Identity Crisis

I've kinda been meaning to write something about the end of Midway Newcastle and Mr Pick's excellent write up (http://pickassoreborn.vox.com/library/post/midway-newcastle-rip.html) has nudged me to get around to it. If you read that then there's not much else I can say about what's actually happened, just to say how it's affected me I guess. I was for the most part in the group of people who were fighting to the end, I had my CV updated before everything went down but hadn't actually sent it out to anyone. It's one of those things where you hope for the best but prepare for the worst - that being the chance that our future plans might not come off and we wouldn't get paid what we were due - which is what it turned out to be. I've not been hit too hard by it thankfully, having some savings to pay the mortgage this month, unemployment insurance to cover the next month if need be and got on the dole straight away (I have no shame about that anymore, just treat it as a benefit I'm entitled to).

Job prospects within games are fairly slim around here at the moment, it's been great to hear of good people getting jobs around here but you sometimes can't help feel the pang that there's another open position gone. Personally I'm holding out some hope for a phoenix from the flames type new company with some of the old staff but I'm not sure how likely it is, my other options are to wait around and see if the other places have some positions in a couple of months or to start looking at prospects out of the games industry, which will probably require a bit of knowledge in languages outside of C/C++ now, C# seeming the easiest to transition into.

I don't begrudge my time at Midway Newcastle though, I've worked with some great people in the area that I really wanted to, produced a game that I can be proud of and gained so much experience in the ~2 years that I was there. It's also been a time of great change outside of work, I've learnt to drive, bought a house and I'm getting married in just under 5 weeks! I can put most of this down to meeting Amy, the woman I'm really looking forward to calling my wife, who has pushed me forward and helped me to believe in myself more than anyone I've ever known. Roll on the 5th of September :)

Probably been posted all over the place by now but this is totally awesome :)

Thought it was worth an entry for the first time in a while, not like nothing's been happening but this weekend felt noteworthy (plus most people probably have me added on facebook now where I add random photos etc.)

Firstly (though it actually came second), I had my first proper driving lesson ever on saturday night. I've been out in Amy's car a few times beforehand, having varying degrees of success but this was the first one with an instructor. Did pretty well, was a 2hr session of which I spent about 1 1/2 hrs driving, doing roundabouts, t-junctions, dual carriageways, even got up to 70 MPH :) Still had some screw ups, stalled once and had the instructor grab the wheel a couple of times but he still said he was very impressed even if I had been in a car before a little bit.

Second, me and Amy have bought a hamster :)

( Pics of Cuteness )

Sheesh, been a long time since I've posted anything here, pretty much just using facebook at the moment (where this post will automagically be copied to, huzzah). In the intervening time I've been doing alright at Midway (though coming to the conclusion that both Unreal and Fmod are a bit pants), now have a girlfriend (which comes under the nice things header) and have moved into the en suite room in our house :D

I've also spent a rather obscene amount of money recently, you've guessed it more trainers but also Star Wars figurines. Never thought I'd be one for these sorta things but once I saw them in the flesh I was pretty convinced, only took a few weeks of umming and ahhing before I bought them. They're of Leia and Boba Fett but done in the style of the Clone Wars cartoons, the following pictures should speak for themselves really.

( Photos )

The new trainers were imported from America again, I really wanted something green so that I felt I had shoes that went with most colours I would wear (I know, I'm such a girl) and only later found out that the design was based on Tokyo's Taxis. This makes them approximately 17.5% cooler or geekier depending on your point of view. Also got the space for a shoe rack now, which gives a nice indication of how my obsession's going.

So if you meet someone randomly that you haven't seen for a while and they tell you "I had a dream about you last night and you had something wrong with you and were gonna die but we fell in love and got married anyway" you should probably run away right? Damn. Still, I guess it's nice to know I'm still in her thoughts when I'd kinda given up on anything happening between us. We had fun and I'm sure at one point she said something like "Behave yourself, or I won't take you home" but she eventually got clobbered by the beer (read wine and vodka) monster and had to be taken home by her flatmate. Still had a good night overall, ended up in the Academy again where apparently 2 of my other flatmates were too and none of us met each other. And I also walked home for the first time since my mugging :) Lots of making sure I wasn't being followed though, in a drunken secret agent impression type manner.

Work's still going okay, not had too much actual work to do but been researching stuff, writing technical design documents for features while the rest of the company runs around trying to get a prototype together/move to a newer version of code etc. Oh and I've been in a couple of video conference calls now, the last one on friday where I was the only person from the Newcastle office, which are kinda interesting. Been out with people from work a couple of times now, there was a morale day where we all got to go the cinema and a couple of traditional friday night pub crawls too.

