Aka Hazumi

Halo 3 launch with photos from Redmond, Microsoft Company Store and the Halo diorama

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 18:37:46 GMT

Here we go. Millions are blogging about Halo 3 as I write ths. Sony Defense Force put out a less than entertaining review. I hoped for a bit more, but it was short and sorta boring. For the real reviews, check out metacritic.com, or just go out and buy a copy.

Now for the photos. I went to Redmond Town Center (RTC) last night for the Halo 3 midnight launch. My photos aren't that great. I really suck these days at night shots. I slept and then got up early to catch the launch at the Microsoft Company Store. I love playing games, but there's something about a launch night that gets me stoked.

Bonus: The Microsoft Company Store had two sections of the big diorama you've been seeing in videos on display. Check out those photos for a glimpse.

Enjoy. Have fun. Play safe. Don't forget to reload.

Is Sony Home? Not until 2008.

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 18:24:28 GMT

From Wired Blogs by an American expat in Japan:

We have some not so big news from TGS here. The PlayStation 3 Home is to be delayed until 2008. Word on the street is that this is due to an overwhelming lack of interest. It appears the game development community, while voicing support for Home, has failed to produce any game spaces in Home. “It’s really disappointing,” stated Phil Harrison, EVP of Sony Europe in an interview with on Thursday. “We thought we had something here. Imagine sitting around watching trailers for the latest EA sports game in your virtual living room, and then walking on down to the EA pub for a virtual drink and chips with star athletes and celebrities. What could be better?”

Apparently, a lot. Not only has support from developers been mediocre, but there’s little interest from the gaming community as well. The number of active avatars in the virtual space fell off 56% from the initial beta – this includes the fact that Sony has ramped up slots for the sneak peek. It is believed most of the remaining avatars belong to Sony staffers and SDF fanboys. (Who are out in droves at TGS.

For additional coverage on Sony at TGS, see DarkZero UK’s writeup.

Fine print: The above article is a farse and for entertainment value only. However, the DarkZero writeup is true.

Here but not here.

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 19:20:42 GMT

Hey there. I'm still here, I've just been absent from posting on my blog. Now with Halo 3 coming out next week, I'll be even less here. I'm taking Tuesday off work, as it's a national holiday. :)

I'm in the Simpsons

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 18:45:43 GMT

It's the latest in "create your ____ avatar" flash tools following South Park, M&Ms and countless others. The Simpsons Movie web site has a flash tool to create yourself in the Simpsons world. Give it a try. I had to tweak mine in post-production after creating the initial model on the site.

What do you think?

Stringer speaks about the PS3

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 23:20:32 GMT

Howard Stringer was interview by the Financial Times and spoke about the PS3. According to Howard, people have bought fewer PlayStation 3s than it looks, and they’re happy with what little they’re getting out of the system! :) At least he's no longer calling it a Mercedes.

“I think PlayStation 3 is following a particular trend of 1 and 2, and if you looked at the history of it, it’s a very similar history. It takes a long time for producers, and more time because of the cost factor, to embrace the full bandwidth of PlayStation 3. It’s only using 20% of it right now. And producers will always wait to see how it’s going, and once they use the full bandwidth the games experience is stunning. And while people have not bought as many PlayStation 3s as it looks, it is no different from PS2 and PS1 in terms of percentage of sales, and it is an experience that is dazzling. People who play it, using only 20% of the bandwidth, are perfectly happy playing it and their games will get better. Most of the games are not third-party games yet; they’re mostly our own games and we’ve got Home coming out; we’ve got some exciting games coming out in the summer, 20 or 30 of them. So I don’t worry about that at all. I think that the public would like the cost to be lower, there’s no question about that, but meanwhile…”

For the full interview, visit the Financial Times.

Sony, where's your Forza competitor?

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 21:27:45 GMT

Back in March, Howard Stringer (Sony CEO) said, "If we fail, it is because we positioned PS3 sales as the Mercedes of the videogame field… PS3 is a different audience and it can be whatever it wants – a home server, game device, even a computer."

