Added Multiwinia to the top because A.) I’ve got mad respect for Introversion and their products but this trailer is just a bold brilliant move.  The piano makes you instantly sad for the suffering and pain of war.  The brilliance lies that you feel, albeit only slightly, this tinge of sadness for the scenes you are witnessing, when the scenes and the game multiwinia itself is so abstact that normally you would never feel this.  Great GREAT game, great company, wicked use of music and to make a trailer that essentially tells you nothing about the game who’s purpose is only to illicit an emotional response well that takes balls and brains, cause they pulled it off.

Such a beautiful song that lends itself surprisingly well to the trailer, a testament to those who created it.

You have to give them credit, the boys over at the M$ marketing department know better than anyone how to create a compelling experience with audio in a game trailer

Original WoW trailer.  The song on the soundtrack is called ‘A Call to Arms’(are at least it’s similar enough to see it was used) and is one of the most powerful game pieces ever written.  It’s too bad the song is slightly muted, worth listening to it all on it’s own here

I had to bring in a trailer from AITD as the 2008 OST is definitely one of the more powerful soundtracks created in recent years.

How many companies offer remixes of their commercials? I mean come on, the musical component in itself might not be worthy of a mention but it’s use and the fact that money was spent to pump this out sure as hell is.  Plus it might have the best last line for any trailer ever

One of the most recognizable pieces of music from any game trailer without a doubt.  I dare you not to get goose bumps from this.

Bravo!  When faced with the challenge of how to represent visually the music of the Beatles in a trailer they could have gone down so many cop out, traditional routes but instead they put their balls out there and made something beautiful and creative.

Beautiful song for sure, good call Ubisoft

I’ve had no choice but to smile ear to ear with every trailer for this game, but the music in this one makes me more than otheres

There can be no denying the brilliant pairing of Big Band style music with the visual style presented in TF2.  Both compliment and strengthen each other so well that one viewing of a TF2 commercial and it’ll be in your head for days.

The mellow guitar riff beautifully juxtaposes what is going on in the scene.  Plus the big band sounding theme for TF2 itself is brilliant.

The song just makes everything seem so serene and graceful, even when it involves violence.  I imagine that being the point EA was going for to describe the way the character in mirrors edge moves and acts

Got some more that I missed here?  By all means lets hear it!

***Additional Suggestions I Missed***

Brilliant, again the use of music to juxtapose what is happening in the music has such a great impact I am surprised we aren’t seeing this technique more

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, uses classic visual illusions and his own counterintuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we’re not as rational as we think when we make decisions.

In a games related issue this makes me really rethink how I am going to structure the pricing for future products

If you are having troubles compiling FFMPEG and are seeing errors with LibGL such as:

No package ‘x11-xcb’ found

You need to do a few things.

Firstly upgrade X11: portupgrade libX11. This has been noted to solve a lot of problems so do this first, retry and see if it fixes it.

This however might fail in which case you are going to need to upgrade xproto first as X11 will look for a later version of Xproto than might already be on the server. doing a simple portupgrade might not work so:
So cd /usr/ports/x11/xproto & make clean & make deinstall & make reinstall

now you should be able to go into /usr/ports/x11/libX11 and:
make clean & make deinstall & make reinstall

and now finally LibGL will install properly and consequentially so will FFMPEG

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/science/26fusi.html

Great article about at the NYTs about NIF or National Ignition Facility, which I think is tied with CERN for the most exciting scientific project on the planet.  Truly one of the greatest achievements of human history and the article goes into a little of the life of the project, what it is doing and hopefully what it will achieve.

In accordance to the principles of Doublethink, it does not matter if the war is not real, or when it is, that victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous. The essential act of modern warfare is the destruction of the produce of human labor. A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. In principle, the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects. And its object is not victory over Eurasia or Eastasia, but to keep the very structure of society intact. Julia? Are you awake? There is truth, and there is untruth. To be in a minority of one doesn’t make you mad.

Does Big Brother exist?
Of course he exists.
Does he exist like you or me?

You do not exist.

War is a way of shattering to pieces…materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and…too intelligent.

Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

The primary aim of modern warfare Part 1n accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.  If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations.”

The consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

I personally feel this is one of the most important pieces of modern literature written in the last century.  If you have not read it go out and buy it today as it is pure genius and completely changed the way I perceive this world in a very very real way.  Don’t watch the movie, go read the book and then watch the movie if you want.