The area where I live seems to be becoming the Midway village with this girl Laura who sits across from me in work living just across from me around here. And another guy is moving into the area too but found out that he's going to be a direct neighbour to the head of our studio! Pretty funny - no sickies for him. Also means Laura and I might be able to start getting a lift into work with him, which would be cool. Laura is also very cool, she's from Canada and was in TV before games, actually worked on the most recent 3d Spiderman show. She's also into a lot of the same TV shows as me like Heroes and Battlestar so we've been exchanging the new shows I download.

Oh yeah and I've started going to the Gym as well, what with me saying I would probably since I moved here. Not doing too badly, already smashed some of my school running records (don't let the word records con you into thinking they were fast though ;).

Well I got the Midway job, after thinking I'd seriously screwed up the interview. What seemed like lots of long pauses and questions on the test I just didn't have answers for. They didn't tell me on the spot so I went away fairly despondant and they called me up an hour or so later to say "We'd like to offer you a Junior Programmer position at £22K a year". To which I of course said "yes please", a significant jump from my official £14K with an extra £3K untaxed which I wasn't even sure I should still be getting. I've not got all the paperwork through yet so I might still go to the other interview I've got tomorrow :)

Don't start until Feb 5th, so what else was I going to do to occupy myself? Yes that's right folks, I went and bought an Xbox 360 today. £320 with 2 games in Gamestation at the moment so I went and got that with Gears of War and Lost Planet, the latter being good so far and I already knew Gears was pretty good. Not on Live yet but looking into whether we can move the position of the cable modem rather than get one of those £60 wireless adaptors. Plugged into the main living room TV so it's at least widescreen and big enough to read the text, know I'll start pining for a HDTV to complete the package though :s

Well I thought my first interview would be with a company I'm not too sure I'd want to join, this thursday but Midway have suddenly got back and said they'd like to see me tomorrow. So with much less time to prepare and having the place I want to go to most first I'm now a little nervous. 10am in the morning as well, as you might guess I've not been up that early lately. Still, everyone keeps saying I should get in there no problem so just have to hope for the best, there is a test but hopefully I shouldn't need to reacquaint myself with anything that might be on it. Wish me luck and all that jazz.

Well I've just been made redundant (okay, about an hour ago now). I'd heard people were being made redundant the first day back so I was kinda prepared for it though it's still kinda unexpected, there's people who are more surprised than me as I've been here longer than them and have more experience/always worked late etc.

I should get a really good reference, they even said they might have me back if they signed a new contract within 30 days (Hah!). I'm most interested in Midway Newcastle, I'd investigated their current jobs situation last week as well as updating my CV and even though their one listed job might be slightly out of my reach, the boss here reckons there's a good chance they'll take me. If not them one of the other games companies in the area, the boss knows someone from all of them on a personal level. And on the outside chance this friday just gone I spoke to a work colleague of a friend who left here already to go to a web design place called TH_NK. Even though I've done no web stuff (Creativity module 2 notwithstanding) they're pretty keen to take developers from other disciplines and train them up. So not all doom and gloom then.

So I wasn't really that bothered about the Wii, though I'm starting to think about it more as launch day approaches. It already seems I've encouraged a friend in work to buy one just by showing him Red Steel (he hadn't heard of it and used to be into kendo and fencing and stuff) so it seems a bit daft for me not to. Whereas the 360 and PS3 are far too expensive for me to buy for one, maybe two games so far, I can see myself picking up a lot of Wii stuff.

Zelda I was already planning to get for the cube and it seems daft to miss out on the extras and/or buy it again at a later date. No doubt the new Metroid Prime will be quite good too, I liked both of them despite the second one being less well received. I'm also pretty hyped about Battalion Wars 2 (BWii) as I'm playing the first one again right now. It's a great game, with some annoying flaws that I reckon could be fixed in the next vers. The tutorial's rubbish and there's some unfair missions I keep failing without really knowing why, plus the controls can be a bit dodgy (Resident Evil style forward and turn stuff, unless you're locked onto something and then you can strafe, plus free aiming only when stopped). The Wii control setup looks like that will be a thing of the past though, with the nunchuck doing forward/back/strafe at all times and the remote aiming and selecting troops from the menu at the bottom.

