Apparently Valve is pushing really hard the marketing for Portal 2, publishing special e-comics and even ovveriding the songs I want to play. If you’re looking at the score, well, I suck at pointman, ok? I play mono for a reason. While you wait for the official release of the game you might consider buying the new Humble Indie Bundle, dedicated to Frozenbyte, developers of the gorgeous Trine and his sequel.

If you’re not into indie you should hang from a lightpole check out what the future holds for us, or at least for those who are willing to make the jump to a dx11 video card.

I remain confident that Epic will make a great work for the optimisation, like they’ve always done, making those polygons run on my 4-years-old desktop pc.

For now, I know for sure that I’ll run Brink almost flawlessly, after I put some money on my pre-paid card for the pre-order. You can find the system requirements on the official Bethesta blog.

From an artistic point of view, a screen will always display only 2-dimensional images. It doesn’t matter if you cross your eyes, selectively watch light sources or coloured outlines: you’re looking at light coming at you from a rectangle. Then I ask myself “what’s this fuss all about?”. From what I’ve seen, they’re trying to sell us an illusion in a way that’s very different from switching from black and white to color tv or from 2D graphics to 3D. I’m sure everyone of you has at least seen a glasses-3D movie in the recent years so you may have noticed that you don’t have to focus on anything. You just point your eyes at the screen and everything else happens on its own. Even the depth of field has been decided for you by a screenplay writer.

You may have guessed by now that I’ve tried out the latest iteration of the 3D experience, the Nintendo 3DS, and I’m not as impressed as I was when I tried out the DS in February 2005. Back then, touch technology was already well-known but It yet had to be adapted for the videogame medium. Nintendo did it first for the masses and I was amazed how responsive and precise many action could be, ditching the dpad in favor of the stylus. The 3DS tries once again to deliver a brand new experience but this time the “new” 3D effect feels already old, being the same thing you’ve already seen in the movies or on your 3D enabled tv screen. The only difference is that it’s without glasses, but this awesome breakthrough comes to a price. The effect only works if your eyes are in the “sweet spot” as Nintendo itself called it. Shortly, there’s only one (one) distance you can see the 3D effect from. Basically it depends on the distance between your eyes but the real problem is that nobody is going to keep the 3DS in the exact same place all the time while playing. Even while trying it out i was trying to relax my arms but as soon as I moved the 3DS away from me the 3D effect was gone and I had to spend another ten seconds to find the sweet spot again. Forget playing with your 3DS on the bus, train, seaside deck chair: every little misplacement of your arms will mess up.

Furthermore, the actual depth I could see was about 1cm further than the surface of the screen (I’m not going to write the distance in inches. You should have learned the metric system by now) and 1cm of depth for the horizon in Pilotwings Resort is BAD. I hope other games can overcome this limitation or I’m going to call it “paper sheets glued one on top of the other”-D. There’s also a minor glitch I’ve experienced consisting of duplicated images near the left and right edges of the screen, probably due to the proximity of the wrong eye to the light beams directed to the other eye. I’ve combined a stereoscopic screenshot from Mass Effect to give you the idea (click the picture to see it in stereoscopy).

Sure, there’s the slider to turn the 3D effect off, but then I ask Nintendo: “what are you trying to sell”? It’s obvious, if you’ve seen the games at launch, that 3D is an option, even for the augmented reality card games. For the same reason that 3D is an Illusion and it’s expendable, I doubt any game will solidly base its gameplay on it. If you see it from this perspective you’ll realize that the 3DS is on sale because Nintendo wanted to say, once again, “we did it first”. This isn’t bad per se, but it’s not what I would expect from the same Nintendo that changed the direction of gaming with motion controls and openness to a broader audience. It almost feel like they wanted to take the same road Sony was walking on at the cost of forgetting why they build hardware for (suggestion: support the games they want to make).

I’ve read that the best part of the 3DS isn’t the 3D screen but its accessory features. Let’s consider those features then. StreetPass and SpotPass are as useful as the connectivity in games like Farmville and Pet Society and, for you to know, I don’t have a facebook account due to disgust. I’ll mark the aforementioned features as “useless” until I hear of a couple that met through them and successfully married and consummated afterwards. The ability to take pictures in 3D is interesting for artistic applications but as soon as you export them you’re back to the traditional 3D methods and I’ve already seen people doing it with 3D cameras or just two webcams on a stick. The web browser was already installed on the DSi and you know how fun is to find countless protected connections around you. The Icing on the cake is represented by the dreadful friend code comeback. The Prisoner once said “I am not a number. I’m a free man!” so why can’t we all live on the continent, instead of Nintendo’s Island?

