Someone just showed me a new trailer for the next Deus Ex game. I only played like the first level of Deus Ex and don’t know anything about the second, so you wouldn’t call me a fan of the series. And maybe this is why I get everything wrong.
But while this video looks and sounds really well made, I really don’t like it. I would even go so far to say I hate it, but keep in mind this comes from someone who never played any of the games and doesn’t know anything about this game. The opening is quite nice, showing that famous painting of the guys dissecting the corpse from a different angle and then making a transition to Ikarus. Nice idea, and I like it. But what then follows can only be described as a highly concentrated cliche overdose. The visuals look like a mesh up of Blade Runner, I, Robot and Ghost In The Shell and while I admit that those movies all look similar, this one looks just like a copy without it’s own identity. And then there’s the girl from the backstory when he wasn’t yet a cyborg, and there’s corruption, and police kills protesters, and the arm turns into a gun, and there’s a chick that turns invisible, and, and, and… Yes, these are all cool things that had amazing effects on the stories they originated on, but in this trailer it just seems like a cheap ripoff. It’s as if someone took all the cool things he could find in cyberpunk movies and put them all together into one trailer, without having any idea why those things were cool to begin with. And then there’s this ridiculously over-dramatic music.
It’s like sitting down and enjoying a nice piece of lamb stake with baked potatoes and then someone dumps an entire truckload of McDonalds junk on you. It’s meat and potatoes, so it’s the same, and also there’s so much more of it. Good Sci-Fi, and especially Cyberpunk is all about subtlety, and this trailer has none of it. I’m still interested in how this game turns out, and maybe it’s actually really good. But this trailer is not. It’s like Citizen Kane, the Maltese Falcon, and Avatar made into one 8 hour movie directed by Michael Bay.
I’ve always been a bit late when it comes to entertainment electronics, and still are. As a kid I had a friend who did have an SNES which we played around with occasionally, but I really started playing on the PC at a point that must have been some time after Windows 95 was released. (The game was X-Wing, until we moved on to Tie Fighter, which I still believe is the best game I ever played!) It wasn’t until well into my 20’s that I got my first gaming console in the form of a PS2 I got on ebay for 40€. It was also already 2007, which is after the PS3 had been released.
And what can I say: I love this thing!
BFF
As announced so many times before, I plan on writing several reviews of games in the following months and lots of them will be for the PS2. But don’t think these games are not worth your time because they are on an old console you don’t have. And here are the reasons why:
This is just a small site with not much traffic that does not appear in many web searches or is linked to by many sites. But it’s unbelieveable how much spam I get in the comments. I was gone for merely a week and the first thing I had to do was to delete a hundred smap masseges in the comment section waiting for approval. And no, there weren’t any actual comments I did approve.
Maybe I could just allow all those comments. Links and hits are the currency of the web, and all that spam would certainly generate a lot of them. But I think I rather pass. However, I will approve all future comments to this post. In a few months, they will probably give anyone a good idea with what I have to deal every day.
I’m really not sure what to make of this story. But Slashdot reports that researchers at the university of Hong Kong were able to store 90 gigabyte of data on bacteria with a total mass of only 1 gramm.
This sounds very cool in a lot of ways, but with researchers, and especially chinese ones, I’m always a bit sceptical if a statement really means what it seems to say. Take a look and judge yourself, I don’t really know much about this subject.
Russian space corporation Energia announced a 1.5 billion euro project to develop and test an “orbital pod” that will grab on old and no longer used satellites and basically throw them back into the atmosphere to burn up or drop into the ocean. The satellite is planned to be completed in 2020 and begin work in 2023.
It’s a bit of a supprise to find Russia to be the first to remove dangerous space trash from earths orbit. But then, they have decades of experience of deposing of garbage by just dumping it somewhere else out of sight.
Apparently this is the big story of today. I stumbled upon it no less then three times since this morning.
A team of researchers at MIT conducted research to determine if the current standard issue helmet used by the US Army increases the severity of brain concussions caused by explosive blasts. On the up side this doesn’t seem to be the case, but on the down side the helmet barly does anything to protect a soldier against such injuries. The reason for this lies in the fact, that in many cases the blast reaches the head by the face, which is left completely unprotected. Being real scientists, the researchers adviced conducting further studies to determine if a visor added to the helmets would decrease the chance of permanent injuries.
