Alex Watson » bit-tech

Recently: July and August 2010

Alex — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 17:40:27 +0000

* Work: Summer seems like a long time ago, even more so as my work in July and August is quite separate to what happened when September came along, and what I’m doing now. August saw me hand over the Custom PC and bit-tech Editor’s Chair – for it is a chair, nay, a throne more like, bejewelled wi’ rubies and emeralds and all the riches of the Orient – and I didn’t really do a whole lot of writing for the site in these two final months. Nothing on the blog, but I did contribute a couple of reviews of two fabulous Xbox Live Arcade games. I’ve never played a game that engages with death quite as viscerally and tenderly as Limbo. It’s a distinctive, bleak and audacious game that really stuck with me. The other game I looked at was the far lighter Snoopy Flying Ace, an arcade flying game that’s visually charming but with hard-hitting, exciting combat.

So, seven years, and 85 issues of Custom PC and nearly two years of bit-tech and that’s… that. I didn’t go out with a bang, but happily, these were two pieces I had the time to invest myself in and write well. Since both publications will go from strength-to-strength (and it’s not a complete goodbye), an exit via the side-door, quietly, with a bit of grace is entirely suitable. I’ll cover what I’m doing now in the next blog post, as it’s still all in the mix a little.

* Away from work, I spent the summer really getting into cycling, and over on The Wired Jester I posted some thoughts on riding the bike through London. It’s still not really a frequently updated blog, but stepping away from day-to-day journalism means I’ve had a bit more writing energy for the last couple of posts, which is a-good-thing(TM).

* Photography: I’ve finally put up some pictures from last year’s trip to Baltimore, Washington and the scenery inbetween. I also put up the photos from a brief trip to Gothenburg and the Swedish coast. Beautiful silvery light, and since I’ve started using Lightroom 3, I finally feel I’m getting a little closer to what I want from my photography. If you’re a digital SLR photographer and haven’t tried it yet, it’s an absolute must. It will make a bigger difference to your photography than any new lens or body, so stop saving for that, and get Lightroom instead.

I’m also using Instagr.am on the iPhone, as sifter if you want to add me.

* Freelance-wise, my Mac User column continues, and I was quite happy to revel in my geekery with this one, which begins with a debate as to which country has the best plug.

Recently: May and June 2010

Alex — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 17:59:54 +0000

* Work: Well, May and the start of June are all about Computex in Taiwan; we covered it in quite some style, with myself and two other reporters. It was good fun, especially as it was the first time for one of the guys, and Taipei delivered its usual craziness in spades. Not literally in a spade, although there are times when the jetlag and lack of rest mean you never feel something that surreal is too far off. The show this year lacked big product launches, but the behind the scenes jostling made it the most fascinating one I’ve been to yet. The battle between Intel and ARM is fascinating, as is Apple’s influence and the way that mobile smartphones/tablets are taking off. I tried to summarise it in a blog post. Speaking of mobiles, this blog post was a fun one to write: My iPhone told me what to have for lunch.

* Photos: I took my new Nikon D90 to the Far East – Taiwan for Computex, then gorgeous Hong Kong on the way back. The photos are on the all new Flickr, although I’ve not put them all up yet. Speaking of photos, I tried out Lightroom 3 and it’s terrific. The filters are amazing, and I think it’s had a great impact on my ability to take a photo that says what I think it’s going to say the moment before I push the button. You can see the results for yourself.

* My Mac User column continues; they’ve just relaunched their website into something more bloggy and individual, and it makes it easier to find my columns too. What more could you possibly want?

* I’ve found a bit of time for The Wired Jester, including some decent ramen links, a photo-post on jetlag and an extended ramble about clothes, particularly Uniqlo.

Other than that, I’ve been enjoying the warm weather – bit of gardening – I’m writing up a really exciting new project – and I’ve been to Sweden for a holiday.

Recently: March and April 2010

Alex — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 23:13:14 +0000

* Work: Well, we relaunched bit-tech! The new site looks lovely, it’s packed with additional features and functions and we improved the advertising (fewer annoying flashing things, better communication for advertisers and readers). I wrote two long blog posts about the redesign which go into details about the changes. I also spent a lot of time in the comment threads talking to readers. Bit-tech has a huge and passionate community who feel very connected to the site, and taking them through the redesign was tricky. A three week, open public beta really helped. So far, it’s worked well – traffic numbers are up, and the editorial team are able to write more content, and are less constrained, and more empowered. Happy days!

But that’s far from all…

* I’ve also written for the site, a technical blog about Valve and OpenGL and a more personal one on the Bullfrog games I loved when I was a teenager.

* Which leads me on to the fact I went to SXSW in beautiful, sunny Austin, Texas. I met ex-Bullfrog head Peter Molyneux, and wrote a lot about the conference, including Molyneux’s excellent talk on emotion in games. A second piece on bit-tech looked at Microsoft’s exploration of designing touch-screen games, while a hands on with the Windows 7 Phone and a write up of a talk on Google and China went up on PC Pro.

* The photos of Texas are on Flickr.

* On The Wired Jester, I’ve been noting down what I’ve been adding to the wishlist – mostly books – and it is expanding like the waistline of someone who’s drinking ten pints of cream a day. I saw David Mitchell read from his new book, which was thought provoking and I remembered an old book of mine, A Terrible Beauty.

