Well, how fast time flies… It seems as if it was just a few weeks ago when I last went to Vallekilde Højskole for Exile Game Jam Fall 2012, and now I’m just back from Exile once more!

As usual, it was a blast: lots of cool people, new tech toys to play around with (Oculus Rift and Leap Motion anyone?), many great game ideas and interesting experiments, sauna, music, party and more!

And… I also made a game, this time along with programmer Gabriel Durac and music by Kristian Rømer.

The result is “Shoot! Nightmare at Exile”, or simply “Nightmare at Exile” for short.

If any of you saw my last game from Nordic Game Jam, NGJ Fighters, the game was mostly made of live-action video footage of two characters fighting against each other. The idea seemed to attract some attention, so I wanted to take that a bit further for this new game.

Partly inspired by games like Mad Dog McCree and Los Justicieros, I wanted to put together a short game where the player walks through Vallekilde Højskole (on rails – it’s pre-recorded video footage after all) and has to defend himself against hordes of enemies attacking him at every step, with an epic final boss fight at the end.

To get the project running I managed to create a simple prototype in Unity where a looping video of my friend Peter Ølsted shooting at the camera and taking cover would play infinitely. If the player clicked on him when he was out (detected by a plane that would only be active at the right time), the game would then switch to a video of Peter getting shot. I also managed to get a similar test with an enemy attacking the player in melee combat without taking cover.

After I got the test running I showed it to Gabriel, the programmer, who had shown interest in working with me on this (also I’m thrilled to have worked with yet another person I had never made a game with before at a game jam!) He quickly understood what I wanted to do, but suggested doing it in Adobe Flash instead.

The reasons for the switch are many, but mostly because it would make syncing the video with the invisible target area that players ultimately click on much easier when using Flash’s timeline. And while Flash was definitely not perfect (constant crashes, memory errors, compiling stopping without giving away any messages at every second build, limits in video importing…) it did a great job at providing smooth gameplay.

The trickiest part no doubt was trying to get more than one enemy attacking on the screen at the same time. As you can see in the picture above, Nina, Simon and Astrid are all attacking the player simultaneously. This is actually THREE different video clips put together to look like one, playing independently and each one with its own tempo. This made it possible to kill the enemies in a different order every time, with only the character shot falling to the ground while the rest kept attacking. Very tricky, but it worked flawlessly.

It was also a lot of fun getting a lot of people to participate in the production of Nightmare at Exile as actors (then again, it was also a lot of fun asking random Vallekilde students if they wanted to die… on the camera). It has definitely taught me a few things to take into consideration in future projects about planning and camera positioning for this type of interactive video. Of course for a 48 hour game there are lots, LOTS of errors here and there, especially when it comes to changes in lightning, but I let them be since this is, after all, a game made purely for the fun of it.

Even cooler was putting together the final boss fight that takes place in the living room at Vallekilde if the player manages to survive that far, but I won’t spoil it here.

This was also my second time recording and editing sound effects for a game, so not only have I learned a bit more of programming (with the Unity prototypes), video production and Flash development, but also sound design, even if it was all done very quickly in the last few hours. Definitely something worth looking into further in the future.

But enough words about the game. How about you give it a try? You can download the SWF file from game jam games hosting website Unicorn7! (You might need to open it with your web browser).

Last week Spilbar 14 took place at AFUK (Akademiet for Utæmmet Kreativitet) in Copenhagen.

SpilBar is a bimonthly event where people from the games industry gather to attend interesting talks, mingle, try out new games and have a few drinks in a cozy environment. It’s organized by Kristine Ploug from DADIU and Thomas Vigild from the Danish Game Council (Dansk Spilråd).

With the latest edition of the event that took place on April 18th, subtitled “Surprise!”, there were several cool things happening (Danish Spilprisen awards, incredible acrobatic performances…) that were worth recording on video. Which is why I was asked to take my trusty camera with me to the event and record everything I could.

The result? A pretty nice video I’m really proud of that tries to capture the ambient of Spilbar. You can watch it below. I seriously recommend watching it fullscreen =) Thanks to Kristian Rømer for the original song!

Dear people of the Internet,

What an exciting week it has been! Look at all that you have accomplished in such a short amount of time.

First, the big, evil games conglomerate EA has been voted the worst company in the US for the second year in a row. That will teach them not to mess with our games by adding stupid DRM systems, trying to force their online PC games store Origin on us and crushing the dreams of so many people who wanted a proper ending for Mass Effect 3.

And you also managed to get the arrogant Adam Orth out of his position as Creative Director at Microsoft. Hah! How could a person defending so fervently the always-on policy of that “next generation console” have a position like that at Microsoft? Well, now he’s out of the company thanks to the fair people of the Internet!

That’s two wins in a row for you this week! Right?

Right?

Or is this a major display of what the angry mobs of the Internet can achieve when they get annoyed at something? Because to me this is the closest thing I can imagine to a father buying his little kid a bag full of candy because he kept screaming and yelling and crying in the middle of the store until he got what he wanted.

But while related, there’s much deeper issues within each case I’ve just mentioned.

