Dave's Blog

The real village used as the set for the camp of the ‘Others’ in Lost has been found on street view: here

I must say it slightly spoils the illusion realising that it has a highway running right beside it, but it certainly shows how amazing CGI is these days that when there are 360 degree shots of the camp you don’t notice this.

The video below shows a demo reel from Stargate Studios showing how some shots in TV shows are actually filmed. I recognise some of the scenes in the video and you really wouldn’t realise with most of them that they weren’t filmed on location.

This has to be one of the best Halloween costumes I have ever seen!

Along with most other people I was very excited about the release of the new movie in the Batman series. I was looking forward to it even more after seeing trailers for it before other movies. I never set my expectations too high for it just in case I was going to be disappointed, but I certainly wasn’t! I enjoyed it so much that I have now been to the cinema to see it twice and intend on seeing it again at some stage.

Read on if you want to hear in more detail what I thought of it, but a word of warning, it does contain spoilers. (more…)

I’m a big kid at heart and still enjoy seeing some kid’s movies from time to time, so when I heard about Wall-E I really wanted to see it. Pixar do animated movies so well and made two of my favourite movies from when I was a kid, Toy Story 1 & 2, so I was looking forward to seeing what they would come up with this time.

If you don’t know what this movie is about, it’s about a robot that has to clean up Earth of rubbish after the planet has become impossible to live in. Another robot, Eve, is placed on Earth to scan and collect information. Whenever a plant is discovered it becomes clear that Earth may be returning to a habitable state and it is up to Wall-E and Eve to ensure that the humans come back. In the process of this, a relationship begins to form between Wall-E and Eve.

The story was interesting enough, I was never bored at any point throughout. Obviously this is a kid’s movie so the story is going to be mainly aimed at the kids, but there was still plenty in there to keep the adults interested as well. There was a good few comedy moments as well that seemed to have the adults laughing along with the kids. Along with the comedy you also had the sad moments. They really captured emotion very well, especially considering the story followed two robots. To be able to express emotion in something that naturally can’t really show much was definitely a success on the creator’s part.

The graphics were also done excellently. All the environments and characters were created very well and looked good on screen.

I was going into this movie expecting a kid’s movie and that’s what I got. It was a solid effort and due to the good graphics, ability to create emotion in the characters and a decent story I would probably give Wall-E a 7.5/10. It’s definitely a good one for the kids, but if you’re that little bit older, it mightn’t be the one for you unless you can enjoy a kid’s movie.

I got an email last week through work inviting me to watch a live webcast of Microsoft’s conference at E3. I decided to take advantage of it because I figured we would get a pretty good link within Microsoft, instead of watching a possibly bad quality, constantly re-buffering, version outside of work, and boy was I glad I stayed to watch it, there were certainly a few shocks in there!

FFXIII was a major shock, and a welcome one, I’m looking forward to that now!! I havn’t played a Final Fantasy game since FFX, but I really enjoyed it, so I’m looking forward to it coming our way on the 360 now.

I don’t think I like the look of the new dashboard, I hope we can do more with it ourselves to personalise it. I’m glad to hear the blade system isn’t completely going away because I really liked it as an interface. The avatars are an interesting addition but it remains to be seen whether they will have a big impact, I was perfectly happy with the standard gamerpic.

I like the look of the new party feature, it should definately make playing games with friends a lot easier, and even just a good way to chat with them as a group instead of individually. The idea of watching movies together was interesting, I just hope we get the feature of free movies outside America!

Brand new Geometry Wars is something I’m really looking forward to as well, especially with the co-op play in it. I’m sure this will be a first day purchase for me!

Some of the games look like they could be interesting for parties, You’re at the Movies being a main one (with a few drinks possibly needed). The way everything that you done was then edited into a video at the end was a nice addition. I thought the way we can load music from our iPods into Lips is pretty cool too, I wonder if there will be many restrictions on that one, such as having a not so well known song you want to use.

I was very disappointed in Gears of War 2, I was expecting a good bit more from it. Unfortunately it didn’t get me excited in any way at all when I was watching it. To me it didn’t look an awful lot different to the first. There were the obvious additions of weapons and things like that, but the game world itself looked pretty much the same to me. The new survival mode with friends sounds like it may be good the first few times you play it, but I think it could get old very quick. It remains to be seen whether I will become more interested as it gets closer to release. It’ll probably still end up being one I may buy (provided I eventually finish the first!)

It looks like E3 2008 belongs to Microsoft, I can’t see how Sony or Nintendo will be able to top this conference!

Eurogamer have provided a full report of what happened at the conference here.