I borrowed L.A. Noire over the Weekend. I was interested in finding out what the fuzz is all about. First, I was blown away by the facial animation. Then, I was surprised about the streamlined and quite accessible interface and controls. Then I almost rage quit because of the arbitrarily punishing interrogation system. Finally, I was on the floor laughing because of this:

But I would not be laughing for too long. For I was reminded of the recent L.A. Noire Kill Screen review by Kirk Hamilton. He brought up the interesting Idea that L.A. Noire’s rigid, protagonist-centric world tells a much more terrifying and bizarre story than the game developers wanted us to believe. It’s a story of a man trapped in a bloodless, inescapable purgatory of convenient solutions, make-believe victories and hollow promotions. The god-like powers he seems to have support this notion. Investigating a case of two women almost killed in a car falling from a cliff, the Protagonist himself is able to effortlessly survive the most amazing car stunts. There are never any consequences. No investigations. Nobody ever even comments on that elephant in the room.

At times the game seems to have been designed to actually cause said dissonance on purpose. In the above mentioned case, the protagonist eventually gets into a race against the clock to reach a certain location by car. One of the cliffs in the video I posted above is placed suspiciously convenient straight on the path to get there. As this is one of the early missions, players are not familiar with the map and are bound to make that jump. An oversight? Or is it a deliberately placed stumbling block? A Verfremdungseffekt. A wake-up call. A red pill. The golden key to unlock the fridge horror of L.A. Noire.

So yesterday I did a short write-up of some thoughts on the new Nintendo system. Today, I wanted to remark a couple of things on Sony’s Vita. Right off the bat there is an obvious similarity between the Wii U and the Vita.

I’m sure this is just an awkward coincidence.

In this comparison, Sony could be in a weak position. The Vita has a smaller screen, is less flexible and I doubt it will be able to compete with the Wii U as far as the processing power goes. Sure, it’s portable but the kind of high-end games it seems to be going for rarely work on-the-go anyway. Will you be REALLY playing Uncharted in a crowded bus? Or will you rather recline on your couch and play it like the PS3 version?

Pesonally, there are two things I outright hate about the Vita: the name and the system interface design. The name sounds like a brand of anti-aging moisturizer. The system interface looks like a Fischer Price toy from the 90ies. It’s seems like a tacked-on effort to make a geeky high-tech device sell to the Wii and DS crowd. That’s not how you out-Nintendo the Nintendo. That’s just how you alienate the only audience you had in the first place.

But those are rather minor gripes. Because what impresses me most about the Vita is the OLED screen. It’s supposedly a pretty amazing new technology. Again, Sony’s ineptitude for communicating the features of their systems shows. Compare the Vita with the 3DS. Both feature innovative screens which produce an experience that can’t be conveyed in any other way than by experiencing it live. Nintendo realized that this is a difficult feat and focused their entire PR strategy on bringing this across. For Sony, the Vita screen is just a inconspicuous bullet point.

Granted, the OLED is perhaps not as pivotal for the Vita as the 3D screen is for the 3DS. But then again, what is pivotal for the Vita? It’s pretty much a beefier PSP. Considering how poor the PSP worked out for Sony, is this really a good idea?

But what really blew me away was the price. 250 EUR for that kind of expensive technology isn’t just aggressive. It’s desperate. It isn’t that long ago when Sony was selling the much less sophisticated PSP GO at 250 EUR. I guess they had to learn that lesson too often now. Sony is claiming that they aren’t losing money on this. Either they are lying or the PSP was more over-priced than I thought.

I have the impression that Sony is really trying to brute-force the Vita into the market after the weak impact of the PSP. But the console lacks focus and their non-existent communication strategy doesn’t help either.

But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad console. In fact, I might be there at launch day. The PSP didn’t sell among the masses and it was the last console I got in this generation. But I soon found out that it was a neat system with a selection of some very good, somewhat hidden titles. Beefing it up and fixing some of the problems is not a game-changer but it might just turn out to be an acceptable deal for me, especially at that price. And yes, Monster Hunter may have to do with this as well.

On this episode of the Monster Hunter Podcast: Five by Five. With the largest amount of participant in this Podcast’s history, we continue to push the boundaries of Monster Hunter. And we don’t even leave the Arena this time.

Get the mp3 of the episode here.
The RSS Feed is here.
Get us in iTunes here.
The Tumblr Blog here.

Enjoy!

This is the story of my CO3U Microphone. I’m selling it on eBay right now.

It’s about 1,5 years ago that I bought me a microphone. I had no clue about microphones. I wanted something simple and flexible to record the Podcast with. I ended up with the Samson CO3U. Considering how clueless I was, I was lucky. It turned out to be a very cool, flexible microphone that had a lot of nice features to experiment with. Little did I know how an important role it would play.