First, the case of EA being voted worst company in the US.

Let’s take a moment to look at what makes a company “the worst”. Is it their impact on the world economy? Is it the impact on the environment? The way they treat their customers? The illnesses or deaths it has caused? All those are very valid reasons to rate a company the worst, and I’m not just making them up. These are real issues that companies have been linked to, from banks to electricity companies that have gone from causing instability in the world economy to contaminating the water of an entire area, causing cancer to its population.

But here the Internet got to vote on an open website what they thought was the worst company. And EA came up as the winner. The reasons? Well, there’s many valid arguments for attacking EA. The most recent one being that the new SimCity’s launch was plagued with server connection problems because they had slapped an always-on DRM on the game without any real need to. That means those who bought the game at launch had trouble playing what they had paid for… until the servers got fixed. So those who bought the game can now play it. Sure, it’s still a draconian decision to have this type of online requirement on a single-player game, but this is hardly the kind of issue that causes everyone to hate a company forever.

There’s many other things such as how they push their Origin store on customers, which is definitely not as good as the competition ( but has everyone forgotten how much hate Steam got when it first came out and how it took it a couple of years to start being good?). And there’s the Mass Effect 3 ending which annoyed thousands of gamers worldwide with its ignorance on the player’s actions throughout the series (something that got partially fixed -for free I should add- through free DLC). There’s all the issues with micro-transactions, their constant disregard for what “gamers really want”, and much more.

None of those are crimes noteworthy enough to cause such a huge reaction on an award that pit EA against so many other non-gaming related companies. Because the truth is anyone who is not deeply invested in the games industry does not care about those things. Heck, my parents don’t even know what EA is! The percentage of people truly affected by EA’s decisions is so small that it is baffling to see those problems upscaled that much.

But the gaming community is a very vocal one. When they are angry about something it takes the internet by storm. They know how to work through the web’s social networks and spread the word all over the net. And with the creativity that so many people have to create memes and have them become staples quickly it makes it look as if those are issues that “everyone” in the world knows about.

That’s not truly the case though.

I won’t go much further into this topic, but I’ll close it off with a quote from Forbes about what exactly is this “Worst Company Award”: “It’s a measure of how annoyed the internet is with a certain brand at the moment.”

Oh, and this (fake) letter from Dorkly standing as Peter Moore from EA:

So that’s all of it on the EA case. It’s something that EA will probably react upon but still take lightly as they most probably believe that the poll has little validity.

But then we have the other controversial topic: Adam Orth.

This one is way more worrying than any Internet vote. This is the case of someone losing his job because he made a couple of comments on Twitter.

I have to admit that when I first saw these tweets I was extremely annoyed at Adam Orth.

But there’s a small problem with Twitter. If you jump into someone else’s conversation (because tweets are public after all) there is usually very little context to grab from those short 140-characters long messages.

Is Orth being sarcastic in his last tweet? Is he really looking down on those cities? That’s impossible to tell from just that image, which is the one that got shared all over the Internet through channels such as Reddit. Go a bit further back in their timelines and you will find out that this is not the first time they talk to each other, they’re actually friends to talk to each other in a casual way. That last reply could easily be him joking around.

But of course this is Twitter and it’s public. Even if you have the now-so-typical disclaimer of “opinions are my own” when you have a certain position in a company you have to be careful of what you post and how you say things, because it might involve your company in a bigger way. Some people have argued that he shouldn’t ever post his opinions on Twitter and that he should have sent that to Manveer Heir instead through private messages.

So are we suddenly as users of Twitter censoring what someone can or cannot say publicly online? Check Manveer’s tweets. He’s Senior Gameplay Designer at Bioware, quite a high position to be in the games industry, yet he is one of the most vocal people in the games industry, always expressing his own thoughts and often with a fair amount of personality in them. As he describes himself, he’s a “sarcastic ass”. And nobody has any problem with that! He criticizes lots of games, he criticizes the moves of many companies, and at keynote events he criticizes pretty much every sentence that comes out of the speaker’s mouth.

But guess what? People expect that from him already. His “online persona” has always been like that so if he said something about Bioware with a sarcastic note to it, people would take it happily. Perhaps a few replies with rants, followed by snarky responses from him.

What happened with Adam Orth was not so much a situation of “public personalities should not comment on Twitter their personal views” as it was Orth not having built enough of an online personality to be able to do that. Had he done so before, there would be a lot more context in his tweets for people to understand it. Instead, Orth later on (with Manveer’s help) tried to explain that he was being sarcastic. To which people replied that was a very childish response trying to take away the blame from himself.

The damage is done now though, and Orth is out from Microsoft and with enough media backslash to make finding a new job a real nightmare for him. All because of three tweets in which he is talking to a friend. That escalated quickly! Of course it doesn’t help that the topic of the conversation was the already controversial always-on subject…

In any case it’s really scary to think how fragile our entire careers are now that through social media everyone can react so quickly against you.

I don’t want to defend either EA or Adam Orth for their actions because they did not act their best to be honest. But the Internet should really try to be more careful with their actions as well and try not to look like a kid having a fit.

