The Web Goes Anime

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Ever wonder what popular websites would look like if they were redesigned as people Or, for that matter, anime-style characters Thanks to DeviantArt artist Jon-Lock, now you can.

The talented artist has managed to take companies like Chrome, Firefox, Instagram and other companies and personify them with sweet-looking futuristic style characters. A number of each site’s features have managed to make it into the character designs, which are really quite awesome.

We’ve included a few for you to take a gander at below.

Source: Kotaku

 

 

 

Scan The Room With Your iPad

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If you’ve been looking for a way to scan rooms, objects and more, your options are quite limited and expensive at the moment. That could change, though, thanks to the Structure Sensor.

A company called Occipital has launched a new KickStarter project for this 3D sensor, which works directly with Apple’s iPad line. Using it, “you can walk around the world and instantly capture it in a digital form,” according to the listing. “This means you can capture 3D maps of indoor spaces and have every measurement in your pocket. You can instantly capture 3D models of objects and people for import into CAD and for 3D printing. You can play mind-blowing augmented reality games where the real world is your gaming world.”

Our camera is actually axially aligned with the built-in camera,” said Jeff Powers, the founder of Occipital. “That’s important because we’re fusing the data from those two sensors. We’re also fusing the gyro and accelerometer that’s on board. In the iPad, you kind of have the rest of the story, but it was missing this active 3D sensing.”

This project should have no problem taking off. With 44 days still to go on the Kickstarter project, it’s already reached nearly double its initial goal, with over $196,000 raised and climbing. No doubt that Occipital will put those extra funds to good use, to make sure this scanner is top-of-the-line.

There’s no word on a launch date for the device, but we should know more in 2014.

Source: Kickstarter

 

Class Up That Game Library

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Gamers that aren’t too fond of particular game cover designs can now do something about it – by encasing them in special book covers that give them more of an artistic, book-like quality.

A New York-based Etsy shop run by JamesBit is offering a number of custom video game covers that look like books, complete with the name of the game title, the publisher, and a JamesBit books logo. They look good for any given game library, and vary in colors depending on what type of content the game possesses.

For instance, with Bioshock, it’s a bit grey-ish, indicating the dreary world you have to run through in the game. Red Dead Redemption, however, has a bright red cover resembling a bit of the Wild West.

You can order these covers for $6 apiece. Visit the store at the link below. They’re sold out at the moment, but more will be in stock soon.

Source: Etsy

 

This Week’s [a]list Jobs – September 18

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“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” — Confucius

This week’s [a]list jobs:

Zynga – Vice President of Global Brand Marketing, San Francisco

Microsoft Studios, Xbox – Creative Director, Los Angeles

Future US –  Executive Editor of Official Xbox Magazine, South San Francisco

[a]list daily is now your source for the hottest job openings for senior management and marketing in games, entertainment and social media. Check here every Wednesday for the latest openings. To see last week’s [a]list jobs click here.

Houser On ‘GTA’

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Grand Theft Auto V is set to take the gaming world by storm, with analysts predicting sales in excess of 20 million copies by the end of the year. With a combined marketing and development budget reportedly reaching $250 million — double that of 2008’s GTA IV — Rockstar is once again pushing the boundaries between Hollywood and interactive open world storytelling.

On the heels of celebrating the 10th Anniversary of GTA III (which is now available on tablets) and five years after the launch of GTA IV; Dan Houser, vice president of creative at Rockstar Games, looks back on the game franchise that has sold a reported 135 million copies to date in this exclusive interview.

What were your goals when transitioning GTA into a 3D open world game in 2002?

What we really always wanted to stand for is high quality games that are appealing and are not based on focused testing. Focus testing in 1999/2000 would never have predicted that a 3D gangster game was going to blow up. Then having done that, no amount of focus testing would say do it in the ’80s. So doing stuff that is true to yourself, as opposed to what the market thinks it wants, that’s definitely something that we’ve always done and hopefully other people have followed suit.

The Grand Theft Auto franchise has been lauded for its cinematic presentation. What do you think game developers can learn from Hollywood?

