Shadowlessness

By the prickling of my thumbs
Something wicked this way comes…

Garshasp is up on Steam and Gamers’ Gate, and it will be available for purchase shortly. This is a huge step for us, specially if we are received well.

I am now praying to all the gods I don’t believe in to make it so (witness the vanity and weakness of man!)

Tonight at midnight is Garshasp’s official release day. Finally! After many delays, tomorrow people can supposedly buy Garshasp at retail stores all over Iran.

The reason that I say “supposedly” is because that our distributor, a company named Lohe Zarrin e Nikan (I won’t even bother to link to their website) is a bunch of idiots who have done their best to disrupt the release and demean Garshasp. They have postponed the release date with no apparent reason for more than two weeks (not to mention their previous blunders and postpones for a couple of months,) they missed a huge (by Iranian standards) public game show, they rejected our designed retail packaging, they have used their own idiotic artwork for promotional material (which not only have nothing to do with Garshasp, but are also so very hideous.) Oh, and they have printed on the package that all rights of Garshasp are reserved for them! I must add that none of the above is permitted by the terms of the distribution contract we have with them!

Tonight is the culmination of years of our lives, and instead of partying and drinking and stuff, everyone has already gone home. No one even mentioned the release, as if we have all given up hope about this event being of any note and importance.

Tonight Garshasp is released, and not even we care. How’s that for a sad state of affairs?

I had a perfect nightmare
on a starry torrid sea:

I am cast to prison at a
crippled demon’s plea.

The demon has 3 faces
all are laughing down at me.

The Banker with his filthy lucre
sets the game astride.

The General with raging might
lets forth a battle cry.

The Judge locks now the metal
tomb where I’m meant to die.

… But vengeance is
a brutal beast
not held by any cell

My wit is steeled
My blade is wet
So sound the Reaper’s bell.

Banker, General and Judge!
You all shall burn in Hell.

– From The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile‘s debut trailer.

“Oh God!”
“Smith will suffice.”

The other day, my brother Ehsan recommended two new movies for me to see. One was Tarantino‘s “Inglorious Basterds“, which is of course a no-brainer, and the other was “Zombieland“. Man his taste is impeccable!
I am now exactly 3 minutes and 14 seconds into the film (I swear to all the Random Number Gods that it was a coincidence!) and I love this movie already!
Guess what the track on the film’s opening credits is! Frakking “For Whom the Bell Tolls“!

P.S. I’m finally back in Tehran after a three-hour-plus flight delay.

I had heard of the new Bioware RPG Dragon Age: Origins but I guess I had forgotten about it. Today, I stumbled upon a couple of reviews and some videos and now I’m in love with the game! It appears to be very long (which probably means a few months of gameplay for me; yay!), difficult, deep and true to classic Bioware-RPGs. Almost everyone calls it a great successor to the Baldur’s Gate duo. And I enjoy Bioware games, from Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights to Mass Effect (yes, even KOTOR games!) My only worry is the departure from almost strict D&D ruleset of BG and NWN.
In any case, I’m downloading the whole 8GBs right now, unless somebody knows whether stores over here have got the game?

In other news, I finally got my hands on the God of War Collection trailer. For those rare GoW-challenged people among my audience, the Collection is a remastered version of the first two God of War games for the PS3 (they where released for the PS2 originally.) It seems that, as they had promised, SONY has not changed anything in the games, and just packed some higher resolution textures and (maybe) animations, which is a wise move. The first two GoWs deserve to be preserve at the masterpiece of gameplay they are. This will be release this month.
Obviously, the above means I have to get my own PS3. As soon as I figure out a robust solution to get both video and audio out of the PS3 and into my 1080p-capable but HDMI-incapable monitor and my speakers, I’m taking the trip to the Toopkhuneh(!) square and getting me a 120GiB PS3 Slim.

In yet other news, late last month (a day before my own birthday in fact) the twelfth book in the amazing and fantastic fantasy series The Wheel of Time has been released. It was supposed to be in November too IIRC, which makes the release a nice surprise. I’m already a fourth into the book and I’m liking it! May Robert Jordan rest in pieces… oops!… rest in peace.
I have one thing to say to anyone who likes high fantasy at all: GO READ THE BOOKS. The whole 12000-13000 pages of pure immersion and greatness. Doesn’t matter what other people say. I have read enough fantasy series to know which one is great! Go read it. Read the first book if you feel you don’t have the time. Do yourself a favor.

Running away is a solution to many things. Giving up, throwing in the towel, passing the buck, unshouldering the burden, admitting your incapability, playing dead…
It’s a perfect solution for mediocrity, isn’t it?

If you thought that was the rant, you’re sourly mistaken. Here it is.

Let’s try a thought experiment. Nothing real, just a wild and fantastical fantasy. Suppose you are standing on the edge of a rooftop, contemplating jumping down. As long as you haven’t jumped, the choice is always yours. You can jump, stay on the edge or move back. It’s not like you can’t jump two seconds or two hours later. If the situation changes, you can always weigh the odds again and make a more suitable choice.
But what if you jump? You make a choice and you jump. I think that’s the best choice you can make; the most logical. If you stay on the edge, or you move back, the edge and the jump will always be there, tempting and tantalizing. Why defer the choice?
Some might say because it’s a final choice and because you will always have the option, you can postpone it for later. It’s not like the edge is going anywhere, right? Wrong. I say you should always jump the first chance you get, because once you jump, there is no going back and there is no more choices. Why would you postpone a move that solves your dilemma so quickly? How come people (including myself) defer such obviously logical choices for more than a single second?
I like these kind of choices. I like changes and commitments that you cannot revert. They simplify life so much.