My only concern is what all this stuff will be like on the 14" or thereabouts TV in my bedroom, as the big TV in the living room isn't mine and I wouldn't want to be disturbing people (though I might have enough housemates interested in games to get away with it at the moment :)

So anyone else here itching to buy one on launch day? T'would be my first launch day console buy if I were to get one :)

Couldn't really title this anything other than that after going to see Public Enemy last night :) What can I say other than that they were awesome and I never thought I'd see them in such a small venue. It was a pretty rocked up set, some versions of songs were kinda close to the album versions but others were unrecognisable apart from the lyrics. And people went just as mad for rocky stuff like Bring the Noise as Public Enemy No. 1, which was fairly unchanged. Being used to about hour and a half sets from bands recently it was quite surprising for this to be at least two hours, missed my metro home though, boo! But seriously, the energy of those guys is just crazy, especially Flava Flav who must have stage dived about 10 times. They must be in their 40's by now - I know they've probably got nothing on Iron Maiden for example but in terms of music that really means something to me, it's a rarity. They were only hampered by this stupid column in the middle of the stage which they kept crashing into - Chuck referred to it as "our new member, the immovable motherfucker".

( The inevitable picture cut )

It sounds daft but one thing I was very impressed with - you know that really annoying bit between the support and the band where people whack drums as hard as possible and continually shout "one!" into the mic? Well that didn't seem to happen, instead they had their DJ come out quite early and swap over from the venue's one and get set up etc. while the person checking the mics was a bit of a warm up guy too, doing call and response stuff with the crowd and plugging Public Enemy wares on sale in a mildly amusing way, plus getting the DJ to do a bit of scratching and stuff as well. All concerts should work like this!

In other news I had a plain clothes police guy round yesterday afternoon to take a proper statement from me, going over it all again in detail still manages to raise my heart rate to a significant degree :s Plus I've found out that the girl I was seeing until Feb of this year is now engaged to someone - what the frak happened there? Yet to hear a full explanation, I don't reckon she was seeing anybody else at the same time but that seems to be everybody's first thought on the matter. I'm not particularly bothered by it, I've probably dodged a bullet by it but it's still... weird to say the least.

( Gratuitous trainer shot )

Yup, new trainers again, the last pair are a little scuffed but nowhere near finished with, oh dear. These are Nike SB Dunks, SB standing for Skateboard, which I'd heard of in many a Hip Hop song before I even knew what they were. I've never been a fan of Nike in the past (they are one of those evil corporations aren't they?) and I still don't like anything where you can see the air bubble at the side but these have really grown on me. I didn't even know these ones came with red laces as well as grey, switched almost straight away, a little OTT but I think it sets them off nicely. They're also dead comfortable from the off and will only get better (as much as I love those Adicolor ones they started off crippling and are still a little tight), didn't even have to get a size above my normal.

Soo, no real repercussions from the mugging, haven't even been down the police station to make a full statement yet. I've been out and about in town since though so not feeling trapped at home or anything, just a touch more paranoid than usual I guess (which is already pretty paranoid). If one good thing's come out of it I've ended up in touch with Becky more again, she's even asked me if I'd like to go out for Tea(dinner) in a few weeks. E-mails flying back and forth in the day too, which makes work pass much quicker (probably not the best thing atm). She's been really lovely about the whole ordeal as well (as has everyone really, cheers - well apart from anyone in a normal retail job, do you think me getting robbed might be a good reason as to why I don't have a cheque guarantee card?!), spent at least an hour on the phone to her on sunday, just talking random rubbish.

Work is sort of crunch tastic but not at the same time, I stayed pretty late tonight but didn't really get much done, having zero art is still the main problem and it ain't gonna change anytime soon. I'd love to have loads of proper tasks that I could do and would stay doing them but it's so hard to have motivation fixing a load of little things that don't really have the impact on the game that it needs. Plus the design still getting changed and the designers not thinking of the consequences of this at all never gets any better.

Bah, I shall be off to bed after some Battlestar Galactica, I finally caved in and started watching it after loads of people told me it was good. And it is mostly, doesn't quite rival Firefly for my favourite sci-fi of recent years but still lots of cool stuff - how they made those old ships seem cool again I really don't understand.

Well this might have been a post about a reasonable night out if some little tossers hadn't had other ideas - at about half 3 today I got mugged about 20 feet from my front door.