In general, good movies make more money than bad movies and that’s becoming more and more true of games, as well. There’s a general movement towards quality. Where Hollywood has become unstuck is when they haven’t focused on product quality. That’s something that happens in games, when they’re just trying to fill a hole and make a game because they think there’s an audience for it. That’s probably true of pop music and every other commercial medium, as well. Movies have intrinsic glamor to them that games lack because they don’t have stars, but that’s not something that games necessarily need. I think movies are brilliant at finding their own place in the world, but games are doing the same thing.

Games are 35 years old and about where cinema was at about 1920. The speed of evolution between 1895 and 1920 in the movie industry was really nearly as rapid as it’s been in games between 1975 and today. But it’s been insane how quickly games are evolving. Games will hopefully continue to evolve from here and continue to find their place in the world. But movies differentiate themselves from recorded music and books, and games should do the same from movies. 

What are your thoughts about the impact that Grand Theft Auto franchise has had on the convergence of music and video games?

We were part of a continuum. We definitely did our own thing creatively. We always thought music should be more than just badly written theme music. You began to see that with the birth of Playstation 1 with Wipeout, which was the first game that really pushed top quality pop music in the UK. That was huge. We wanted music that was to our own tastes and to our own style. We did experiments with radio stations on the earlier GTAs. With GTA III you had this move to DVD and suddenly you were able to create a whole soundtrack to people. The impact has been to show people that music can be more than just pop hits.

You can really find a way of bringing a world to life and introducing what unfortunately now is audiences a bit younger than us in some ways. We’re now in our late 30s and you can introduce 20-year-olds to some amazing music they’ve not heard of. When you look at some of the songs on our soundtrack on YouTube, you see comments from people saying they first heard it in our game. It’s a way that younger guys are consuming music for the first time.

Who’s behind the music in the GTA games?

That’s headed by Sam (Houser), who’s obsessed with music and lovingly works on every single track that goes in there. He and Craig Conner, who’s been the GTA music guy since ’97, will bicker about individual tracks on radio stations constantly. They’re both obsessed with it. It’s an enormous labor of love for us to do it. Music helps create this world that people are immersed in. With all of this stuff, hopefully, we’re showing that games are powerful and potentially important and interesting.

Rockstar released a boxed CD set for GTA: San Andreas. How have you seen video game music evolve since then?

I miss CDs. The first time we did that was the end of 2002. That was right in the heart of Napster and we were really starting to see the death of sold music. It was never a great money winner for us because of the time and the movement that was happening. I think a few years earlier it would have been a different story. Soundtracks at that point were just not selling, and haven’t since, because people just take the tracks they want from other places. We looked upon that not as a great piece of ancillary business, but a way of putting things that we loved into people’s hands. It was a way of exposing them to music. In some ways, now it’s even easier because you simply have to put up a play list on iTunes and they can get a hold of music that way. For those that want it, there’s no great risk to us. I don’t think we’re going to figure out the mysteries of the music business. Thankfully, it’s not our job to. But where games remain powerful to the music business is as a way of exposing the audience to a song or an artist or a composer.

How have you seen the game industry evolve over the past decade?

Since really PS2 and Xbox 1, anecdotally, I’ve just heard more and more stories of, “My dad is retired and he’s started playing 360, can you get him a copy of GTA early” There are more people playing Facebook games now. The audience has been gradually expanding. One of the things we wanted to try and do — and we did to some extent — is reach out to some older audience with LA Noire and go, “Hey, this game is a little bit slower. It’s definitely historically interesting. It’s more like interactive TV shows. It’s not twitch-based like some of those games. You might have a go with it and see what you think.” With content like that, you’re always trying to find a way of reaching different audiences. And even with the action games, we’re trying to constantly make them easier to play, and put different difficulty levels in them so the barely-skilled 18 year old with very short nerve endings can play at the hardest level possible. And those of us who are more afraid or whatever to begin with can play on the easiest level. The games are hopefully getting good enough as pure adventures, and they’re interesting enough to play, that it’s not just about shooting anymore.