And most definitely they should not consider this a win, but rather a shameful display of the Internet at its worst.

Definitely worth sharing, that’s for sure.

How many of these can you name? You can right-click the image and choose “Open link in new tab or window” to have a proper look in your browser, because the text under each game is a recommended read.

Some people have asked me what exactly is the place where I work. I’ve decided for the time being to let Euronews do the speaking instead

This is the place where I work as a teacher and PR consultant, EUCROMA – the European Cross-Media Academy:

It’s Nordic Game Jam time again!

The fun and chaotic weekend contest that takes place every year in Copenhagen is back. I’ve been participating in it for two years now, but this time I’m in as an organizer!

Not just that, I’m also videoblogging from the event every once in a while. So you might want to check out what’s cooking over here at our new venue at Aalborg University Copenhagen. I would love to post a few more things here but with all the stuff going on around the game jam I’ll have to stick with this short post (and more updates coming next week!)

Check out one of the early videos from yesterday!

Alright, this comes a little bit late, but better late than never, right?

The thing is, I’ve already been helping out with the launch of TWO games on Steam Greenlight, the platform through which indie game developers can show their upcoming games and have them voted by the Steam community to be sold on their store (it’s not that easy to get your game up there if you’re an indie dev). The first one was BetaDwarf’s FORCED, which by the way succeeded in a great Kickstarter campaign recently, reaching over $60,000 in pledges by fans.

But recently I helped out fellow developer Nicklas Nygren with the Steam Greenlight campaign for his new game Knytt Underground, which got released a few weeks ago on PS3 and Playstation Vita.

And what did I do? Well, I created this little interview video, of course! Recorded at the IT University of Copenhagen (gotta love the views from those glass boxes) for the game’s publisher, Ripstone, the video is shown right on the front page of the Greenlight page for the game (Go on now! Vote for it!)

If you still haven’t seen anything of the game, suffice to say that it’s possibly Nicklas’ best work yet. Visually striking, with tons of rooms to explore, lots of characters to talk (with dialogues to laugh a lot about), secrets hidden literally EVERYWHERE (watch out for a hint in the video interview!) and some great challenges, this is one heck of a game to go through.

But I won’t spoil anymore of it for you. I seriously recommend you check the videos on the Steam page and give the game a try for yourself!

Funny that it took me seeing Simon Cutajar’s blog post about the last Exile Game Jam to realize I should probably update my blog with it as well…

But here it is nonetheless: Coin Knights is the last game I’ve worked on since Super Screaming Skull Bros 2, this time along with Simon Cutajar, inspired by the arcade cabinet made by the RedGrim boys. All done, as usual per game jam standards, in under 48 hours.

But whereas the previous game was a 2 player co-op experience, Coin Knights is a 4 player competitive game where each one of these brightly colored and blocky knights will have to collect the highest amount of coins possible before the time runs out.

Simple enough, but there’s a bit more to it. The central theme, given by the Exile Game Jam restrictions, was uncertainty, and we addedgreedto that (one of the themes that were also commented at Exile). Players will have to fight each other to collect the treasure chests, get the coins inside (which can appear randomly in groups of 10, 20, 30, 50 or 100 coins) and bring them back to the castle. Players can hold up to 4 treasures at the same time. The catch is that the contents of the chests are unknown to the player until opened, and if the player is too greedy he might stumble upon a bomb. And a bomb will, simply enough, make him lose all the coins he has collected.

So players will have to decide whether to keep collecting coins or bring what they have so far to their castles so as not to risk losing it all.

Oh, and players can push each other away by using their shields. Or steal the contents of a chest before they are collected by a player.

Unluckily for us the game was not finished on time thanks to an untimely bug caused by the randomly spawning treasure chests, which totally crashes the game sometimes before reaching the time limit. Hopefully both Simon and I will be able to further polish the game, fixing bugs and adding a few more power-ups that will make the gameplay more chaotic (personally I also want to increase the size of all the sprites so that the action is bigger and crazier).

Simon and I worked on the design of the game from the very beginning, with him later on focusing on the programming and music side while I made all the graphics and sound effects. For now you can play the current version of Coin Knights here!

Playtesting Coin Knights at Exile Game Jam

If you remember the cool XKCD comic strip “Click & Drag” where you could view a huge, never-ending panel full of tiny surprises all around the place, then you’ll probably love this playable version that the wonderful people of Kajakklubben in Copenhagen have pulled off.

Basically they have made it into a nice exploration game where you’ll keep getting surprised by the small details that have been added everywhere. I recommend you give it a look and I applaud Kajakklubben for the awesome idea!

Click here to start exploring now!

Oh, and one more thing! You can also check where players are in real time!

Update: Woah! Looks like this little game got far more attention than anyone thought possible! Their statistics service even went down for several hours from so many simultaneous visitors!

First we have XKCD comic creator Randall Munroe commenting about the game:

“I *love* Press and Move. I don’t know anything about animation or about game interfaces, but it’s exactly how I would’ve set it up if I’d been designing a more game-like version. I spent quite a while exploring, which until this I’d done surprisingly little of.”;

And then we have Kotaku, who along with other online gaming websites have praised the game.

