appleseed 2004 – sapporo tin edition | jazz | ts3

so the official sappotor tin double dvd arrives from amazon, actually two days ago now. my god. i was impressed with the honky version, but the official has been transfered much better. now i can actually see the stupendous level of detail the creators went to. the textures in this film are absolutely amazing – and at times they’ll only be in focus for a second or two, then the camera will pan away or zoom wide – but you know the textures are still there – covering everything. added to that are warped reflections on glass to show the imperfection of the glass – totally mind blowing.
the tin is also mighty heavy. i must say, as much as halo 2 blows chunks for quarters, i feel it is a better game for coming in a sapporo tin. yes – that’s about the most posative thing i have to say about halo 2.
see, now if i was into metal-gear, i could have mgs3 in a sapporo tin as-well – making a lovely little tin collection – unfortunately i’m not that into it.

accompanying said tin were madeleine peyroux’s two albums, dreamland and careless love. this woman is ella fitzgerald and billie holiday rolled into one woman. her voice sounds like it’s straight out of the 30s. she’s actually playing live here in melbourne on the 19th, but Laura and i have decided the money could be better spent. also it’s not that i dislike the first more blusey album, but i preffer her jazzy second album. also two albums might make for just a bit of a brief concert. i’m sure she’ll come again, and when she does i think i’ll go.

as per usual, i’ve discovered the memory limit of the mapmaker in timesplitters: future perfect. not so much about running out of memory all together, but i tend to try and use roughly half of the memory for tiles, the rest for objects… like ts2, my creativity runs wild for a bit – lo-and-behold, my main idea is only half presented, and i’m already past the half-way memory mark. this innevitably leads to down-scaling, and i really hate doing that. others might love the maps, but to me they’re barely shadows of what they could have been. i’m also really feeling the 5 level restriction – they’ve given us stackable tiles and the ability to pull out the ceiling to make an ‘outdoor’ level, but the levels have gone down from eight to five. that means i’m just one level shy of having three walkways criss-crossing under each-other, as you need one level’s clearance between each walkway. one extra level theoretically is available by putting two-level tiles on the very top level, but this puts back in said pulled-out ceiling, and only pulls the ceiling for that pseudo level at the top, regardless of stackable tiles placed on the very top level. make sense? this is because there aren’t any two-level stackable tiles – and for good reason – why would you need them? i really could do with that extra level. in ts2 in a way, i never needed that many levels – at the most we used 6, maybe 7 – but now that there are more possibilities, we only have 5 to play with. pardon me, but that fucken sucks. well, in reality the lowly timesplitters engine is trying to render a lot more draw-distance with those now possible open spaces, so all in all it’s probably on par with the freedoms and restrictions of ts2. us jaded gamers will always want more though 😉

that’s enough for now – it’s saturday morning and it’s time to go kick chibi-r out of bed via the loud ringing of his mobile…