Now Dave Karraker in Sony Corporate Communications is saying in the Playstation blog, “SPUs are not ‘normal’ processors like the PPU. There is a trade-off between performance and versatility. A Ferrari is not the best car for a visit to Home Depot…”

What's with Sony? They couldn’t get Gran Turismo out the door for the new console. (Other than a free demo.) With all this obsession with high end automobiles, you’d think they would have led with an amazing car game. Forza pawns.

P.S. Dave also said that porting a game from the 360 to the PS3 is more difficult than beginning development on the PS3. So, why are developers that he's hearing from starting on the 360 in the first place? Hmm... And about issues with games that rely on heavy online use? Ahhh.. yeah, you guys forgot online, even though your flagship launch title was an online game. Phil tried to make up for it by coining the 3rd age at GDC and introducing Home. But you're definately playing catchup, and there's definately a difference.

Paris Hilton and George Bush

Sat, 09 Jun 2007 01:14:56 GMT

I have an opinion and it's not too kind. I think Paris Hilton skirted justice and the time coming to her for a legitimate crime.. and so did George Bush. I guess they have one more thing in common now.

Earth's true ancient pokemon revealed!

Tue, 22 May 2007 17:57:22 GMT

Have you ever wondered if "they" were real? You know, some fantastic creature in your imagination. Many of us have seen photographs of beautiful and scary sea creatures and have said, WOW. Artists have drawn on the mysterious creatures of the deep for inspiration when creating fantastic aliens. The characters of Bikini Bottom in Spongebob Squarepants come from the sea. But what about Pokemon? The creature on the right is an actual ocean creature affectionately named the Dumbo Octopus. The creature on the right is also affectionately named, Pkachu from Pokemon. "Welcome to the deep Pikachu."

My sister pointed out this book to me, and I'm ordering a copy. What a great coffee table book for the kids inspiration and nightmares. "The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss" by Claire Nouvian. Go check it out. They're not all cute and adorable like the guy above.

HDR Experimentation

Tue, 22 May 2007 05:38:27 GMT

I decided to dable in some HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography. It's been all the rage for a while now. It's time for me to catch up. It's a technique that is effective when taking photos of scenes or objects that have a great variance in lighting. A standard photograph would over expose some of the scene, and under expose others. By shooting a series of photographs at different exposures, you can use the computer to combine the photos into one taking the best portion of each image into the final product. There are a few ways to do this. Many require using Photoshop to manually tweak the image. For me, I've chosen a piece of software called Photomatix. Its custom designed for HDR photography, and simplifies the task. Since I'm just experimenting yet, I only have the trial version of the software. If I find the technique useful, then I'll purchase the full version.

If you want to learn HDR for yourself, see this tutorial. The software I used, Photomatix, is here.

The professional examples are much better than mine. I've chosen to tweak my final photo a lot and bring up the saturation to pronounce the colors in my [messy] office, below. The church and the skyline are some other people's examples.

Original - Note how the image on the monitor is over exposed and the room is dark and underexposed. This is the middle exposure image from the set of 9 raw shots.

HDR Tone Mapped - Notice how a variety of light sources have been leveled so most of the image is neither too dark or too light. This is the blending of 9 braketed RAW images at different exposures.

In a situation like the one above, a flash might be practical for illuminating the room more evenly. In some cases, a flash is not practical. (i.e. a very large space, or outdoors with lights and shadows) or would remove some of the more interesting aspects of the lighting in the image. When tone mapping an HDR image, you can over-saturate it to bring out the colors which may be washed out by bright lighting.

See some good examples (not mine) below.

Jose Maria Cuellar's "The prayers"

Altus' Tokyo Nightscape

Minneapolis now on Live maps arial view!

Fri, 18 May 2007 18:14:08 GMT

Live maps added Minneapolis to the birds eye view collection. Now we can see our former home in Northeast Minneapolis from the air. Cool.

Update: I neglected to provide a link to the Live Maps tool in my post. My apologies. It's http://maps.live.com/ Once on a map, click on the "switch to bird's eye view" button" as shown below. You have to be zoomed in far enough for that button to be active.

Welcome to the Halo beta

Wed, 16 May 2007 19:16:50 GMT

Today marks the first day of the Halo 3 beta. To celebrate, I'm posting a Mac vs. PC parody comic that I made. It's based on frames of artwork that someone else originally made. (Source is offline.) I got some blurbs from a couple contributors that I used for the Mac guy and added my own little story twist. Voila. A Mac vs. Halo parody comic. Enjoy. (Or not!)