GE ‘Brilliant Machines’

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GE is keen to emphasize how they’re building the infrastructure of tomorrow, and they’re doing it with these ads that have references to (and the original actors from) Back to the Future, Knight Rider, and The Matrix. We’re particularly fond of the one with Agent Smith and its clever tie-ins with both the theme of a connected hospital and references to the Matrix itself.

 

When ‘Doom’ And ‘Quake’ Beget eSports

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The League of Legends World Championship circuit is in full swing, leading up to the Finals on October 4 at Staples Center in Los Angeles.  That’s right, the next elite players of Riot’s super popular MOBA will hoist a trophy on the same stage where venerable L.A. sports teams the Lakers and the Kings have done it. The League of Legends competition is arguably doing more to elevate the profile of eSports than any other current tournament. It has most certainly surpassed popular tournaments for stalwarts such as Starcraft and Counterstrike in the amount of buzz it’s generating. For the upcoming championship, Riot even snagged a major non-endemic brand as sponsor in American Express, whose marketing executive has very candidly said that he sees the potential for esports to rival real sports when it comes to marketing and audience reach.

Dennis “Thresh” Fong

There’s an event horizon atmosphere and the feeling that this could be the breakout year for eSports. When standing on the precipice before a leap ahead, it’s great to take a moment and reflect on the past. That’s why we couldn’t resist when Dennis Fong, more famously known as all-time undefeated gamer Thresh, offered to talk with us about how he helped put competitive gaming on the map. Fong now heads up online game community Raptr. In fact, after his tournament days, Fong started a string of successful companies mostly around the concept of online communities for gamers. Two of them, Gamers.com and Xfire, helped advance both social play and digital game distribution. That career trajectory started with his game skills.

“I think I was officially the world’s first pro gamer. I started competing in tournaments in 1994 with Doom. The first kind of really big tournament was held by Microsoft called Deathmatch ’95.”

Fong recalled the early days of online gaming as a “Wild West” compared to the organized tournaments of today. The entire competitive gaming circuit revolved around one game at a time, all products developed by John Carmack and his studio id Software. First it was Doom, then Doom II, then id’s groundbreaking Quake games. Very early on, players would lay claim to bragging rights as being the best, but most of it was conjecture since elite players rarely agreed to informal online matches because of the threat of lag. To settle scores, they’d wait until the next big tournament.

“I’d built up a pretty big name around Thresh, and in the online communities that were pretty new at the time, I was kind of known as the best. I’d never lost a tournament,” Fong said. “There was another guy who was kind of like the ‘Thresh of the East’ called Entropy, and most people on the East Coast thought he would destroy me. But we actually had never faced each other before due to latency issues.”

Thresh and Entropy built up a rivalry that paved the way for their Magic versus Bird moment. In 1997, Carmack and id launched the now legendary Red Annihilation tournament. While Quake had been steadily replacing Doom as the game of choice in competitive circles, the tournament sealed it for id’s new 3D shooter. In classic over-the-top fashion, Carmack put up his own red Ferrari 328 GTS as the grand prize. Fong recalled how the tournament came down to him and his rival.

“We made it to the finals of the tournament for the Ferrari, and I ended up beating him, I think it was 13 to negative one. He never killed me.  I think he killed himself once,” Fong said, then added, “That was the start of, you know, the legacy of Thresh.”

Carmack and Entropy’s loss was Thresh’s gain.

Fong completely dominated the online tournament scene during his eSports career. He continued competitive play up until Quake II, and he never lost a tournament. He had the fame. He credits a Wall Street Journal story with helping him start his fortune.

“One day this reporter from Wall Street Journal who was thinking about writing a story on online gaming, this whole trend he’d been hearing about, decided to call me up,” Fong said.”At the time I had no idea even what the Wall Street Journal was, but I agreed. He showed up at my door at my parents’ house. I told him, ‘Yeah, can you come back in an hour ‘ I’d just woken up. The poor guy sat in his car for an hour. Again, I had no idea what the Wall Street Journal was — I was 16 or 17.”