Right now I’m only interested in Super Street Fighter IV 3D and I wouldn’t mind buying a new piece of hardware with this gimmick if it weren’t for the absurd price (and knowing the production cost doesn’t help either). I’ll probably wait for the inevitable price cut right after the first big title or  when Sony’s NGP will force Nintendo’s prices to appeal to parents with crying children once again.

In the meantime, I’ll “co-operate” with my friends in Portal 2. Don’t look at me like that. I always help my friends in New Super Mario Bros. Miscalculating gaps… but good intention do count, don’t they?

I’ve read some nice things about Skyrim lately on magazines and on the internet, yet I was almost blown out of the window at about 1/3 of this trailer.

I’m sorry to inform you that from now on I won’t publish my comics regularly twice a week but they’ll be published when they’re ready. The main cause for this is that I’m starting to have some heavy work to do for the academy, including 4 different projects and university class to attend as long as I can before the classes start to overlap at the beginning of march. In this conditions drawing the comic has turned out to be a chore in hours when I would just launch any game to rest (I can rest even playing Doom or Team Fortress 2, so you know). It’s not that I don’t enjoy drawing anymore, but rather that I put so much effort in the comic that it isn’t relaxing any more. Before the next year I’ll probably change the domain name and turn this website in my personal portfolio with illustrations, videos and the comic. Don’t worry. I still have tons of ideas for future comics, although I like to think new jokes as soon as I finish drawing one.

Now that I took the aching tooth out, here’s a little glimpse on the ongoing story: I’ve chosen the names for the two undead that will lead our heroes into the depth of the Inn’s basement once again. You’ll get more info on them in the next comics, but for now I have a nice nickname for one of the two.

The fun part is that I wanted to give more character to him and his skeletal pal but every time I had to draw his face this was the only suitable expression. I mainly wanted to make him different from the average numb zombie but that face of his will be so awkward in the future that it’s a shame not to draw it.

There’s more. The story I’m drawing lately doesn’t have any particular reference to games because I didnt’ find any laughable game in the past two months. Yes, I’ve played Dead Space 2 but it’s so “serious” and well-conceived that it’s hard to find new jokes about it. Luckily, Kirby Epic Yarn, Bulletstorm, Brink, Portal 2 and many others are drawing really near.

You may also have heard that Sony revealed its next portable console, the New Generation Portable, or NGP. Although the games in the works are less than the respective 3ds titles, its graphics are really amazing for the small piece of technology that is. I hate to look at good graphics on small screens.

Last sad news: don’t hold up your hopes for Mirror’s Edge 2. DICE shifted almost all of its employee to the development of Battlefield 3. I leave comments about this to you. I’m tired to say the old things once again to sound just like an old geezer.

The Duke Nukem Forever E3 trailer finally got released. 720p obligatory.

Now, I know that I’ve said that I would have waited the GDC to talk about the Nintendo 3DS but I’ll use this occasion to do it.

It will be out in North America on March 27 and in Europe on March 25 at the cost of 250$. Not european price has been state so far but it’s unfortunately supposable that it will be 250€ as well. Sometimes I really ask myself why did man invent the stock market.

On the other hand there are some good news regarding its online connectivity, with embedded web browser, multitasking (i.e. looking for walkthroughs online) and better friend code management. There will be only one friend code per console and you’ll be able to send it to the people you meet in real life wirelessly, track what they are playing to join the game. Although I really admire this effort into building a better community this is just not enough. Valve, Microsoft and Sony built solid communities ages ago and there’s no copyright on friend lists and nicknames so I don’t understand why Nintendo doesn’t copy the classic traits of a good gaming community.

Back to the 3ds, its battery will last 3 to 8 hours, depending mainly on how you use its wireless connectivity, the screen brightness and 3d features. It also has special StreetPass and SpotPass modes in which it downloads content from wireless access points and other 3DSs, be it newspaper pages, Miis from other players, or unlockable content for games like Super Street Fighter IV.

In my humble opinion this isn’t worth the price. The battery can’t even equal the DSlite battery life and no game has been shown that really makes the most out of the 3d capability. The price is very high, compared to previous DS versions and the main cause is probably the its hardware is expensive, being recent on the market, and the fact that the 3DS is the first handheld of the new generation, without PSP2 or any Microsoft handheld of any sort. Unfortunately, this entitles them to push the price as far as they want. It’s widely known that fanboys buy no matter what.

I can wait, especially for the inevitable “fixed and revised” 3DSlite after a year or so. You’ve heard it here first.