Once again, congratulations to Tim Garbos, K. Shonibare-Lewis, Martin Fasterholdt and Kasper Videbæk for a nice job!

Steam announced yesterday that the world’s most popular online gaming store is getting a brand-new UI for using it on your TV, with a gamepad. They call it Steam Big Picture.

Many will dismiss this as something irrelevant. After all it has always been possible to plug your desktop or laptop to a big screen and play games with a controller. That’s nothing new.

But folks, we’re talking about Steam here, so we need to look at the bigger picture (see what I did there?) I honestly think that this is one huge step in moving the entire games industry forward.

Let me go back in time for a moment: it used to be that game consoles such as the NES and the MegaDrive had great games with nice graphics. But PCs were always the big guys that could display bigger worlds, more detailed characters and play online games. But at some point games started becoming more mainstream. Incredibly complex stories arrived with much higher production values as game consoles became the easiest solution to play games comfortably on the sofa. PC games also got more complex, but so did the hardware part: users were no longer buying big desktop PCs and instead they favored small, portable laptops that they could take anywhere. This meant that most laptops had small graphics cards incapable of running the newest games comfortably.

Consoles offered one huge bonus against computers in terms of gaming: you just had to connect them to the TV, put the disc in, and start playing (though nowadays you also get the constant nagging of online updates). But they also meant a much more closed environment where what can be sold was strictly controlled by the hardware maker. So pretty much everything has been in the hands of Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft for the past few years.

But PC gaming never stood still either, because while the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 were fighting to get a better media consumption system in the living room that could stand up against computers, Valve was building what would eventually become gaming’s biggest online store, focusing solely on making the gaming experience better on the PC and letting other software makers and web developers do the media and web consumption thing.

The result was Steam, and the previously maligned service is now a heaven for gamers worldwide. It has amazing online community services, the possibility of making your game free-to-play and then buy add-ons, holiday sales that knock your wallet off your pocket, cloud-based game saves, automatic background updates for games and, recently, a new gateway for indie developers to showcase and possibly sell their games on Steam based on what the community likes best.

And now you can use it on your TV without the need of a mouse and keyboard.

An addition like that on its own means nothing. But when you add to that the impressive catalog that Steam offers of both casual and hardcore games plus all the features mentioned above, you start to realize that if Steam was a console it would be right now the most powerful console ever.

Now what would happen if Dell, HP, Acer or any other PC manufacturer decided to create a small, affordable computer that was advertised along with Valve as a Steam-capable machine? What if that machine had Steam pre-installed and came with a wireless controller?

Well, you’d have the console with the biggest games catalog ever, the most complete online service and the choice of buying whichever brand you liked most. Depending on the brand you might even be able to upgrade it with newer graphics cards and processors instead of having to wait for the next generation console to arrive. Even better, you’d have instant access to every single game you’ve purchased even on a Mac and still play them on other systems.

The funny thing is that Microsoft has been trying to aim for this to happen for a long time ever since they announced Windows XP Media Center edition. They just never pushed it forward as much as they should have. They had ease of use from a couch with a TV remote, access to online services and a few games started integrating themselves in the system when Windows Vista came out. Then there was Games for Windows LIVE, later renamed to Xbox Games for Windows, which gained more haters than supporters. The reason why they never pushed it further was probably the fact that Microsoft already had the Xbox 360 on good standing and they didn’t feel the need to risk cannibalizing their hardware sales.

And now Steam has beaten them to the punch. Right on the verge of Windows 8 arriving on stores as Valve readies Steam and all its games to work on Linux-based computers. Right when it is time for the next generation consoles to arrive, starting with the WiiU later this year.

If these next-gen consoles take too long to arrive and Valve plays its cards well (and it has way too many aces in its sleeve to fail) this new Steam Big Picture might mean a new current in the games market. It might drive more people to buy PC games. It might mean less next-gen console sales. It might potentially give indie game developers broad access to a huge new wave of customers. It might.

This is all but my own conjecture. Obviously the console market is not going to die just like that simply because of a program adding a coach-friendly UI. But it does mark the beginning of a new trend, and it could change many things in the long term. All we can do for now is wait and see. And try the Big Picture mode ourselves for free.

What you see above is a picture of what Google Chrome showed the visitors of websites that linked to my site for the last couple of days. A similar warning was shown to Firefox users.

First of all, my apologies to all those whose site was affected by this problem.

Apparently my site got hacked somehow, and though everything seemed to be working normally, the truth is that some malicious code had inserted itself into my WordPress installation, resulting in almost every page attempting to redirect users to shady websites.

Google’s frequent security scans detected this and immediately blacklisted Anchel.com as a malware-affected domain, triggering warning messages on all web browsers that use Google’s blacklisting service. And not only that, but every other website that had content coming from mine would receive a similar warning as well. This affected a couple of friend’s websites (such as AloneInTheDark211 as seen in the picture above) and fellow game designer Hugo Bille for whom I’m helping out with the Spanish translation of his upcoming game.

It has taken me much longer than expected, but it seems like I have been able to (manually) take out all the injected malicious code from my web server after several scans, checking many PHP files and asking friends for help.