“So [the reporter] followed me around for basically a day and a half or so, and found the whole thing to be super intriguing. Instead of doing a story on online gaming, he basically did a story on me. I ended up being on the front page with a stencil drawing of me. To me, that was the start of my pro eSports career. I started getting a whole bunch of calls from CEOs of big companies asking to sponsor me, wanting to give me money.”

Fong was soon making a six figure salary for a career which he said took about an hour of his time a day practicing his craft. He credits his success less with practicing mechanical skills and honing his reflexes than learning ways to outsmart his opponents.

“Back then, the way I approached the game, the way I played the game, the way I thought about the game was ahead of its time. Most people when they think about first person shooters, they immediately think about the fact that they must have lightning fast reflexes and that kind of stuff. Which I certainly do have faster than normal reflexes, but what helped me actually be successful was the fact that I rarely had to use my reflexes to win. What that basically means is, I approached these games kind of like speed chess, where it’s really about outthinking, out strategizing your opponent, putting them in bad positions and not putting yourself in bad positions.”

“There were guys out there that had better aim than I did, mechanically they were better than me or faster than me. But that comes and goes, right? You can have a good day, you can have a bad day. But your brain, if you keep thinking and try to outthink your opponent, that’s pretty consistent. That’s partly what I attribute to the fact that I never lost a tournament in the five or six years that I was competing.”

What advice would Fong give a gamer, or perhaps even his own son or daughter, about pursuing eSports as a career?

“The way it is right now, I’d probably say step carefully. I certainly wouldn’t advocate dropping out of college or high school to pursue pro gaming. Number one, I think total prizes, the total amount of money in this space is growing, but it’s still not huge yet. There are only a handful of players making millions of dollars. Only a very, very small segment even make hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Career longevity seems to be a factor too. According to Fong, competitive gaming careers usually taper off once a player reaches his twenties. If it’s true, that’s even shorter than the average career of a real sports athlete.

“You look towards Korea, at a certain age — 25 or something like that — you start dropping off, even if you’re a top player,” Fong said. “Top players in their mid-20s start losing a lot. They just can’t keep up with the kids these days.”

Rockstar Hints At ‘Cocaine Cowboys’ Game

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While countless weary eyed gamers are either playing or thinking about Grand Theft Auto V after last night’s midnight launch, Sam Houser may have just dropped a big hint about source material for Rockstar North’s next game. Houser told NY Times that the Miami drug trade portrayed in the documentary Cocaine Cowboys would make a good setting for a Rockstar game based around a female protagonist.

Houser was asked whether he’d given thought to stronger female characters in Rockstar games, an issue that’s been brought up among game press.

“Seemingly not as much as I should have,” he told NY Times writer Chris Suellentrop.

Griselda Blanco a.k.a. “The Cocaine Godmother”

Suellentrop then writes that Houser cited Cocaine Cowboys as a fitting plotline for a female-driven Rockstar game. The 2006 documentary and its sequel follow the rise of the Miami cocaine scene, highlighting the cartels and their drug lords who fed the surge in cocaine use not just in Miami but across the US in the late 1970s. Although not mentioned by Houser, one of the key players of the era is Griselda Blanco, otherwise known as the Cocaine Godmother.

Blanco was somewhat of a narco matriarch, a renowned drug lord for the Medellin Cartel whose four sons followed their mother into the trade. Three of her sons met tragic deaths after serving prison sentences in the US then being sent back to Columbia. Her fourth son is under house arrest for cocaine trafficking charges. Blanco herself was gunned down execution style in Medellin, Columbia, in September of last year. It’s the kind of story where at least the main plot points wouldn’t need a lot of embellishment for a fictional portrayal.

Source: NY Times

Pokémon’s Catchatronic Remix

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Pokémon is bringing back “Gotta Catch ‘Em All” and celebrating with a code hunt for players to win Pokémon stuff. They’re also celebrating with a remixed version of the original Pokémon theme!