So I’ve been going through a real LOTR kick lately.  After finishing watching the Extended version Trilogy again, I then went through all 6 DVD’s of the Making of and now I’m going through the Cast Commentary of each film.  I suppose watching all of this and immersing myself in the Film project has given me an immense appreciation for the incredible effort that went into this film, I would say more so than any other films in human history.  I say this because I feel that this could be directly responsible for how I feel about LOTRO.

After finishing the films again I was left with an incredible desire to explore this world in much more detail and on my terms.  A testement to the amazingness of our times that now that option is available to me.  My problem however is that I wanted to explore a world as rich as the one created in the films(visually) or as captivating as the world created in the books.  Perhaps this was an unfair expectation in Turbine but upon entering Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings Online I was immensly dissapointed, and my guess is that many other players also are.

Visual: When you watch the films there is absolutely no mistaking that the world of cinema has never seen works that match the visual authenticity and sophistication of LOTR.  Not strictly from a CG perspective but speaking of the set designs, the blacksmiths working around the clock, the seamstresses, the miniatures, etc etc.  Everything for these films shattered records previously thought to be impressive.   This is something Turbine should have taken into account when they decided to create Middle Earth for the masses to explore, clearly they aren’t expected to match the quality of the film, however I would expect them to take the same fervor in attention to detail and groundbreaking effects relative to other online games.  They however did not.  The infinite small details that make the story in the book come to life, and those of the films that suspend all disbelief are no where at all to be found in the game.  With the expectations that the films set for this the gameworld seems bland and vanilla no matter where you are looking.   It is simply another generic online game that looks no better and in many cases worse than many others.

Gameplay: Again absolutely nothing ground breaking here.. The quests are incredibly tedious for the first 10 levels with ZERO hook to get you interested in the story.  The very very beginning introduction starts off with you defending a courtyard, which is a step in the right direction, however after that it is simply one rat quest after another, interspered with fedex quests here or there.  There is an epic quest storyline that goes on but has zero compelling features in it and the fact that the hero you are following is so much weaker than yourself makes it even more insulting.

You can start off as any of the main characters in the story: Dwarf, Elf, Human or Hobbit however there is no major major differences between them.  By this I mean they share 90% of the same classes throughout, so each race serves mainly an aesthetic purpose which can be good in a way as it allows you to play your favorite class and explore the hobbit world or the elves but there is no real compelling reason to choose one over the other or any reason to feel special about being an elf as there is a human of the same class out there that is identical to you without the pointy ears.

There are some slightly innovative mechanics for combat but really nothing to write home about.

Lastly, once you get your first character above lvl 10 you are able to do ‘monster play’ which allows you to start a lvl 60 evil character(orc, spider, worg etc etc).  This could prove interesting as it opens the whole world up on the other side so I’ll give them that.

Price: There doing something right here.  You can sign up for a 10 day free trial and convert it for 9.99 / month.  No box fee which is nice to see.  However compare this to a game like Requiem, which is 100% free, looks much better visually and has more exciting and developed gameplay from the start and that 9.99 still seems overpriced.

At the end of the day it seems all too clear that either Turbine bit off far more than they could chew, or their main intention here was to cash in on the immense success of the brand – wanting to take as little risk as possible due to the fact that almost anything they produced would be gobbled up by hordes of rabid fans.   Consequentially what they ended up producing was a product that visually can’t compare to it’s competion let alone attempt to step into the massive shoes that Peter Jackson created for the brand, and gameplay wise has nothing unique to appeal to players over any of the other games offered out there.  This strikes me as a major disservice to the Brand in general, once you know what went into writing the books and then the insanity that went into creating arguable some of the greatest films ever made.  Perhaps Turbine was doing the big corporate thing and playing it safe or perhaps they bit off more than they could chew, either way I see them in a slightly tarnished light because of this project.

