Brent Ruhle's Blog

Record

greedfeed — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:51:49 +0000

Have you had the chance to check out woot.com? If not, do so, it’s awesome and just plain fun to see what the item of the day will be. The big purchase I was scouting for when I found woot was a camcorder. I was convinced that I would ditch this whole blogging thing and instead substitute it with vlogging. Blogging can take a very large amount of my time to really think of what I want to say so I figured just letting it flow out of my mouth would change all that. Of course what I didn’t take into account was that meant people would need to stare me down for 5 minutes while I tell my story, and I just wasn’t comfortable with that.

I still made a purchase though figuring I could have fun shooting videos around the office and such. I bought the Flip HD camcorder and so far I’ve been really happy with the decision, mainly it’s been really silly quick videos but the nice part about the Flip is it’s so small and easy to use I can just pop it out whenever and take a video of friends, families … or coworkers in a money booth apparently, which are like 9/10ths of my videos at this time … Weird.

Running Into a Glass Door

greedfeed — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 17:29:24 +0000

Good news squad! I finally have a game to talk with you about in this post. Mirror’s Edge … What do you mean I’m late to the party?! Listen here, I just played through it this weekend and we’re going to talk about it, now read on and enjoy darn it.

First off I thought Mirror’s Edge was completely under rated based on the press’ opinion and just general word of mouth. This is a game that strives so hard to be unique all shortcomings become easy to overlook. The biggest problem with the game actually becomes it’s length, you never want to stop zipping around levels and once you finally get to the end of the story you’re left with a time trial mode to reconciliate your need for more content, and it just isn’t enough. Mirror’s Edge reminded me of a lot of the greatest parts of Assassin’s Creed, which I suppose isn’t really all too shocking since they both took the real world style of parkour runners and both tried to adapt it to a game world. All in all I think Mirror’s Edge pulled the transfer off a little more smoothly since Assassin’s Creed got painfully repetitive towards the end of the game.

On the non-gaming side of life I spent this weekend reading through Justice League’s Earth 2, a thank you goes out to my friend at work for letting me borrow it. It was an amazing premise but like Marvel’s Secret Invasion I think the concept was better than the execution. Really you’re yearning to see Ultraman take his full rage out on Superman or to see Batman come to terms with how this worlds Owlman has changed Gotham City, but instead we are left with Green Lantern trapping all the bad guys in their base while the good guys clean up (for a short time anyways) … No fuss, no muss, I guess.

Lastly I spent the weekend with my buddy watching the minor league opener for the Rochester Red Wings. We lost of course but it was still just a good time to get out of the apartment on a sunny day and chew the fat with friends. Hopefully there will be more time this summer for days like those, after all, I did just acquire three very awesome Frisbees…

Etch Before You Sketch

greedfeed — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:53:36 +0000

Finally I’ve had a chance to put some more time into the overall designs for some of the characters in my story. I’m not completely happy with it still but the evolution of the idea has come further and further with each attempt. I don’t expect this to be a comic that I try to make money from, hell, this isn’t even something I plan on finishing and sharing with my closest friends but it is fun to just work in the process, flesh out plots, create unique dialogue, and sketch out some sharp characters. At some point if I ever become truly happy with the direction of some of the characters I may post their evolution just because I find their changes so interesting.

One of my more interesting designs was with one of the antagonists of this comic, I knew from the beginning I wanted his character to be hooded or masked most, if not all, of the time. I started with Darth Revan as inspiration since he contained a lot of the pieces I was looking for in a character, as I continued to work influences changed more and more, I tried various clothing (from a Rocketeer-esque jacket to even trying no shirt at all). Also I realized that part of the theme of this character was that he was ultimately a man headed for complete destruction and therefore wanted to include that death imagery in him as well, so than I started to work with animal skulls to change the mask around a bit, at first the mask had the antagonist looking through the “eye sockets” of the skull-influenced-mask to changing towards peering out of the wide toothy jaws of the creature. I’m excited about the directions my characters continue to take but I think my next phase will be taking the animalistic design of this particular character and start to readapt him for a more space opera-ish look.

A Fabled Weekend

greedfeed — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 16:02:40 +0000

Not having much change from week to week has slowed down the content in my posts considerably. Mainly because I’m waiting on Gamefly to send me another game since they refuse to stock their top rented games and instead try to force customers to take what’s in their list at the 29^th spot, in order to counter this I removed the titles that I really only wanted to play AFTER beating the big blockbuster hits, hopefully forcing them to give me a copy as soon as it was available, it has kind of been working but I still find myself in these long waits for them to give me any of the ten titles I have in my queue.