I was coming home from town when some guy behind me asks the time, I tell him it and he says "What?" so I repeat it, probably about 3 or 4 times, by this point I was thinking something was up. I take a glance back (as he's now infront of me) and spy two other guys a bit back around the corner. I thought there's no way I'm gonna run to my door and open it so I'd rather them not know I live here so I backed up a bit and they all rushed me. For a few seconds my instinct is to fight back but after a good smack in the nose I think "you're not Arnie, lay down and hope they take stuff and fuck off". Which thankfully they did, took my wallet out of my left pocket and as I was lying on my right side they just took that and went, leaving me with my mobile phone and keys.

Dripping with blood I get back in the house, call the police and they send out an ambulance too - no idea what a broken nose feels like and I guess having a few drinks might have cushioned the pain. Ambulance arrives first, take my blood pressure etc. and say they can't really tell if the nose is broken right now. To be honest I was glad of not having to go to hospital, just wanted to be in my house, they say if there's dizzyness, blurred vision, headaches and/or vomiting to go to hospital. Police turn up a bit later, don't really have anything to tell them, cunts were wearing hoodies closed as far as possible. They take a description of the wallet, a Nightmare before Christmas one with a chain so it's kinda unique at least. They also say there's CCTV cameras in the area so they might have got something, it's pretty much that or nothing though.

I was feeling kinda morbid so I went out and took a pic of my pool of blood, behind a cut for the squeamish:

( I hope this is not.... Matt's blood )

Don't think I've ever seen that much of my own blood before.... will be a nice surprise for someone coming out of their house tomorrow. I've put some plasters on now so I look a bit like Marv from Sin City (I wish). I've already cancelled credit cards, drivers license I'll do something about tomorrow - thankfully it's still registered in Liverpool so I don't think they could know where I live. Was only a maximum of a tenner in the wallet anyway, stupid fucks.

I should probably be sleeping right now but I seem to be running on (rather useless) adrenaline, plus still not sure my nose has stopped bleeding completely, my mouth is all dry too. Ho hum, in conclusion - the world is full of cunts.

( A bunch of pictures and stuff )

Stolen from rllmuk but was a good point: does anyone feel like the Daily Mail must be a satire? Read this and then after you've stopped laughing, can such a badly researched, ludicrous article actually be serious? Highlights include quoting a comedy song about 'emos' and thinking it's a real song about slitting your wrists etc. and making a list of dark haired (well apart from Debbie Harry), pale skinned female celebrities and commenting on how they have a "touch of the Goth about them". Amazing scenes.

Still can't really be bothered with a proper life update, it's not really been that interesting. Work's been a bit stupid but I've stayed away from staying in late whenever I can, just don't really see the point. I am genuinely worried about the future of our company and the fact that producers seriously think our current game will be finished in 5 weeks (for some perspective, it's been going since about March and we have 3 out of 21 cars, none of which are truly finished and one city district out of 5). I've had a couple of weeks off at home, no proper going away holiday but they're not really my thing, especially on my own. I'm going home and to Creamfields this weekend, should be good hopefully.

( Photos and all that jazz )

So I finally picked up a pair of those trainers I mentioned in the last post, they're pretty much as smart as I expected and keep making me want to drop into late 80's Hip-Hop slang to describe them (see the title :)

( Replaced with images of my own as the other ones have stopped working )

I've currently got red stripes on one and yellow/gold on the other just to see how they look and I think I might go for green regularly. It's a bit of a pain to change them as it requires unlacing them completely pretty much but it's not too bad given the freedom of choice it gives you.

I got them from JD Sports in the end who randomly had some 12's in, after discovering that Foot Locker are stupid Americo-centric wanks. They actually refer to everything in US sizes, which are half a size smaller, I did wonder why they would come to have an 11 1/2 in store. Then when I asked to try ordering a pair of 12 or 13's they said they'd look for a 12 1/2 and that they only came in half sizes.

Oh and thanks for the birthday replies in the last post by the way, they were appreciated :)

Well for the first time in two years I'm making a post around the anniversary of my birth that will actually make reference to it, I felt really sad that last year the nearest post I made was about being told to tidy up the house :(

So anyway, back from a not entirely unsuccessful night out, though only 3 people turned up, boo! Still, had a dance to some 70's and 80's funk so not all bad. And will be out tomorrow night which I reckon will be more enjoyable despite having a much higher geek factor - seeing an Xbox 360 hooked up to a proper HDTV and playing some multiplayer Guitar Hero, woot woot! I've ordered myself a DS lite from Aus as a present, which may turn up tomorrow and I've got my eye on some new trainers if I can get to try them on somewhere. They're these rather funky looking Adidas ones that let you change the colour of the 3 stripes on the side, possibly even to your own designs, I reckon camoflage would go quite well.