So, once again, sorry to all the affected people and thanks a lot to Gustav Dahl and Emil Erik Hansen for their advice! Take this as well as a word of warning to everyone out there with a WordPress site! Even if you think your website is not at risk, you’d do well to check your security settings (the WP Security Scan plugin checks for some basic mistakes your installation might have).

And now Anchel.com is back on track!

Remember those BetaDwarf developer diaries I posted about a few months ago?

What about that post about BetaDwarf at Copenhagen Games?

Back then their game Faith of the Guardians had a very different look and certainly it wasn’t as polished as it is now.

But that’s also because the team has been pushing VERY HARD to get the game ready for showcasing on the new Steam Greenlight section. This is a digital game showcase where indie game developers can display their work in progress (or already finished games) and get people to vote for them. The games that get the most attention will strike a deal with Valve to sell their game on the all-powerful and ever-popular Steam Store.

So yes! FORCED is the title for BetaDwarf’s first commercial game and it’s waiting for you to watch its new amazing trailer (which I participated in creating!) and vote for them so that they can get a sales deal on Steam!

If you like what you see here, make sure you go right now to their Steam Greenlight page and rate them, mark as a favorite and share the link with all your friends! Everyone at BetaDwarf will really appreciate it and you will also be helping the Danish game developers community! =)

So what are you waiting for? Go on and vote for us!

Thanks!

I haven’t been posting many new updates on the blog lately but I’ve definitely been maintaining the Portfolio page with new content such as the No More Sweden game Super Screaming Skull Bros 2 I made with K. Shonibare-Lewis and Mattia Traverso or a list of the most important articles I wrote while I was working as a technology columnist for US-government news website Voice of America.

But the thing is that now I am officially finished with my studies at the IT University of Copenhagen and I am now a Master’s in Game Design after writing my thesis “Cutscenes did not kill the gameplay” (which I hope to make available soon on this website).

So… what’s next?

For starters, I am now working for Den Danske Filmskole, which is the National Film School of Denmark. And what does that have to do with games? A lot actually: I’m working for the program called EUCROMA, which stands for the European Cross-Media Academy.

What we do is a program for students from all over Europe where they are guided through the process of creating a cross-media production which encompasses both a short 3D animated movie and a videogame based in the same universe. I’ll keep the specifics for a later post, but for now it will suffice to say that I am one of the people organizing the entire program which will start next January.

At the same time I’m helping randomly here and there with little things that come up and I am actively participating in several Danish game institutions (I am now one of the five board members of the IGDA Denmark (International Game Developers Association).

So YES, I will be staying in Denmark for a while longer. How much longer you ask? I do not know yet, but I am not in a hurry to get back to Spain. The one thing that matters to me right now is that I have found a place where I can work for a living while I expand my skills and knowledge, putting into practice all I have learned so far during my radio, TV and film studies both at the University of Navarra (Spain) and the University of North Texas (USA) as well as my game design studies at the IT University of Copenhagen (Denmark).

I have several plans going forward from now on. Some may succeed, many may fail. But whatever the case I will be updating this website with my portfolio, my resumé and other blog posts about videogames and technology. At the same time feel welcome to subscribe to both my Twitter and Facebook feeds, which I definitely keep updated way more often than this website.

A few months ago I posted about the recording of a trailer for the upcoming game Heroes & Generals by Reto-Moto, a Danish video game developer based in Copenhagen with some of the original developers of the popular series Hitman.

Today the trailer made its way to games website Gamespot, where it is already getting some attention. Can you spot me in the video?

Why don’t you go ahead and give it a look?

Oh, and here’s once again a picture of the entire team for the trailer!

I was really skeptical of this when I first heard the rumors of a possible Microsoft tablet. First because I didn’t think they would risk their relationship with all the OEMs like HP, Dell and Sony. Second because a Microsoft-built tablet would probably be too business-oriented and just lack the whole “cool” factor that many tablet users are looking for.

Then I saw the live presentation of the new Surface by Microsoft (they are calling it like that) and it totally blew my mind.

I hadn’t been this excited for a Microsoft product for a long time. Sure, it’s yet another tablet, but they seem to have learned a few tricks from the Apple book of “how to make products look exciting during keynotes” (read: they are all magical). It’s sleek, it screams amazing build quality, it has innovative touches like its colorful touch-covers (which also happen to change the background color of the Windows 8 start screen automatically) and it is the only tablet that comes with a fully functional office suite (Microsoft Office 2013). All of a sudden it makes Windows 8 look a lot more interesting too! This is definitely one bold new direction for Microsoft. Say goodbye to the old “play-it-safe” dinosaur of the last decade.

Now, some would say this is too late, but I don’t think Microsoft is late to the game at all. Look at the current state of the tablet market. Some people have completely replaced their daily computer use for a daily tablet use. I know some friends who just leave their laptops at work and only bring home their iPad so they can still read the email, check Facebook and watch the occasional movie or TV show. But that’s not everyone yet. Many people still need proper document editing and higher quality games that do more than just touch and gyro.

