Tag Archives: SXSW

Homeless hotspots

This week at SXSWi a Homeless Hotspots campaign has been causing debate. It seems there are plenty who approve of the scheme, so I thought I’d come up with a few more ideas for next year.

  1. Homeless Coffee Tables. It’s hard to juggle a Starbucks latte and an iPad. Let one of our homeless hold the coffee for you while you Tweet what you just overheard.
  2. Homeless Umbrellas. The weather’s been pretty bad, so why not make use of our special mobile umbrellas? While you focus on your conference program, a homeless will hold an umbrella over your head so you don’t get wet.
  3. Homeless Bike Racks. Place your front wheel between his legs, he’s been trained to grab hold of it. We’ve given him a six pack of Lone Star so he’s not going anywhere.
  4. Homeless Ashtrays. Some of you still smoke, but for cost-saving reasons we don’t have ashtrays everywhere in the convention center. Instead, we’ve equipped several homeless with asbestos-woven T-shirts with a pouch at the bottom.

Hey, get off your high horse, they’re employment opportunities don’cha know?

SXSWi report

I started my afternoon by shuffling to the bus stop at the end of our street, to get the bus downtown. It wasn’t long before a SXSW attendee turned up, badge in hand. The bus was on time, and quickly filled up with mothers and children who were traveling to the capitol building to protest the planned cuts in education. I chatted and expressed my support, but it wasn’t my destination.

I got off the bus on South Congress, and wandered about taking some video shots of downtown before heading for the convention center, and South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi). Each year they have a free exhibit area called Screenburn, where video game companies show their stuff.

Last year it was almost dead, so I nearly didn’t bother going–but then I read on Facebook that Insomniac Games were going to be there. They make the Ratchet & Clank games, probably my all-time favorite 3D platform game franchise.

The R&C games are based around free-roaming exploration, puzzle solving, and lots of stuff exploding in cool ways as you get increasingly ridiculous weapons upgrades. The genius of the game design is that it effectively auto-adjusts to your skill level. Initially you just have a wrench, and maybe a blaster pistol, with which to defend yourself. But, as you smash scenery and enemies apart, you collect metal bolts, which are the currency in the game; and once you get enough bolts, you can buy a weapon upgrade. So if you fail to get past a tough part of the game, you can keep trying, and if you fail enough times eventually you’ll have enough scrap metal salvaged to swap for a weapon that’s just enough of an improvement to get you further into the game.

Anyway, Insomniac were demoing Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One, the first PS3 R&C game to have multiplayer online play. Up to four people can join in, and you get to play Ratchet, Clank, Captain Qwark, or Dr Nefarious. The levels are designed so that you have to cooperate with the other players in order to advance. Like LittleBigPlanet, all of the players are kept on the screen at all times, with the camera zooming out (within limits) when necessary. The developers also talked about the influence of Goldeneye 64.

(Oh, yeah, they also had Resistance 3 on demo, but I don’t really play first person shooters, and it looked like a pretty typical one.)

Capcom were at SWSWi Screenburn too. They had half a dozen Nintendo 3DS units, and I had a chance to play Resident Evil: The Mercenaries. The level I played was like the village in Resident Evil 4, and I got to run around and shoot cultists and zombies in the face. The usual annoying Resident Evil “no strafing, limited angle of view” game mechanics were there.

The 3DS itself is recognizably familiar, though the home screen interface is confusingly different from the DSi, and the new placement of the home, start and select buttons takes some getting used to. The touch screen also feels cramped, now that I’m used to my DSi XL.

On the plus side, the analog controller is great. The upper screen image is high enough resolution that I didn’t notice pixels until I paused to think about the screen quality.

I’m not completely sold on the 3D, though. Yeah, it works, but you really do need to be absolutely head-on to the screen. You also need the screen to be about half a meter from your face or less, which is probably going to help create a new generation of shortsighted geeks. Playing Resident Evil, several times I had reorientate the device to my face precisely, because I had gotten a bit carried away with my trigger finger. So I can see the 3D working for casual games and adventures, but it seems problematic for anything involving a lot of fast-paced action. You can turn the 3D off, at which point the graphics become a little crisper, like the antialiasing has been turned down and a little unsharp mask applied in Photoshop.

The budgerigar from the DSi has had a promotion in the 3DS, and now provides help for the camera app as well. Unfortunately, the 3DS has the shittiest digital cameras I’ve encountered since the Apple QuickTake 100. The images may be 3D, but they look worse than the ones from your cell phone, even if you’re still using an old Nokia from five years ago. Forget about taking pictures indoors, unless you carry studio lights around with you.

