Michael - Zachariah - Slick

Gears of War 2
I played through a bit, not completed it yet but it’s an improvement from the original for definite. I like the whole ‘if you’re not blown into pieces but died, you can crawl about till an NPC revives you’ deal, means when I crazily go out trying to chainsaw a legion of locust and get shot, I can still carry on once revived.
I’m not a huge Gears fan, ironic considering I use the original for machinima but still, I’ll play it once I can be bothered.

Left 4 Dead
Valve… or companies under supervision of Valve… make some of the best SP and MP fps games ever. Left 4 Dead is continuing the trend and from the demo I played, it’s truly amazing. You basically have to stick it on the hardest setting to really get the best feeling from the game. To make it even more fun, try and sabotage your team as much as possible as Rob shown Zach, Ben and I (shoot the car with the alarm right Rob?).

Fallout 3 and Farcry 2
I bought them through Steam but I haven’t touched them yet, they seem like games which I need to spend a bit of time with, so when I can be bothered I’ll play them. Anyone got any comments on these?

Wrath of the Lich King
Yes.. I got a World of Warcraft expansion, but here’s the thing, I don’t get addicted. I play them for the quests and new shiz and eventually I get bored like I always do. But I gotta say, I’m really enjoying the whole Death Knight character, he’s powerful and got a bunch of cool equipment and started at level 55! How cool is that for a starter character.

Mirrors Edge
I love the whole idea behind this, first person free running. They really pulled off the feel of a fit woman running around being chased by trigger happy cops and as a game, it’s quite fun. Fighting the cops could be so much better though, you have barely any variety of attacks and trying to take a weapon away is really frustrating.

Anyway, anyone playing any of these and what’s ya comments?

Old film photo of Lit Fuse

We all remember War Of The Servers, well it used to have a website… for some of you that never saw it i re hosted it on my website temps till it gets into the sub bits of the site - http://robertstoneman.com/

So some of us Lit Fuse chaps went to New York to the Machinima Festival! we came home with an award for ‘Best Music’ for Ignis Solus, Lars so deserves this and i think i speak for all of us, the work he does and the dedication he has is awesome. Lars you rock man! and we’ll be sending your award to you ASAP! once Michael has finished with it… i posted more pictures on my FaceBook but here are some of the pictures New York, The award, Zach and Brian!:

Have fun!

Robert x

Edit: More pics in my Facebook from the hyperlink below, love Michael.

I leave here at 6:30 to go to the airport and fly to Heathrow around about 9:30, where we’ll transit over to JFK. Zach, Rob and Brian arrive a few hours after us, so we’ll go to our shoddy hotel, drop our stuff off and meet up with some machinima peeps afterwards (I think, or we’ll just hang at a pizza restaurant till the others arrive).

forget these faces though

So yeah, Check us out at the new york festival. We’ll be easy to spot. Mike and Rob will be the ones walking around with the poofy accents and I’ll be the guy carrying the largest hangover! It’ll be great! -Zachariah

My first official Lit Fuse Film using Gears of War, hope you enjoy it for what it’s worth.

Either way, keep checking the site for the updates, subscribe to RSS feeds, like every RSS feed there is.

Anyway, anyone who buys anything from the music store and it doesn’t work, you’ll have to wait till I get back to contact you about it.

In other news, we have 3 projects in the making. Flying Fenix, a Gears of War machinima, is hopefully going to be released on the 20th of October. Basically the filming is at a close for it (I think) and now the sound, music and effects work starts happening. I’ll give you a heads up if it’s delayed.

There’s a Poland’s Got Talent now?

so huzzah! to celebrate, I’ll toss up a shot from a  long ongoing film of mine that didn’t make the deadline.

Join Robert in the laughing activities!

Love Rob,

:)

To conclude the last 2 blog posts, I don’t hate it as much anymore. The save function is still the bane of this game as I’ve crashed many many many many many times while I’ve done some progress. I mean it annoys me even if I saved just before hand and then did a trade deal on some spice that sold for 15k each and lost it due to the crash.

Anyway, as I said before I had quite a few enemies but there were some that didn’t hate me yet, so I chummed up to those people by giving them cash and doing some missions resulting in allying with them. This was very helpful as I was able to have an ally ship beside me and I had some green on the map. Obviously I didn’t have an enormous amount of cash so I thought about the spices and that I was only getting red spice from my planets and the moon next to my home planet had pink spices which I never had before.

I ended up scrapping and saving for the Atmosphere generators and anything I needed to terraform the moon and got a colony set up on it getting me that pink spices. I left the planet and checked my other planets while they were being bummed by the orange team again (they’re called Gopplet’s in my game). Returning back to the moon gave me 10 pink spices which I sold for 44k each when I went looking around for the best deals. I was in the money now, setting up more colonies on the moon to harvest more spice to make me super rich. In doing all of the terraforming and colonising, I unlocked a few new tools for me to terraform easily such as the Heat Ray which heats the planet up using your energy. So I was able to now go around forming new colonies on other spiced up planets.

Things are getting much easier now; with the new found cash I was able to ask my allies to attack my enemies’ planets while I hoard my monies. Actually one time I asked them to attack the Gopplet planet and I also attacked a different planet of theirs which I enjoyed bombing the shit out of as they asked to surrender. Being the kind hearted fellow I am, I let them surrender which for some reason made them like me more… You just blew up my planet but you know… you didn’t blow me up so we’re cool. 