Yesterday I made the scary journey to Comic Book Heaven. I hadn’t gone in awhile and wanted to get current on a few of the series I read, of course since the place is basically just piles of books organized in no rhyme or reason I ended up knocking over a stack in a corner trying to reach for a copy of Albion. Immediately the owner comes over concerned about his books (they were fine, luckily) and I’m obviously feeling the better part of embarrassed, and like a total idiot on top of it, so I decided I would cut my losses at that point, picked up the latest Fables trade paperback and made my way to the register and out the door. The owner did mention to me also that because of the economy he wouldn’t be ordering any more trades unless people wanted them in advance, I’m sure he meant that well intentioned as saying he could help me find whatever I needed even if it wasn’t in the store, but really I just took it as why should I bother coming to this store if I couldn’t find anything today when I can just go online? So needless to say, I don’t think I will be back in his shop any time soon, real nice guy though and if he read this (which I know he doesn’t) I just wanted to say sorry about the books again.

Secret Exchange

greedfeed — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:54:25 +0000

Great news, reading was a success, I finally finished Perdido Street Station by China Mieville and it was great. I jumped into the next book, The Scar, right after finishing it. Hopefully this won’t take me six months and two books in between like the last one, fingers crossed. I haven’t had much time to play games since Killzone left a bad taste in my mouth but I did manage to make it down to a local venue last night to see a little bit of hardcore. Ten bucks to get in, what a deal!

In the office today I had a coworker who brought a comic book for me to read, Grant Morrison’s first series, New X-Men. As a fair exchange I brought Invincible as well, the funny part was we both handed each other our issues hidden in office folders and no one was the wiser. Something about a twenty and thirty-something trading comic books in an office with ties on cracks me up.

For some reason or another I’ve been drawing Zombie heads all day, they all look terrible and then I’ll start to shade them and add detail then they somehow explode in to awesome. I keep trying to focus on sketching out some new ideas for a comic story I thought up but I just can’t get the look I want. I have the main arc all outlined and written up, it could definitely use some work but it’s a fun enough idea to work with, I just wish I could get the characters how I see them. Maybe I should just stick to writing out the dialogue for now and hope the rest comes to me.

Fighting in the Woe-zone

greedfeed — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:24:11 +0000

I just started working on beating the original Killzone because I didn’t want to jump into the new installment without seeing where the series had come from. I got to be honest too, Killzone does not exactly say great things about its sequel, this game is a mess. I’ve heard that the original came out as a lame duck years ago but I had no idea how true that statement ways, I can barely aim, I can’t see past 100 yards of fuzz, and the whole game is more like playing a slideshow then it is anything that would have the words video attached to it. This game is awful, who are these characters? All their words might as well be in a foreign language because this story has absolutely no appeal to me. Seriously, Peggle has a better story than this. Basically we have a nation of, I will admit, very well designed evil looking Jin-Roh/WW2 storm trooper inspired bad guys, who have been persecuted and just treated all around like dirt by their fellow man and because of this they seek to fight back from their oppression… Wait, isn’t that the good guys story? These guys have every right to be pissed off! We treated them like absolute garbage. Every evil Helghast I kill I end up feeling like the bad guy, the guy who shoots a rubber bullet into the crowd at the equal rights protest. Yikes, I have higher expectations for Killzone 2 and I hear it has a great multiplayer component, to be fair I never really enjoyed any FPS-ers on Playstation until the original Resistance came out, so hopefully that game helped set a better example for Killzone 2 but until I pick up that copy get me the hell out of this warzone.

Games and Books?! I Say Good Day Sir.

greedfeed — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:05:09 +0000

I seriously cannot stop playing DoW2 with my friends. I have barely made it through the single player but the multiplayer is exactly what I always wanted in an RTS, less base building and more unit combat. The game is still super buggy and I find that it will occasionally crash to every ones desktop, but that seems to only be when we are winning of course …

Also I’ve been back to reading, albeit at a rather slow pace. I’m finally trying to finish what I started way back with Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. It’s so hard to describe what the book is truly about because there is so just so many plot pieces going in so many directions that I can’t wait to see it all come together. I originally picked the book up after hearing a recommendation about it being a great sci-fi book in a steampunk universe. Steampunk has always interested me, something about the Victorian style adapted to current tech always seemed awesome to me. Perdido Street Station takes that visual style and then adds an almost Tolkien race structure that’s been intensely perverted, instead of Elves there are half-man half-eagle Garuda, instead of Dwarfs we have bulbous toad like creatures. It’s really a great read so far and not as alienating towards non sci-fi fans as you may think. Check it out, I know I needed something to fill the void Battlestar Galactica left after coming to its conclusion.