This may sound cool at first, as fully enclosed helmets always look very badass in movies and games. And never underestimate the confidence bost of soldiers thinking their armor looks cool! However there are some serious downsides to this as well. As Cmd. Skywalker (Red Squadron, Alliance Starfigher Corps) said in 1977: “I can’t see a thing in this thing!” It certainly is possible to design transparent blast shields that allow the wearer an unobstructed view, but I can’t think of any design that doesn’t look dorky.
And never underestimate the decrease in confidence of soldiers thinking they look dorky in full combat gear.
The idea is nothing new. A material that is soft and flexible, but hardens instantly when strong force is applied to it. There have even been some successes with semisolid substances, that could be put into gel pads but now silicone technology company Dow Corning created a new silicone polymer that takes the form of a fabric that can be cut into pieces and sewn together in any number of ways.
Does it also come in blue?
The use of Deflexion in protective clothing for sports or physical work is obvious, though I have doubts it’s strong enough to make actual body armor for police and military personell. But the possible uses for this stuff are endless. It could for example be used in notebook bags and people will come up with lots of other uses once this material gets more widespread.
This strip on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is not exactly from today. (You might notice that a lot of things on this futurist site are rather old.) But it reflects exactly my thoughts on the transhumanist predictions about life extensions and the overcoming of mortality.
As you have seen, or rather not seen, this page has been “low on new content in recent months”. I had to deal with some stressful stuff in spring and had somehow forgotten about the site after that. Now it’s winter again and almost exactly a year after I started this page, and I’m feeling like picking it up again. The first thing was remembering the admin password for this site, but I was able to get in again. Next was deleting 1064 comments of spam! And I even deleted all the spam that had accumulated in August. (I think it was over 2000.) But I have 7 genuine comments, so I’m willing to do this extra work.
When I first had the idea of starting a technology and sci-fi page I wanted to do a couple of reviews on certain movies, novels, and games that I enjoyed (or really hated), but all I got to where XKCD and Eversion. Both are great, but not exactly what this page is supposed to be about. But I have a tonne (metric) of stuff lying around here which I want to write about, and even if I manage to make one review each weak, this will last me until next summer.
Another aspect of this site are technology news, for which I mostly relied on two pages which I searched for interesting bits every day. But they seem to be rather low on news about gadgets these days, so not much to report there. If anyone knows about good news sites that report on new technological inventions or developments in electronics and such, please let me know! It will be very appreciated.
Deus Ex 3: I don’t like this trailer
December 10th, 2010Someone just showed me a new trailer for the next Deus Ex game. I only played like the first level of Deus Ex and don’t know anything about the second, so you wouldn’t call me a fan of the series. And maybe this is why I get everything wrong.
But while this video looks and sounds really well made, I really don’t like it. I would even go so far to say I hate it, but keep in mind this comes from someone who never played any of the games and doesn’t know anything about this game. The opening is quite nice, showing that famous painting of the guys dissecting the corpse from a different angle and then making a transition to Ikarus. Nice idea, and I like it. But what then follows can only be described as a highly concentrated cliche overdose. The visuals look like a mesh up of Blade Runner, I, Robot and Ghost In The Shell and while I admit that those movies all look similar, this one looks just like a copy without it’s own identity. And then there’s the girl from the backstory when he wasn’t yet a cyborg, and there’s corruption, and police kills protesters, and the arm turns into a gun, and there’s a chick that turns invisible, and, and, and… Yes, these are all cool things that had amazing effects on the stories they originated on, but in this trailer it just seems like a cheap ripoff. It’s as if someone took all the cool things he could find in cyberpunk movies and put them all together into one trailer, without having any idea why those things were cool to begin with. And then there’s this ridiculously over-dramatic music.
It’s like sitting down and enjoying a nice piece of lamb stake with baked potatoes and then someone dumps an entire truckload of McDonalds junk on you. It’s meat and potatoes, so it’s the same, and also there’s so much more of it. Good Sci-Fi, and especially Cyberpunk is all about subtlety, and this trailer has none of it. I’m still interested in how this game turns out, and maybe it’s actually really good. But this trailer is not. It’s like Citizen Kane, the Maltese Falcon, and Avatar made into one 8 hour movie directed by Michael Bay.
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