My trusted CO3U. I served me well. But I need to move on.

But the start was jumpy. The podcast didn’t go so well (Note to myself: Remove that button on this Website) and and I was a bit disappointed to see the mic just collect dust.

But soon after I was about to record the vocals for TRAUMA. I had the CO3U ready as a backup. But I was actually going to use a super-expensive fancypants Sennheiser they had at the university studio I recorded at. Except I didn’t. The Sennheiser was an XLR mic that had to be wired through one of those crazy complicated mixing tables. The problem was that I had no clue how the mixing table worked. The guys at the studio apparently didn’t either. The recording didn’t work at all. The voice didn’t come out loud enough. We turned every knob, but time was ticking. The actors I made the appointment with were getting impatient.

That’s when I whipped out the CO3U. It’s a simple USB mic that doesn’t require any mixing tables. I had it up an running in a couple of seconds and we ended up doing ALL of the recodings for TRAUMA on just this mic.

Now to be honest, I wasn’t blown away by the quality when back when I got the first. We did our first podcast recordings in my living room. It turns out my living room has the WORST acoustic properties in the world. It’s an old flat with a high ceiling and narrow walls. There is a ton of reverb. It took a couple of sessions to figure out how to get a good sound out of the mic.

The TRAUMA recordings were done in a padded studio cell but there were some super loud renovations going on in the background and my main actress – Anja Jazeschann – had whisper to get that dreamy voice. Considering the conditions, I was quite pleased with what the backup mic produced. You can hear the results for yourself. It certainly saved the day.

I continued using the mic for a year doing our weekly Monster Hunter Podcast. I used the mic in every show up to and including episode 40. During that time, I grew quite comfortable with it. I learned how to get around the reverb in my living room (by speaking into it very closely) and how to post-process the recordings so that everything sound well. The CO3U is just the right mic to experiment with. It has tons of switches for 3 different recording patterns, a built-in highpass and a -10db pad. It was a pleasure working with it.

The CO3U has lots of switches!

Recently I decided to move on and experiment with changing my setup. I heard that a lot of people use the Blue Snowball. It had one feature the CO3U didn’t seem to have – some slight built-in compression. This means that the mic is less sensitive to variations in loudness. I decided to give it a try. You can hear the results in the Monster Hunter Podcast Episode 41. I wasn’t happy. My voice sounded remote and dull. To be fair, I do realize that this is just the usual learning curve with the mic. I did some recordings afterwards and they sounded much better. I also liked the compression that brought me to the mic in the first place. However, the Snowball was a bitt less flexible than the CO3U. For example, it didn’t have a figure eight pattern for recordings of interviews. And hearing the results of shows like the Day9 Daily and the Experience Points Podcast (both use the Snowball), I was somewhat let down. I expected epic win out of the box.

What I tried first: The Blue Snowball. Result: meh.

What I realized is that good sound recordings take a lot of experience. They require you to learn the limits and strengths of whatever you use. But of course now the Pandora’s Box has been opened. I’m still dedicated to move on from the CO3U. I liked the compression on the Snowball but since I will need to re-learn everything, I was tempted to see how deep this rabbit hole goes. I exchanged the Blue Snowball for the just slightly more expensive Blue Yeti. It seems to have similar characteristics but has more settings to fumble around with. It’s what I liked about the Snowball and what I liked about the CO3U. I did some tests and so far I’m pleased with what I’m hearing. I will post some more soon.

What I ended up with: The Blue Yeti. Much better. I think I can make this work.

But until then, you are invited to bid for my trusted CO3U. It’s a good, solid mic for podcasts and voice recordings. I had a lot of fun with it and as you can see it served me well. It’s still in superb condition, in spite of the patina it acquired. And if you want, I will even sign it. Hey, that autograph may be worth a ton some day.

P.S.: Don’t mind the white lies in the eBay description. I will continue podcasting!

I’m back. I took a 2-week break to get some things done. And indeed, I got a lot of things done. Especially concerning TRAUMA. More on that in a couple of days. But until then, here is another thing I uploaded recently.

It’s an advanced tutorial on The Tone Rebellion (Basic Tutorial here). It explains a couple of in-depth concepts.

On my first few playtroughs I almost wrote the game off as somewhat shallow. The first few “levels” were usually a bit challenging. But as soon as your economy stabilized it got really repetitive. It made you repeat the same actions over and over again until you win. There were no meaningful decision either. But as I cranked up the difficulty, I was in for a surprise. I got honestly stuck at the hardest difficulty. The game gets so challenging you suddenly need to pay attention very subtle economic details. I think I got a foot in the door eventually, but I still haven’t beaten the game on the hardest difficulty. I will investigate further and plan a Let’s Play afterwards.

Until then, enjoy the above tutorial!