LimitlessUnits.com » film

God of War III (3) Combo Video and Damien Walters 2010 Demo Reel

Tony Huynh — Mon, 03 May 2010 03:35:14 +0000

Posted by Tony Huynh.

God of War III Combo Video – Spartan Mayhem
Really amazing God of War 3 Combo video that does a great job of showcasing how deep God of War III’s combat is. It’s well-edited and has some really good music to boot. My favorite part is when the player kicks the Oil Pot underneath the Minotaur while juggling him.

Damien Walters 2010 Demo Reel
This reel features the incredible Damien Walters in tumbling, stunts and freerunning. Definitely worth a watch.

The Expendables Movie Trailer of 80s Awesomeness

Tony Huynh — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 06:00:14 +0000

Posted by Tony Huynh.

I can’t believe my eyes!

Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Steve Austin, Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the same movie? The 80s are back!

No, this is not an April Fools joke.

Brad Borne’s The Fancy Pants Adventure and Bruce Branit’s World Builder

Tony Huynh — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 00:32:29 +0000

Posted by Tony Huynh.
I have not been posting as often because I have been really busy with work and life outside of work. Speaking of life outside of work, my girlfriend and I watched Cable Guy again a few weeks ago and that convinced us to buy tickets to Medieval Times for this weekend. This is our first trip to Medieval Times ever and I am really excited to dork it up. I’ll be sure to take pictures.

Cable Guy’s Medieval Times Scene

Brad Borne’s The Fancy Pants Adventures
Here is a great flash game that I’ve been having a lot of fun with called The Fancy Pants Adventures. It is a momentum based movement game with really great animations. It plays a lot like how Sonic the Hedgehog wishes it could.

Lastly I wanted to share World Builder, a beautiful short film by filmmaker Bruce Branit. He was the co-creator of 405. World Builder was shot in a single day and the postproduction took 2 years. The user interface for the 3D modeling is amazing. I wish the Unreal 3’s BSP editor worked liked that.

Bruce Branit’s World Builder

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

Bruce Branit’s 405

Akira Live-Action Adaptation Director’s The Silent City

Tony Huynh — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 19:11:10 +0000

I remember hearing a while back that a live-action adaptation of the 1988 anime Akira was being created and that it was starring Leonardo DiCaprio. I quickly forgot all about it until I saw Ruairi Robinson’s short film The Silent City. Ruairi Robinson is tapped as the director of the new Akira film and watching his short film has got me excited about the prospects.

The Silent City directed by Ruairi Robinson.

The Making of Silent City
If you were wondering how Ruairi Robinson and team put together their final amazing sweeping camera shot like I was, here is a documentary on how they made the film.

Roger Ebert is Right: Games are Not High Art…Yet

Tony Huynh — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 01:48:42 +0000

Some of you may have heard about Roger Ebert’s disparaging comments about video games. If not, I will sum it up for you here.

“The nature of the medium [video games] prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship [however elegant or sophisticated] to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. For most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.” – Roger Ebert

Later, Ebert updated his opinions that games are art, just not high art.

“A year or so ago, I rashly wrote that video games could not be art. That inspired a firestorm among gamers, who wrote me countless messages explaining why I was wrong, and urging me to play their favorite games. Of course, I was asking for it. Anything can be art. Even a can of Campbell’s soup. What I should have said is that games could not be high art…” – Roger Ebert

This may sound blasphemous, but in a way, I agree with Roger Ebert’s assessment of our industry. Video games are currently not high art and they are an inferior medium to film and literature. I am not saying that video games can never be “high art,” it is that games have not yet reached that point. Video games have many challenges that other mediums do not have. Video games are a relatively young art form, are difficult to create, have to be “fun” and mass-market games have spiraling budgets, which cause a reluctance to experiment. If we are able to move past the video game industry’s self-imposed limitations, games have the potential to be the most powerful and important art form we have. In this article I will define what I believe “high art” is and discuss the challenges that the gaming industry faces to attain this important recognition.

Other gamers may challenge what I am saying by pointing to games such as Shadow of the Colossus, Ico, or Okami as “high art.” I would disagree. Stylized graphics do not make a game high art. High art is a work of importance. Works of importance are pieces of art that have cultural significance that include social commentary. Games as a whole are missing these key ingredients. Where are our games that deal head-on with themes like religious fanaticism, racism or the holocaust? While there are hundreds of films and books dealing with these topics, video games in the pursuit of fun and sales, avoid these touchy subjects at all costs.

Games = Fun
If you look at all the end of the year best of video games lists, what one word determines the placement of these games on those lists? Fun. If you peruse the talk schedule of the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC), it seems every other talk is based on how to make games fun. Being a game designer, the main discussion point in every game mechanic meeting is how to get the section of gameplay to be fun. Maybe all of this focus on fun is a bad thing. That possibility is just what Warren Spector discusses in his article; “Fun” is a Four-Letter Word.