Battery life is also a concern. So, yeah, I’m not dashing out and buying one on launch day.

Capcom also had some 2D DSs running Okamiden. The game Okami“>Okami was one of the most artistic released for the PS2, and later found its way to the Wii; I highly recommend it. Okamiden looks like it could be one of the DS’s best this year.

I took a break from looking at video games to check out Mayfair Games‘ booth. They’re the US distributors of The Settlers of Catan, a world-famous German board game that’s widely regarded as one of the greatest games ever. I’ve never played it. As I confessed to the man who turned out to be the CEO of the company, I’ve always been much more interested in present-day and futuristic games. We got talking, and it turned out that he was the creator of RoleMaster, a game I played a lot of; and also helped create SpaceMaster and CyberSpace, two SF RPGs I bought and admired greatly, as well as MERP. We talked about the unfortunate 90s implosion of the RPG industry, and the lawyers taking over management of the T*lk**n estate.

(Meanwhile, some deletionist on Wikipedia is trying to get him excised.)

Overall, SXSWi Screenburn was a hundred times better than last year; it looks as if at least part of the economy is genuinely recovering.

Then I walked home, via the Congress Avenue Bridge and the tangy scent of bat guano. Got some cheesecake flavored gummy candy and a pineapple soda on South Congress. The house is perilously short of coffee. I have some drilling to do, but that’s another story, and one I think will have to wait until tomorrow.

SXSW2009

List of people to maybe try and sneak in to see at SXSW 2009 (because $600 is way too fucking expensive and the ticket prices have turned it into an industry trade show):

  • Explosions in the Sky (who I didn’t know are from Austin)
  • NASA
  • Ulrich Schnauss

And in the "Yeah, like there will be any space to sneak into that" category:

  • Margaret Cho
  • DEVO

SXSW

We went out in search of some music on Saturday night.

8bitpeoples were having a label party at Molotov’s on 6th. When we got there, it became readily apparent that the best sound was available by standing on the sidewalk outside the venue, and looking through their open windows. We had a pretty good view of the stage too.

Later we went in search of Chris de Luca vs Phon.o, the former being half of Funkstörung. Sadly, it appeared that they had canceled or changed the date to 3 days earlier or something, and the venue denied all knowledge of them.

Not going deaf for a living

Well, at the weekend I had my first SXSW experience, and it was a good one. Last year I managed to miss John Watts, but this year I was prepared. We went to The Hideout downtown about an hour early, and waited in line. The rule was SXSW badges first, then wristband holders, then if there was still space in the venue proletarians could pay $8 each to get in.

The band before Watts was Asakusa Jinta, a kind of psychedelic heavy metal marching band from Japan. They apparently had a lot of buzz, as the venue was full to capacity and there were 20 or 30 people lined up in the hope of getting in. From what we could hear from the corridor, Asakusa Jinta are indeed pretty awesome, but not necessarily a band you want to share an enclosed space with, even if you have earplugs.

Eventually the band stopped, and lots of people left. John Watts wandered past with his promoter handing out flyers. The line thinned out, and we were left standing with some Germans, and two local girls who were apparently hosting Mr Watts during his stay, but were unacquainted with his music.

Back in the late 1970s, John Watts founded Fischer-Z. At the time they were compared to Talking Heads and XTC, but for some reason they never had the commercial success of those bands. The original band broke up after 3 albums, but Watts then reformed Fischer-Z with a new lineup.

The style of music is the usual pop/rock range, but sprinkled with the musical twists that keep my interest. The lyrics are sometimes melancholy, occasionally angry, but there’s always humor there that prevents things slipping into punk (or Depeche Mode) territory.

It all strikes me as very English, but for some reason their biggest fans were in Germany. If you want to hear some Fischer-Z right now, your best bet is either to switch the iTunes music store to think you’re German (using the drop-down at the bottom of the front page), or to head to FineTunes Music Shop, a German MP3 vendor. [Update: Fischer-Z albums also available from Audio Lunchbox.]

Anyhow, John Watts has now moved into solo performance, and seems to have taken on a kind of “wandering troubadour” role. For his latest album, he bought a 30 day railcard and traveled around Europe talking to random people—and then wrote songs about their stories.

His SXSW performance was just him with an amplified acoustic guitar. I particularly appreciated that he was picky about the sound, and insisted on getting it to a loud-but-comfortable level, with the vocals clearly audible. If only all artists were prepared to argue with venue sound guys.

So all in all, one of the simplest—yet also, one of the best—live music experiences I’ve had. Hopefully he’ll be back next year.