* I’ve also started a new column in Mac User, Dennis’ Mac magazine. It’s called Mac to the Future, and it’s about new tech and how it will (might!) impact Apple. The first two are online, a look at the Apple A4 CPU inside the iPad, the second a piece on Apple’s use of Intel’s new Core i5 and Core i7 chips.

Recently: January and February 2010

Alex — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:40:47 +0000

* Work: Technical piece of analysis - Why the iPad is Intel’s worst nightmare, and to balance that out, a distinctly less technical review of the marvellously simple Zombie Driver.

* First few photos from my epic trip to China on my sabbatical in September/October last year: Tea and Temples.

* The Wired Jester: My year in books, 2009.

Best of, 2009 edition

Alex — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 19:42:50 +0000

So that was 2009; full as ever, although work gave up a little room to other things this year – I found the time to work on my photography, and it’s really developed(1), helped, of course, by a near seven week sabbatical break in September and October which took me to beautiful, strange, tasty Southwest China and Maryland and Virginia in the USA. It feels as if I wrote less than in previous years, both outside of work, where my current novel seemed to seize up, and at work, where a bigger team meant more management and less of a need for me to write. On the plus side, there were a few things I really liked from 2009 in terms of quality. They’re linked after the jump. Now, on to 2010.

For Custom PC and bit-tech

* Killing is fun. This was a blog post for bit-tech, and looked at the problem with FPS games set in a war-time environment: namely that the mechanics of the game are in opposition to the morality of the situation: to make the game fun, the killing has to be fun also:

“In every FPS you need to kill hundreds, if not thousands of people as you progress through the game. In fact, you’re not killing people: you’re removing obstacles, because single player games that aren’t primarily puzzle games or simulators are always about progress through the level. To impede progress and to make it challenging for the player, you need obstacles. These can be puzzles, but since you’re not making a puzzle game, it’s better if these are enemies, and it’s better if these enemies can tax the player by fighting back. When you, as the player, eliminate the enemies, you’re granted power-ups, new weapons and keys to enable you to access more of the game (and in turn cope with more powerful enemies). It’s such a simple and recursive formula that it needs to be jazzed up – it needs to be made fun, because you need to do it over and over and over again. It’s work.”

* My Best Gaming Moment of 2009. My contribution to a feature written for that flat period at the end of the year when there’s not much new happening but the site still needs updating. I picked playing Rock Band as my ‘moment’:

“The things I write and pictures I take are somehow less personal, less meaningful than things I read and the movies I see. This is especially the case with the songs I hear. If I’m taking notes for a piece of writing, I’ll often end up scrawling favourite song lyrics in the margins, signposts to where I want to get to. It often feels as if my meaning is inside the song, and I need to hear it to get to what I want. Fragments of melody lodge themselves in my head, and I’ll end up needing exactly the right song to write certain paragraphs. So it was obvious I was going to love Guitar Hero.”

* Noby Noby Boy review. A look at the newest game from the Lead Designer of Katamari Damacy:

“Despite Noby Noby Boy’s cute, naïve looks and non-lethal gameplay it will probably be one of the more divisive games of the year. Some will look at it as a beautiful piece of art that expands the notion that videogames are a more complex and involving form of art than anything else we currently have. Others will take one look at the flat shading, coy terminology and recoil in disgust. Several members of the bit-tech team certainly did when we had Noby Noby Boy running in the labs.”

For The Wired Jester

* Already mentioned a lot, but it was from 2009 so deserves a place in this round up post: write up of my visit to Peleliu, in the South Pacific, and its haunting WW2 relics.

* Virtual Reality, Then and Now. A short post on the fact VR is about computers bleeding into real life, not the other way around:

“In the 1980s and 1990s, the term ‘virtual reality’ was understood to mean the creation of reality inside the computer – and thus we would need to experience it using complex imaging and interaction systems (3D googles, cursors mapped to the movement of a glove etc.) The implication behind this was the reality itself would be untouched… Few people imaginged that when VR came to pass, it would actually involve computers altering the way we acted in reality.”

* On the importance of The Beatles releasing their music digitally:

“And so now they’re missing. Everyone learns the truth that the Beatles are Important with a capital I. The Best. The Greatest. Whatever is left that the other Apple has done well to build up. But the music just isn’t there. It’s absent from the places where the kids – the people who live and breathe music – are, and where everyone is increasingly going to be. iTunes is the biggest music retailer now, Guitar Hero is mainstream entertainment. The Beatles are abstract, venerated, protected. Their name is known, but I suspect knowledge – and love – of their songs is dipping lower and lower.”

(Somewhat dated now, with the release of Rock Band, but the points about their absence from TV/Film/iTunes stands.)

Fiction

The book is currently called The Fine Sort. Seven or eight chapters done, about 30,000 words or so. Nothing to post here just yet, but I did put together a collection of short stories and print them via Lulu. The result was excellent – great quality printing, lovely cover, nice stock. Some samples to follow on here.

(1) Pun not intended, and only applicable to those who remember film cameras.

Killing is fun

Alex — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:41:01 +0000

Why computer games have a problem with war – they have to make killing fun.