Microsoft is now offering a solution for this with a tablet that not only has all the hardware necessary to make it a possible notebook replacement (or just complementary), but they also have an OS that is custom-made to work great on both tablets and PCs, unlike iOS and Android.

Also it’s interesting to see how during the presentation Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer kept mentioning that this is the perfect integration of hardware and software, making it as good as it can be. Interesting because this is exactly the same mantra that Apple has been pushing for the last 10 years…

And think about the possibilities in gaming: we’re talking about Windows here, so it’s going to accept any gamepad you connect to it. Play a game on the go… and then plug the tablet to the TV when at home and play a game like Portal 2 (which, on the Intel version of the tablet, it might run moderately well).

Right now I have a very unexciting Android tablet (Sony Tablet S). I think I just found its future replacement. But I’ll want to see prices first…

For now all I can say is good move, Microsoft.

It’s that time of the year again, when all the gaming industry giants gather to present their biggest and baddest productions at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. It’s one hell of a show full of keynotes that sometimes capture the excitement of all the video games community… or absolutely disappoints with a lack of innovation or interesting games.

So, how is it going this year so far?

Well… what can I say. It started quite bland. The first two keynotes were Microsoft and Electronic Arts and they were both extremely underwhelming. They both had their fair share of interesting stuff to show, but they ultimately fell flat in trying to get the audience excited, both those in Los Angeles and those watching online.

Starting with Microsoft, they opened with the ever-hyped Halo 4. I for one think that, as engaging and well-balanced as the gameplay in the Halo series has always been, the formula was starting to grow stale. That is why seeing this new lush multi-layered jungle full of enemies crawling all over the place felt so refreshingly new. It looks as if Halo is reinventing the formula without straying too far off from the core concept and style. And it just seemed to fit in nicely.

Splinter Cell Blacklist was shown shortly after, but it brings up the question of whether this is even a Splinter Cell game at all, with the focus on stealth seemingly missing most of the time. Sure, Conviction had its action moments too, but it never reached the point that this new entry into the popular Tom Clancy-branded saga seems to go to. Nice touch with the player being able to use Kinect to get an enemy’s attention by literally yelling at him.

And then Microsoft switched over to Kinect mode. That is, they started to boast how Kinect will help in sports games like FIFA and Madden. I don’t really care that much for sports games, so I just listened to it without paying that much attention to be honest. But Fable: The Journey came afterwards. Why, Microsoft! Why do you have to force Kinect as an on-rails “shooter” (with magic, but a shooter none-the-less) into a perfectly fine series that is all about choosing your own path in a broad open world. It simply does not work. And then a random teaser of Gears of War and another of Forza came up with no explanation whatsoever.

Online services integration (more of them), televised sports and specific apps for it on the Xbox 360, the new Xbox Music that replaces the dying Zune brand, a predictable new fitness game but now coming from Nike… and then the interesting stuff came in: Microsoft’s SmartGlass.

This is the integration that Microsoft has been aiming for the past few years but never got quite right. For the first time it feels like a Windows 8 PC or tablet, a Windows Phone and an Xbox 360 can act together to make the final experience more entertaining and complete than ever. You’re watching Game of Thrones on the TV through your Xbox 360? Watch simultaneously on your tablet (Windows 8 or even iPad) a map of the world it takes place in showing where the events on the screen are taking place in. Planning your next strategy on Madden? Do it on the tablet and then see it come to life on the bigger screen.

But to be fair this is not something absolutely new. In fact Nintendo already hinted at this with its unveiling of the WiiU a year ago at E3 2011. Except that Nintendo’s console already comes with the tablet integrated into the controller. On the other hand Microsoft already has all the industry deals with movies, TV shows and music providers. And that makes one huge difference when you want proper integration. Nintendo will have to prove that they can come up with more interesting ideas.

But by far what looked best was the new Tomb Raider game. Seriously, Lara Croft has never looked this amazing, and I’m not talking about graphics. They look great, sure, but that’s not what made it stand out. It was how fluid the gameplay felt. How this new mixture of survival Metal Gear Solid 3 style and Uncharted’s cinematic presentation combined to make a compelling world. How the new Lara made you care for her for more than just her hot looks. This could easily be the big comeback of gaming’s most famous woman.

Capcom showed more of their Resident Evil 6 game, which if you ask me is yet one more step towards completely detaching the RE brand from all it used to stand for. And a Kinect game was also shown that looked a lot like what Angry Birds would be like if it was made in 3D.

South Park: The Stick of the Truth however got everyone laughing. Maybe it is just because the show’s creators were incredibly charming, or maybe because the trailer was simply funny. But the idea of living as your own character in a big South Park adventure does not leave anyone indifferent.

After that… well… Usher stepped on the stage, danced for a while in front of a Dance Central 3 logo, and left. I’m sure I am not the only one who is trying to forget that random moment.

Oh yeah! And Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 got shown at the end in a painfully long gameplay video with many, MANY explosions all over the place. And I got really sad that Microsoft decided to end with such a weak note. Sure, the CoD series are real best-sellers. But there was absolutely no need to spend so much time over that when other seemingly interesting games just got a really short teaser clip that explained absolutely nothing.