In a world with so many high quality free mmo’s being produced these days(Requeim, Shaiya, Last Chaos to name a few) if you want to step into this arena and charge people money for a monthly subscription you had damn well be able to justify it on all fronts… LOTRO does so on none, which saddens me to no end.  Someone please call Bethesda to fix this mess!

http://www.twistimage.com/blog/archives/domain-registry-of-canada-scam-with-direct-mail-and-online/

If at any point you receive correspondence from these guys do what any sensible person does and take the return stamped envelope, collect some animal feces with it and mail it back to their address.  They are a huge scam preying on the general ignorance of people saying that their .ca domains need to be protected by them and only them for an insanely inflated price of 40.00 per year.  You can get the same protection, or better anywhere else for a fraction of the price.

http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/display/?id=4690

“University of Manchester scientists, in collaboration with colleagues from other European centres, have shown that higher levels of vitamin D – primarily synthesised in the skin following sun exposure but also found in certain foods such as oily fish – are associated with improved cognitive function in middle-aged and older men. The study, published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, compared the cognitive performance of more than 3,000 men aged 40 to 79 years.”

I found this study interesting because of the amount of elderly peopleI know who are still so incredibly with it versus those I know who aren’t.  It always seems like those who have it going on up top to a surprising degree are the ones that worked good hard labour their life, such as on a Farm.  Interesting how the two can be corelated

http://www.yooouuutuuube.com/

I gaurantee you this isn’t what you think, oooh so much cooler

Here’s an example: http://www.yooouuutuuube.com/v/?rows=36&cols=24&id=CBgf2ZxIDZk&startZoom=1

So after running into this problem suddently and for no ‘apparent’ reason(although it became apparent later) I noticed the complete lack of real support docs online in regards to the ALSA underrun problem.  Hopefully I can rememdy this a little bit and help some people out.

Last week I noticed skype audio was getting really choppy, it was the equivalent of seeing the conversation through a strobe light.  Odd I thought but didn’t pay it too much heed, that was until the end of the week when the audio simply stopped all together and skype refused to close down normally.  I would have to manually kill the process in terminal after the sound cut out.  This problem was exclusive to skype, which made it even more frustrating as I could have youtube and/or music playing in exaile while skype was screwing the pooch.

It occured to me today that something indeed had been changed recently right before this problem started and that was me fiddling with pulse’s daemon.conf and enabling real-time scheduling.  I can’t remember what for but this was part of the problem.  In fact there is even a mention in pulseaudio’s man page in regards to the possibility of real-time scheduling causing problems which I’ll quote here:

Alternatively,  if the risk of locking up the machine is considered too
big to enable real-time scheduling,  high-priority  scheduling  can  be
enabled  instead  (i.e.  negative  nice  level). This can be enabled by
passing –high-priority (see above) when starting  PulseAudio  and  may
also  be  enabled  with  the approriate option in daemon.conf. Negative
nice levels can only be enabled when  the  appropriate  resource  limit

RLIMIT_NICE  is  set  (see setrlimit(2) for more information), possibly
configured in /etc/security/limits.conf. A resource limit of 31 (corre‐
sponding with nice level -11) is recommended.

At this point I got a little excited as the solution seemed within reach.  I hashed out real-time schedule and implemented high-priority scheduling, restarted pulseaudio and loaded up skype.  It started fine but when I made a test call I was once again plagued by ALSA underruns.

They key here was to adjust the nice level.  I incrementally went down from -11 all the way to 3 (as in plus 3 not -3), restarted pulseaudio, loaded skype and viola!  Problem solved.  The nice level might be different for you so maybe experiment with that a little bit.

Summary:

• edit ~/.pulse/daemon.conf (or /etc/pulse/daemon.conf if you run as system)
• Hash out realtime-scheduling and realtime-priority
• Unhash high-priority and nice-level
• set nice level to 3 (not -3 or -11 for that matter)

Update:  Bah, I am still seeing these under runs.  The severity of them has gone down as skype doesn’t completely cut out now and lock up but I am getting audio cutting in and out every 2-3 seconds when making a call via skypeout.

Searching around the skype forums I found this and this actually seems to have done the trick completely:

Edit your ~/.asoundrc file

# Part I directly from ALSA Dmix Wiki

pcm.skype {
type dmix
ipc_key 1024
slave {
pcm “hw:0,0″
period_time 0
period_size 1024
buffer_size 8192
#format “S32_LE”
#periods 128
rate 44100
}
}

pcm.dsp0 {
type plug
slave.pcm “skype”
}

# This following device can fool some applications into using pulseaudio
pcm.dsp1 {
type plug
slave.pcm “pulse”
}

ctl.mixer0 {
type hw
card 0
}

pcm.pulse { type pulse }
ctl.pulse { type pulse }
pcm.!default {
type pulse
}

ctl.!default {
type pulse
}