Social Notworking

greedfeed — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:20:27 +0000

Lately I’ve been diving further and further into social networking (or as one of my friends pointed out from urban dictionary, social notworking). Usually, when new communities pop up I make sure to atleast always get a basic account up and running. From Twitter and Facebook all the way to MySpace and Orkut, I make sure I have some sort of presence. I like to test the waters because I believe it keeps me up to date with technology and web development. The problem I’ve mainly been having is keeping it all up to date. In the same way I update my 1up blog and then update my website’s blog (http://blog.brentruhle.com), I need to be able to update my Twitter and have that update my Facebook account as well. It’s all so much to stay in touch but I think I’ve come one step closer to a silver bullet. A user on Digg was raving about a program I had never heard of before called Digsby, so I thought I’d give it a shot. At first I have to admit, I was very unimpressed, asking me to decline or accept no less than 5 bloatware programs is not my idea of a good introduction. However, after establishing dominance over the installer and registering all my IM, mail, and social networking accounts together I really started to enjoy Digsby. It checked my email for me so I didn’t have to keep looking, told me about any new invites on Facebook, and streamed in my friends Twitter status’. I’ve only been using it for a day but it really allowed me to free up a lot of that time that would normally be spent making sure every friend gets the love they deserve on the sites they prefer to use… Wait, maybe this isn’t a good thing after all…

Staying Current.

greedfeed — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:33:46 +0000

Taking all things in stride, gaming fell a bit to the backburner these past couple of weeks, however I did find time to still play a few great titles. First I picked up the new Warhammer: Dawn of War II, the game is really amazing. Honestly I haven’t put to much time in to the single player but the multiplayer really manages to test your ideas about what actually makes a RTS, stripped to its bare bones and built back up to become something more about unit tactics and less about build order the game play is a lot of fun, especially with three friends. I never understood why Shawn Elliot always spent so much time talking about Relic’s other RTS endeavours like Company of Heroes but now that I’ve played Dawn of War II I can really see that these guys are a solid company. With all the time I’ve started to put in to DoW2 I’m beginning to wonder what it will feel like to go back to Starcraft 2 after this. Will SC2 feel like a step backwards? I was never honestly a fan of all the base building to begin with but always saw it as the necessary evil until now. Still I trust in Blizzard and if they claim that their Mom’s can enjoy SC2, I’m sure I will love it just as much as the original.

In other news, for some reason I’ve really been having an urge to try out some ideas for a webcomic, I’m sure it’s just another pipe dream but I wouldn’t mind just giving it a whirl just to get back into sketching like I used to. If I ever come up with something I’ll be sure to post it here first obviously. I’m sure it will either be game related or friend related seeing as both are what I find more interesting in my life.

Tell Us About Yourself in Thirty Seconds Or Less

greedfeed — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 21:15:16 +0000

When you play a demo you expect to be shown the most compelling things a game has to offer, which is why, generally a demo is the first level of the final product. You want to hook your user by showing them the best you can offer right away and then continually try to meet or exceed those bars throughout the game. So what does it mean when after playing said demo you walk away feeling kind of ho-hum?
This past few weeks has seen some big name demos hit the market, namely Halo Wars and Resident Evil 5. I plowed through Halo Wars and was blown away but the cut scenes the demo shows off. The universe of Halo becomes so much more alive through the huge firefights these scenes show off, but then when I finally got in to the game component I was left feeling a little blah about the whole thing. It really just made me think of a big melting pot of The Lord of The Rings and Warhammer 40,000k mixed brusquely with Halo coloring and then served over an Xbox 360. Can I get some A1 over here please? this meal tastes far to plain. I still have my sights set on picking up a retail copy when Halo Wars comes out, if not solely because of my respect for Ensemble Studios’ Age of Empires/Mythology games, plus a long time love/hate relation with the Halo universe in general.

The other demo was Resident Evil 5, I never got a chance to try it solo, each time I went for it I was playing the co-op offline version of the game. It was an interesting coincidence that I just started playing Dead Space the same time the Resident Evil 5 demo was released, the interesting part being that I think I actually like Dead Space far more. Ironically though Resident Evil 4 for Gamecube reinvigorated my interest in the zombie survival series because it lost the tank like controlling of previous games and finally made the experience fun to control, now with Resident Evil 5 coming out with some years behind us since the rebirth of the series, I find the controls once again restricting and claustrophobic when compared to titles like Dead Space. I will definitely be picking up Resident Evil 5 (in fact I’m far more likely to then Halo Wars) but I think I’ll be staying away from the Co-Op on my first play through since I found the tension and experience in general to be a little more stressful with the dependence of another player making the same dumb mistakes you’re making all over again.