Heavy Weapons Guy

Wed, 16 May 2007 16:45:28 GMT

New Team Fortress 2 video. Brilliant.

Halo 3 Zune

Wed, 16 May 2007 06:17:12 GMT

She's a beauty. :) See Cesar's unboxing video in his blog.

I love FPS

Mon, 14 May 2007 05:10:38 GMT

I have a confession to make. I suck at FPS games. But I still love them. In a fair fight, I get my @$$ kicked. At the same time, when I get killed, I'm usually laughing like a fool. I do get in the groove sometimes. I do better at team games where people are working together. I think it's usually because it forces me to plan better and not just rush in.

Here's my profile, including the Halo 3 beta. (What is public, at any rate.)

Vancouver Trip

Mon, 07 May 2007 23:38:12 GMT

We visited Vancouver over the weekend. Aunt Sally had taken a train down to Seattle for a quick visit during the week. We drove her back to Vancouver on Saturday so we could visit Adam at school as well. The kids had a great time on this road-trip.

I have some of the photos up already, and more are on their way tonight.

Swing in PS3 bashing?

Thu, 03 May 2007 20:27:46 GMT

So, to limit the amount of PS3 bashing in the media, it looks like headlines have been targeted based on controversy. Never happens. Engaging readers by controversial titles never sells papers.

The intro says: “Rockstar creative vice president Dan Houser has admitted that bringing the next iteration of GTA to the Xbox 360 is more challenging because there's no guarantee of a hard drive in every unit and disc space is limited to DVD instead of Blu-ray.” The funny thing is that his response to a targeted question on the 360 was “Yep. To be honest with you we haven't solved all those riddles yet.” GameDaily goes on to point out that they’ve been having design riddles with both the 360 and PS3 in their own unique ways. Imagine this..

Question: “Dan, did you ever struggle with fears of the dark when you were a kid?”

Answer: “Yup.”

“Dan Houser admits to having a fear of the dark. This could impact his ability to perform his job as Vice President in the darkened offices at Rockstar. Important decisions are being made around how next gen the GTA series will look on the PS3 and Xbox 360. Will Dan cripple the next generation of gaming's most controversial title based on potentially untreated mental issues?”

Off to la la land

Thu, 03 May 2007 05:18:02 GMT

I'm flying to Los Angeles first thing Thursday morning. I have a 6:40am flight and I get back in the evening at 10pm. It'll be one of those in-and-out trips. I wonder if I'll have time for an in-and-out burger? Hmm... I have to get up early to leave the house by 5am.

Monday was Zack's birthday. The photos are here. Tina's birthday was Tuesday. The photo is here. Why do I look so OLD? Actually, I thought I looked like Ben from lost earlier.

I'm only bringing my camera phone to LA. It's not worth lugging the SLR. Tina has a party Thursday evening, so I'm leaving the point and shoot for her. We'll see if I have any interesting camera phone photos when I get back.

Adios!

Zachary is three!

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 18:48:47 GMT

It's Zack's third birthday today, and he is happy! We had some presents for him right away in the morning, and more for tonight. We're doing a low-key family dinner (with cake, of course!) this evening.

Here are some photos so far.

We're actually combining the parties for Emily and Zack into one at the end of the month. They really like going to 3-2-1 Bounce, and so it makes the most sense ($$$) to combine. Emily has more friends since she's in school. Zack likes playing with her friends too.

Zack just finished his Dex medication which gives him mood swings. He's been a handful the past few days. That will wear off soon and he'll be back to balanced Zack.

White and Nerdy

Fri, 27 Apr 2007 17:04:29 GMT

Thanks to Drory for this Friday pick-me-up.

Bugatti Veyron: Worlds fastest production car

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 17:20:17 GMT

I'm back from Lisbon. Actually, I made it back on Thursday as planned. My photo album of the trip is here.

My friend Diane sent me the following video back in March, but I hadn't watched it. Now that I have, you really should. If you like speed, the Bugatti Veyron is for you.. given you have a road to drive it on. Watch and learn.