I think it’s kind of funny, I think it’s kind of sad,
The memories in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had.

That’s not about death of course. It’s about giving up in despair. It’s about indecision and inability to deal. It’s about petty problems that prove impossible for weak people.
It’s about me.

I watched “Watchmen” last night and I liked it. Most of the movie was quite mature and “grown up”, as opposed to other teenager-friendly comic book-based movies like Spider Man.
Let me tell you what I didn’t like in the movie. I didn’t like the casting. All the characters, with the exception of Rorschach (Jackie Haley, whom you might remember from “Little Children”) and the Comedian and to some extent Dr. Manhattan could have used better or more suitable actors.
The plot and the ending was so-so. Although generally guessable, it was definitely much better and deeper than the usual crappy comics-based movie plot line and ending.
I was not impressed by the direction, but what do I know about movie directing?! I liked several of the sequences though (including the opening.)
The characters were waaay better developed than most movies these days, but the books (which I’m not familiar with) are probably responsible for most of that, not the writers of the movie. Incidentally, one of the writers is David Haytar, the voice actor for Snake, in the English versions of MGS series!
I liked the classic soundtracks from around the 60s (and 50s and 70s too probably!) It’s always refreshing to hear Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen in movies instead of Britney Spears or whatnot.
I liked the atmosphere of the movie. Dark, disturbing (although not enough!) and very 80s.
What I liked the most was Rorschach! The guy is crazy! Think Marv and Dwight (from Sin City) blended together. The character was fantastic!

Found a great “mood” poem (here) the other day:

Wake up and see
I’m dead as dead can be
The doctor told me.
Some day, I’ll get up, I’ll get up and walk away
Wake up, face me
Don’t play dead, cause baby,
I’ll spit at your feet and say-
‘you fuc*king disappoint me.’

Dead as dead can be,
Cold and too far away to see
A brief and vague reflection
Of what could and might still be,
In Amsterdam the tulips have all grayed
I wait for you to face me,
Don’t play the fool cause,
I’m waiting to spit at your feet and shout-
‘you fuc*king disappoint me!’

Cold and uncaring the scene
A scene of misery
The paramedic tell thee
‘Dead as dead can be.’
But some day I’ll get out of the morgue and pay
The way to fame and fortune
With a brain as hot as sin,
Yeah some day I’ll find you to say
‘You disappoint me
Baby, you disappoint me.’

Perfect! I found it while searching for one of Constantine‘s soundtracks: A Perfect Circle‘s (wikipedia, Last.fm) Passive (sorry for the crappy lyrics site) but I searched for “the doctor told”, instead of “my doctor tells me”.

Death… is in my blood.
Fate has brought me here.
I hope for nothing.
I fear nothing.

If you haven’t already seen the new God of War III trailer, cut off your pinkie and go watch it immediately (here’s the lower-resolution version if you are bandwidth-bound.) This is a great trailer, one that makes you lose sleep or want to kill your friend and steal his PS3. (FYI, this is an in-engine, real-time-rendered, albeit scripted footage.)

God of War is a great game, perhaps the best game ever (OK, all-time top three.) If you have never played it, you have missed a lot in your life, believe you me! It’s like you’ve never watched the Matrix or Fight Club or The God Father. It somehow completes one’s life experience. I’m not saying you have to like it or them, but you got to experience them at least. (What? You don’t like them? Get the hell out of here.)

I just noticed that EA – a game publisher that is mostly known for popular, unoriginal and mediocre game – was responsible for Spore, Mirror’s Edge and Dead Space in 2008.
I like the idea of the first two and the implementation of the third (although I’ve yet to play any of them in any meaningful volume) and I may have to revise my previously held views about EA.
Since these are not received particularly well by the general populace, if they continue to produce innovative games in 2009, I will respect them!

Here are two higher-resolution in-game videos from Soshiant: one (~90MiB) and two (~86MiB).
Here’s another video (~71MiB) showing some characters from concept, through modeling, to animations.

Note that our engine is not even in alpha. There are many bugs present, most of with are level design bugs due to our rush for the exhibition (camera placements and transitions, characters occasionally going through walls, Soshiant’s hand not being aligned with the ledges he is hanging from, etc.) But there are some engine bugs too, like the character’s hair getting stuck in a wall or ground, or the character jumping from one position to another, or the shadows poping here and there. All you see is subject to improvement, change or both.
Also, these videos are compressed with the irreplaceable Xvid codec. The third video, which is the only one with sound, features one of our original sound-tracks, composed and played by our multi-talented concept artist Soheil Danesh.
I would be very happy to hear your feed back on any and every aspect of these videos.

Amir Hosein made a post to the OGRE showcase forums about Soshiant. The response is overwhelmingly positive. I’m hoping that our love, care and enthusiasm can fuel our effort for just another year or two, and I believe we will make it, and we’ll make it big time!