresses through the ODST campaign. It is also noted that the enemy characters appearing in each wave are generated at random, thus the player will be unable to anticipate the strength of the next wave prior to its arrival.

ODST is a first-person shooter. Although the gameplay of ODST bears a strong resemblance to previous Halo titles, the player does not assume the role of the enhanced human supersoldier Master Chief. Instead, the player controls a lone UNSC soldier, known as “the Rookie”, in the city of New Mombasa, East African Protectorate (formerly Kenya). Since the soldier, known as an ODST or Orbital Drop Shock Trooper, does not possess Master Chief’s advanced armor, reflexes and strength, he is more vulnerable to gunfire; players are forced to act more cautiously. The soldier HUD is different from the previous series, with red outlines for the enemies thanks to a new feature called the “VISR” (Visual Intelligence System, Reconnaissance). The “VISR” also gives you a compass and outlines important items in yellow, but has no radar. However, the aiming reticle remains. It will also include an open world environment.

Placement

Well my placement at the Peninsula Medical School has come to an end. After a fun filled and hard working year it is time to return to my fourth year at university. I’ve learnt so much while working there and i’d highly recommend any future placements to try and get a place there.