But apparently such is the way of the gaming industry these days…

More will be coming soon! Stay tuned and be sure to follow me on Google+ and Twitter (I prefer Google+ for this since it makes posting pictures easier) to see what else is up before I compile my opinions together into a blog post!

Sometimes we can only marvel at curiosities like this one.

This is what you can see from the town of Skagen, in the North of Jutland in Denmark. It is literally the place where the North Sea and the Baltic Sea meet, the connection of the Skagerrak and the Kattegat. Since these two seas have different salinity and temperatures when they meet they cause turbulences that make it a dangerous area to cross by boat.

Quite a view, isn’t it?

Edit: Seeing how many visits I receive on my website based on this post alone, I decided to add yet another amazing picture of Skagen that I hope you will all like. Enjoy!

Earlier today someone on Facebook asked about the growing discussion that handheld consoles like the Nintendo 3DS and the PS Vita are slowly fading away, getting lost in the incredibly successful market of smartphones and tablets like the iPhone and iPad. I replied with a very long comment for a Facebook post and I thought that I could re-purpose my text for a new post here.

The thing here is that there’s no doubt now that smartphones and tablets are affecting the sales of handheld consoles. They are still not killing the market, but the incredibly slow start the Nintendo 3DS had until known franchises came to it and the big struggle the PS Vita is currently having on the market are signs that things have changed.

Taking that into account, what is the current audience of handhelds? What are the reasons one might buy a dedicated gaming console instead of a smartphone or tablet?

Let’s begin with the one age group that smartphones and tablets are still a long way from breaking into, and that is the younger audience under 14 years old. You wouldn’t buy a 10 year old kid an iPhone, a highly expensive device that is easy to break and get stolen, but you might buy him a Nintendo DS with a Super Mario game or the latest movie tie-in like a Spiderman game or a Disney character in it.

In fact, when you look at the age demographics of the iPhone and iPod Touch you can see that the age group of users from 13 to 17 years old is tiny (6%) when compared to that same age group in the iPod Touch demographics (46%) (Source from 2009). You could consider the iPod Touch as a game handheld if you will. After all it has access to apps and games, which is the main reason these users choose the iPod Touch over the more traditional iPods which are almost exclusively used to play music. Same goes for the Nintendo DS/3DS and (in a smaller way since it goes for a more mature audience) the PS Vita. They offer cheaper, contract-free devices with gaming as their main purpose and, in the mindsets of buyers, a better value proposition for a kid than an iPhone. You could add Android phones here if you want, but currently there are no low-end Android devices that could cover this space, since the cheap devices that do exist are simply too low-powered for modern phone games.

But of course that’s not the only audience of handheld consoles. When you go to ages 14+ both the DS/3DS and PSP/Vita offer a nice choice of games aimed squarely at this audience. You have Metal Gear Solid, Uncharted, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, God of War, Final Fantasy… However, and this is where the sales have been going down, those handhelds now have to compete with smartphones and, to a lesser extent (simply because not everyone sees value in having a device that some feel is a bigger smartphone), tablets.

But here is the thing, and it’s a point most media outlets seem to be missing. Let me explain a little bit first: smartphones have absolutely nothing blocking them from running blockbuster titles of the same quality as those mentioned above (touch controls aside). You just have to take a look at what French company Gameloft has been doing in the past few years, taking popular gaming franchises and creating equivalents of them for phones (N.O.V.A is a Halo clone, Modern Combat 3 is Modern Warfare 3, Hero of Sparta is God of War, StarFront is StarCraft…) or taking Ubisoft staples into bite-sized chunks (Prince of Persia, Splinter Cell, Brothers in Arms).

BUT!

Those games coexist in a marketplace full of extremely cheap offers of $0.99, the new standard for game prices (something neither Nintendo or Microsoft are very keen on, claiming it devaluates videogames as a whole). This means that if a company wanted to make a full size game with the same length, depth and quality as a console or handheld game they would need to price it higher to cover the production costs. And that simply doesn’t sell very well in a flood of $0.99 titles. Gameloft and EA are able to pull that off thanks to their use of big franchise names, but even then the prices don’t usually go higher than $6.99, and they quickly drop after the hardcore fans of the series have already bought it so as to attract the rest of the market.

The top 10 paid games on the US AppStore as of May 2012

The other company that is managing to pull off higher prices for its games is Square-Enix. $15.99 for a port of a DS Final Fantasy game (Final Fantasy III), which was already a remake of an old NES game. But Final Fantasy games have the advantage of being really deep and lengthy adventures (thus the price) that don’t require very precise control input: just tap and wait for the battle animation to finish.

That’s where handhelds come in for those who want a more serious gaming experience. You get the more precise controls for action games   and the higher production values, with almost console-quality graphics, story and gameplay depth in a smaller package that you can take anywhere you go.

For those who want an all-around device that does everything an iPhone will be the only device to carry around at all times. But those who want a deeper experience on the go (and I’m not talking about just something to play on the train, but also when visiting their parents for a week, going on a trip and so on) will also carry with them a handheld.