Work's still a bit slow at the moment, though I did start messing around with our cutscene editor which was mildly interesting as well as a completely illogical pain in the arse. I also went full circle and was asked to give a couple of people coming in for interview the guided tour of the place, nice to see some fresh faced individuals unaware of what lies ahead of them, muwah hah haaa! Ahem, anyway I didn't think I did to great a job of it actually, partially because we've got builders in doing windows, radiators and eventually decorating and nobody seemed to be quite where I expected them to be. They've messed us around a lot with the builders too but I don't have the energy to go on a big rant about it right now. Oh and I'm dying of a sore throat as well, think it's my gorramn flatmates fault *shakes fist*

Since I've just watched Memento I guess I might as well start from there and work backwards :)

( Movies, games, videos and all that jazz )

I almost posted entries a couple of times last week, I think I'm glad that I didn't though as I would have looked back on them and thought they were stupidly whiney now. I think Stu's announcement put me in my place a little bit, shows you how insignificant your own little worries are. Hope you're still feeling upbeat about that dude.

So anyway, what would I have been moaning about? Pretty much just this girl Becky and my inability to stop over-analysing everything that's going on at the moment. Every delay in her sending me a text or excuse for not being around seemed to make me think that she was just using "I want to be friends" to mean "I don't like you and want to have nothing to do with you". Sigh, some may say that's my better judgement talking but I have a feeling it's more likely to be my bitter and cynical judgement (I've been wanting to use that all week). I think last night confirmed that we definately want to be friends after spending about an hour and a half on the phone to her and about 3 hours on MSN. As for the relationship side of things, I'm trying my best not to think about it too much, we're still flirting and that - guess I have to leave it up to her to say when/if she's ready. We've made semi concrete plans to go and see V for Vendetta next friday and were talking about going to this Japanese restaurant in town sometime, which she seemed quite enthused about.

Other stuff, well I've been watching Firefly over the last two weeks and have now seen all of that and Serenity too. A pretty damn good bit of Sci fi/Western if I do say so myself (when you describe it like that you wonder why it wasn't every kids dream show). I don't think I was expecting the western style stuff quite as much and was a little offput by it and the country and western music to start with but it all starts to make sense somehow. Infact I think I missed the music a little in Serenity, that seemed to have more of a generic-ish sci fi theme to it. The whole thing is very refreshing, virtually no lasers and space fights, all real guns and honest to goodness punch ups :) It also must satisfy a lot of nerds for once as it has no sound for the ships in space, I think it works quite well. I think the film does quite a good job of existing on its own, though I was glad that I watched the series first, both only 12 quid now so well worth a look.

And for more cheap entertainment I picked up Psyvariar: Complete Edition for PS2 for a fiver the other day. It's a vertically scrolling shooter, which seems to have somehow stolen an idea I had for a shooter (even though it came out about 3 years before I thought of it), where you have normal fire and a more concentrated fire which restricts your movement a lot. It also has a levelling up system, which makes your ship transform and power up your weapons. You do this by destroying enemies or by having near misses with bullets, which it calls 'the BUZZ System'. There's only a tiny part of your ship that can be hit (which is hard to tell as you ship starts to transform), the rest allows bullets to pass by harmlessly, building up your level gauge and buzz count. There's some absolutely mental bullet patterns though, there's always a way through but you need to be pretty hardcore to pilot it. I really like it though as it doesn't totally punish you when you die as your ship will be at the same level, same goes for Ikaruga and to some extent Gradius V. I really can't stand old shooters now where you build up a huge collection of weapon upgrades only for them to be gone in one death and after that more deaths swiftly follow as you can't take on everyone with the standard pea shooter anymore.

Not that much of interest at work or anything, still working on shared net stuff for leaderboards, which frequently don't make it into our games anyway...

I have a date tomorrow, with a girl I've never met in real life. I think it's just hitting home now. Been chatting to her online for quite a while now and she seems to have put up with a lot of my weirdness so far so signs are good. To be honest it's probably my first real date (outside of a relationship), we've both said to go with no expectations and have fun and get drunk no matter what happens. There's probably some female code words embedded in all of this but for the moment I'm quite happy to go along with it.

I'm actually doing some overtime this weekend so it will be a good excuse to leave work a little bit early tomorrow, hehe. I've just about done what I was told to for this milestone so I can get that sorted and just help out with whatever for a bit. And hopefully get free lunch again as well :) Life isn't all that bad this week to be honest.