There was a quite cool moment where I checked out a planet that had tribes on it. They were doing all the boring stuff I had to do back in the day but it was nice to see it from above and giggle at their wars. I had an item called the Monolith, which is a block statue that speeds up the planets ‘levelling up’, meaning they would go to the Civilization and Space stage quicker. Checking back later, they had cities that were gathering spices and wars of military and religion, it reminded me of a darker time in my creatures’ life span. Eventually they made it into space and I gave them a hearty greeting to space but oddly enough they had stuff in trade that made me wonder if they were smarter than my creatures. I say this because they had all the stuff for sale as the other species in space like the Wormhole Key, pretty advanced for a first time into space species but whatever it was cheap. Overall, I don’t hate Spore as much anymore.

I enjoyed the Water phase and the Creature phase, munching on things etc. When it got to the tribal stage (RTS), it just went downhill. Barely any strategy needed. Simply kill some wild animals for some food, make an instrument hut, equip people with them, offer gift to rival tribe, play music for them and press button when they show the speech bubble of the instrument. Repeat x 4. By the way this is where I saved it cause I was going out, not knowing what would happen later.

Civilization stage. I’m not sure if I got the choice but some how I ended up being a Religion based city, not knowing what exactly I could do, I was finding my feet by exploring a little, capturing the spice mines to gain a little bit of money then I get raped by the fucking orange team. They had like a zero tolerance policy for a city trying to make do with 2 cities so they send an entire arsenal of military tanks against my pussified religion hovercrafts. After hours of playing, I realised that depending on how you lay out your city, it’ll effect how much cash they generate. Also that the instant you capture a city with a choice of what to change it to, CHOOSE MILITARY AND BUILD SOME BIG ASS TANKS!!!

After I raped the orange team back for what they did to me, capturing 6 cities under a Religion ‘class’ will allow you to spend around 36,000 spore points to instantly take over the world with a big holographic religious speaker. Win. Finally I was on to the space phase where I went through the tutorials quickly and had a good time till it crashed. I ended the task and entered back in only to find Spore doesn’t actually auto save… ever. What kind of games now don’t auto save? I mean there’s games that auto save every time you fire a fucking bullet to make sure you don’t lose on anything. That’s when I yelled at my screen and cursed any stupid twat making a game to leave autosave out, I mean come on, save when you pass a phase atleast for christ sake. So when I through again, I gave up on the custom create shit and downloaded a bunch of other peoples ships and tanks. Raped by orange team again during the Civilization phase by the way.

I eventually ended up back where I started in space and I was already accustomed to the starting tutorials so I whizzed through them and ended up exploring a little on different planets only and found some life on a planet so I decided to drop down to look. I noticed a special ability in my green category saying Fanatical Frenzy, take over a planet religiously. I thought to myself, oh wow, this would be nice to make some waypoints for myself and launched it straight for the planet. The holographic religion thing happened again and the entire planet was mine, yay. When I left the solar system and into the galaxy, I noticed these big red areas around quite a few planets, they started to chase and shoot at me, pissing me off by attacking my home planet. I was wondering what the hell did I do to them already? I tried to pay them off to be good again but obviously that was a waste of all my money and they continued to bombard me.

I think it takes like 30 mins or an hour to recharge the Fanatical Frenzy but eventually I got it again, so I went to a pissed off place and launched the Frenzy. Everything was all good again, till I went back to the galaxy where almost a half of the fucking galaxy had a red circle… What the fuck Maxis?! Why the hell would you give us the ability to calm things down on a planet make everyone else hate you?

So currently I have 3 planets being attacked around the clock by asshole AI’s, just like the civilization stage but with a bigger scope of scale. I’m pissed off with Spore.

• Today my Father and I ordered our New York flight tickets and booked the hotel in Jersey City, taxi ride in is no problem. I’m getting really quite excited for it now, we’re gonna be in New York on the 31st till the 3rd while we check out the Machinima Festival.
• Flying Fenix is almost done, Lars has already been doing some awesome music for it and I really like where it’s going.
• Rob, though busy at Bioware, has been working in his spare time on his machinima film using a game we’ve not used before. I’m sure he’ll write up a news post on the main site… I think
• Zach, again busy at Bioware, has been doing some stuffs but no one must know. Before you think it’s Jack’s story, it’s not.
• Dragon Age comes out with a toolset so I’m looking forward to getting my dirty little hands on that.
• Castle Crashers on Xbox Live Arcade is awesome, I wish I had more time to play it.
• Viva Pinata and Spore come out on Friday… there goes my life again.
• Google Chrome. It’s quite good isn’t it?

Considering it’ll be my first Unreal engine machinima, Lit Fuse’s first Unreal machinima and my first Lit Fuse Film, please be gentle when it arrives. For those expecting narrative, just stop those thoughts now, it has like 2 sentences through the whole thing but it will be supported heavily by Lars’ music which I’m sure we’ll all like. Hope you enjoy once it’s done.

Flying Fenix

Filipe, the good man he is, scampered off and merged them together and came up with a different layout which I liked. It reminded me of metallic winged medals which sort of plays some symbolism about what the video is about… Flying. Anyway the good news is we’re going ahead with this one and Brian is going to be doing his AE magic to make it look pretty in the video.