Plus, now these gaming handhelds get the added experience of buying smaller games at cheaper prices, smartphone style. The 3DS will allow you to buy old Gameboy and NES games as well as new, modern titles for under $5. The PS Vita lets you download casual games like Angry Birds or get an old PS One game like Crash Bandicoot at the same price level. And at the same time you get the full range of top-tier new releases (which tend to be more on the $40 range), some as physical copies, some as downloadable games too (specially now that Nintendo is going to make their 3DS and Wii U games available online as well).

And then finally you have the more mature audiences that as far as I know only Nintendo has been able to attract so well thanks to their Brain Training series. But that’s usually the group that buys only one game or two and leaves it there.

Anyway, those are my 2 cents on the topic. It’s mostly based on my own thoughts and experience, but I believe I’m not too far off the reality. Of course I’m basing myself on articles, opinions, comparisons and a few stats, but you could hardly call every single one of those hard facts, so all this could be wrong.

But the fact is that the landscape of gaming on the go has severely changed and both Nintendo and Sony will have to step their game up if they want to survive in a market full of $0.99 games that, in the mind of many casual consumers, offers as much value as any $40 game.

Usually I applaud Samsung for their impressive smartphones, which tend to be among the best out there in the market.

But seriously… I think this time they are going a little bit too far. How big does a phone need to get to be called “better” these days? Does the size of the screen really matter that much? And how long is this trend going to continue?

I decided to make this stupid little joke on the increasingly huge size of the screens on Samsung’s phones, but this could easily apply to other makers too. Please mind that I put all this together really fast, though the phone sizes are proportionally correct between one another.

The funny thing is that, as I mention in the picture, Samsung already has a tablet/phone hybrid called the Galaxy Note (which as a tablet I think is quite nice, but as a phone I think it is simply too big for anyone to carry around in their pockets), and then they also offer the Galaxy Tab in several sizes.

So what will they do next? Will the tablets increase in size to make space for even bigger phones? Or will this nonsense of “bigger is better” stop someday?

As a disclaimer, I used to have a phone with a 4″ display (the Samsung Omnia 7) and I recently switched to a phone with a smaller screen: the Nokia Lumia 800 which has a 3,7″ display, and I’m quite happy with it, not needing more than that as it is a very comfortable size to work with.

I’ve been living in Ørestad, one of the areas in Copenhagen, Denmark, for year and a half now. And every single time I walk back home there is one building that keeps pulling me in, wanting to have a closer look at it.

At first I thought it was a gym. After all the walls clearly state “Ørestad Gymnasium”, and for about a month I really thought that was the case.

Then I learned that Gymnasium is the Danish word for the institution that teaches the two years prior to university, separated from traditional high schools.

Wait, what did you say? That beautiful building is a high school?!

Yes. And not only does it look amazing from the outside, it’s also an impressive design on the inside! This is definitely not your traditional education institution. There’s no such a thing as boring square classrooms with a blackboard where the teacher just stands up in the front and gives a boring lecture. In fact, as the Wall Street Journal defines it in an article they wrote about this school, the entire 5-stories building is one large room, with only a few glass walls separating the space.

But it’s not just the building that is innovative and different from the rest: the education system is also something new.

In fact, according to the WSJ article teachers are forced by the building’s own distinct design to be creative when preparing their lessons. Group work and even one-on-one lessons are the norm, and because of the open space nature of the school, students learn quickly to be quiet so as not to bother the rest of the groups.

Technology is also a big part of the education at Ørestad. So much in fact that since 2012 students do not use books, with computer-based learning becoming a big component of the system. Teachers can also mix up the lessons by combining classrooms together when needed and encouraging students to do their homework in new ways, like for example, by creating a podcast in which they solve math problems or having foreign-language conversations online.

With such an exciting curriculum it’s no wonder Danish students feel more encouraged to keep studying, as opposed to other countries where the student drop-rate is exceedingly rising. Of course the fact that education in Denmark is 100% free, even at university levels, helps a lot.

So although the architecture of the building is incredibly beautiful, it is also the Danish education system that amazes me. In the past three years I have been loudly complaining about the awful education system in Spain (and, to a lesser extent, in the US). Spanish high schools and universities force students to learn the class material by heart, being able to recite it word after word without looking at the textbook and taking points out of written finals for every minor detail that the student forgot to mention.

What do students get out of that? Definitely not knowledge or experience. When all the courses force you to do that all you get is a short-term memorization of what you were supposed to learn, something that fades away in just a couple of days, with only the most important aspects sticking there.

Compare that to exercise-based teaching in which you learn by practicing and actively working on something vs passively sitting down and memorizing, and you’ve got a clear winner. And it’s not the Spanish system in which it is quite common to see over 50% of a class fail a university exam on their first try or students who are taking the final exam for the fourth or fifth try.

Did I just get a little bit off-topic here? Yeah, I did. I guess seeing how well Denmark is doing in this aspect compared to Spain makes my blood boil.

So just to relax a little bit more, here are a few pictures of the awesome Ørestad Gymnasium. (And don’t forget that you can click on them to expand!)