Bugatti Veyron at top speed
Uploaded by Flabber

Photo Album: Smile

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 01:51:18 GMT

Smile

Emily Smile

Eric Smile

Zack Laugh

Emily Oooh

Tina Closeup

Tina and Emily faces

Zack Spoon

Emily Parade

Emily 5th Birthday

More Photos...

Photo Album: Screenshot

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 18:56:05 GMT

Screenshot

DSC_5673

Photo Album: XBox 360

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 05:51:39 GMT

XBox 360

Road to XBOX Nirvanna

LARRY HRYB AND PETER MOORE

Sign the Deal

Hazumi and Major Nelson

Kiosks

JohnnySopranno and Hazumi

Hanger Gates

Kevin

Group Shot

Larry Hyrb working

Photo Album: Blog Images

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 23:20:30 GMT

Blog Images

Mac vs Halo

Photo Album: Random

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 23:15:31 GMT

Random

Emily's Kung Fu

Beer me

Emotion

Still Tim

Tina, Eric and Dad in '96

Me in 1969

Eye on You

Photo Album: Puerto Rico '06

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 19:20:08 GMT

Puerto Rico '06

Tina and Eric

Waves!

Old San Juan

Relaxation

Custom List: Anticipated Games

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 20:32:23 GMT

Anticipated Games

Gears of War
Great game. Big guns and mayhem in the future.
Viva Pinata
Yes, I am a pinata gardener now. It's great fun dabbling in candy economics.
Call of Duty 3
I bought it. I haven't cracked the wrapping on it yet. :(
Tony Hawk: Project 8
Love it. I'm a big THPS addict. I didn't follow a lot of the more recent titles after THPS4, but I love what this one has brought to the series.

Blog list: Blogs I Read

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 20:21:13 GMT

Blogs I Read

TriXie
XBox TriXie's Blog
Major Nelson
XBox's Major Nelson
And Found
Lost Blog and Forum
Yulia
Yulia Volkova's Space
Cheeky's Hideaway
My friend Tony's blog
Gamerscore Blog
Microsoft XBox and Games employees
Chuck Blake's Blog
My friend Chee's husband has a blog. Right now we're getting updates on their newborn.
Verve
My sister Kari's blog.
SUPERGHOST's Haunted House of XBOX
Superghost's space

Custom List: My Links

Fri, 08 Sep 2006 04:58:32 GMT

My Links

My son's battle with leukemia
Zachary is a great kid who has been hit by a horrible disease. He's doing very well in the battle and has a 3 year war ahead of him.
My Flickr Photo Blog
Photography is one of my passions. Flickr is definately an addiction.
E3 Photo Collection
My very first E3 was in 2006. I was there as a member of the XBox 360 community. If you've got a spare 3 hours, take a look at my photos. ;)
XBox 360 Launch 2005
The XBox 360 launched in November of 2005, and I was there. Share the experience.

Custom List: Fellow E3 2006 Bloggers

Fri, 04 Aug 2006 17:27:08 GMT

Fellow E3 2006 Bloggers

Blog list: My E3 Resources

Mon, 08 May 2006 12:03:38 GMT

My E3 Resources

My E3 Posts
View all of my E3 related blog entries.
My E3 Photos
View all of my flickr.com photos tagged with E3.
Thoughts on E3?
Do you have E3 on the brain? Submit your editorial for posting here.
When's ME3?
Read CroutonBoy's editorial on being an industry outsider during E3.
Too Human
Read JonnySoprano117's editorial on what his take on Too Human.
E3 Insider
Check out the official E3 site, if you're into that big media thing. ;)

Custom List: Faves on the iPod

Wed, 12 Apr 2006 04:59:24 GMT

Faves on the iPod

Rise
Samantha Jones
Since U Been Gone
Kelly Clarkson
60 Miles an Hour
New Order
Everywhere
Yellowcard
Before Today
Everything But the Girl
Your Love
Supergrass
Go Let It Out
Oasis
A Horse With No Name
America
One
Three Dog Night
Shh
Frou Frou
Barely Legal
The Strokes
Let's Go To Bed
Ivy
Get Free
The Vines