But, the word “fun” has other problems. It kind of locks us into a “games are for kids” mentality. It implies that games are good for just one thing: passing time in an enjoyable manner, for want of a better definition.

And perhaps most damning to me is that all this focus on passing time puts a ceiling, of sorts, above us that separates us from other media, media that are allowed to strive for something other than simple “fun-ness.”

Movies, books, musical compositions and so on are – or can be – fun to watch/read/listen to, but there’s nothing in the definition or judgment of those other media that requires fun. We’re the only medium that says to itself, “This is what you must be and all you will ever be.”
– Warren Spector

The mandatory “fun” is what pigeonholes the video game medium into a escapist distraction and puts a self-imposed limitation on video games that prevents it from reaching the high art plateau. I recently watched the movie The Terrorist and asked myself the question, was that movie fun? The film was thought provoking, sad and even disturbing, but can hardly be described as fun. What separates films from games as a medium is film’s willingness to tackle difficult subject matter. In the case of The Terrorist, it chronicles the life of a pregnant female suicide bomber leading up to the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. It is hard to imagine a video game based on the same subject matter. This drives home how mature an art form film is and how much further video games have to go to be considered high art. If we do not limit ourselves to games = fun, we could one day see video games encompass so much more. Perhaps video games could be relabeled as interactive media and we could then see games be on equal footing as films. We could have games that genuinely explore and tackle real cultural and societal issues.

Budgets and Sales: Willingness to Experiment
The reality we live with right now is that fun blockbuster video games receive all the press, accolades and most importantly, sales. Publishers make games to sell and games that tackle societal ills or are not “fun” are unproven. Game budgets are now commonly soaring into and beyond the 20 million dollar range and as games get more expensive, publishers are becoming less and less willing to take chances. It is difficult for game developers to tackle difficult subjects that may alienate or divide their intended audience of Western males age 12 to 35.

Here is an example of a game developer’s willingness to make decisions based off of sales. Seth Schiesel of the New York Times wrote an article questioning the Ubisoft Montreal’s decision to Anglicize the main character of the Prince of Persia.

“What are we to make of a “Prince of Persia” who talks and behaves like a 17-year-old American mall rat? A “Prince of Persia” with blue eyes, fully Anglicized facial features and what looks like a tan he picked up on spring break? Is it taking a video game too seriously to shrink in distaste from such characterizations?”

It was no mistake that the Prince of Persia is Anglicized. This was done to not alienate the developer’s intended Western audience. Yet the game gets a pass for blatantly disregarding reality, simply because it is a game. If we want games to be viewed as high art, we have to look more closely at our games and not take the approach that all that matters is sales.

It is this sales driven mentality and unwillingness to take chances that have placed a ceiling above this industry’s head and stymied the growth and acceptance of games by the mainstream. If we do not occasionally move away from the big-action-summer style of games, we will never reach that pervasive mainstream audience. Games may be expensive to produce, but so are movies and even large budget movies do not shy away from socially important issues.

The first step to having games be accepted as high art is to be willing to take on criticism and be held accountable for our decisions. We can no longer fall back on the excuse, “It is just a game.”

Complexity in Games
One of the major disadvantages of the video games medium is that games are very complex and difficult to produce. In order to create a mass-market game, it can take team sizes in excess of 100+ developers, each specializing in one of these four disciplines: programming, design, animators and artists well over two years. To a certain degree, independent filmmakers are on an even playing field with bigger budget film projects. The differences between a low budget independent film and a big budget film are much less discernable from the audience’s perspective than an independent video game and a big budget blockbuster video game. With film, anybody can pick up a camera and with post-production and editing software readily available, can make a highly polished mass-marketable film. This is not the case with the complexity required to bring a polished video game to market. It is much more difficult for smaller budget and more experimental games to gain acceptance by wide audiences because the production values between these types of games and games with much larger budgets are so wide and easily noticeable to even a casual observer.

Just as technology has made the independent filmmaker more on par with a studio production, I am hopeful that the day comes when technology closes the gap between independent games and big budget games. There are signs that this movement is already in progress with game development suites like Adobe Flash and Microsoft’s XNA studio. When independent gamemakers are able to remove the disparity between their products they will be more able to compete for the consumers’ dollars and it will empower our industry to push and experiment with new social themes and genres.

Video Games are a Young Industry
When film first took form, few would have called it a “high art” form. It took over a hundred years before it gained that distinction. Many parallels can be drawn from when film was in its infancy to video games of today. When film first appeared on the scene it was a spectacle, but frowned on as not comparable to live theater. The same can be said of games in comparison to films today. It heartens me that the video game industry has come so far and so fast on the technology front, but we cannot neglect our responsibility to our audience to move them to think. We cannot simply dismiss Roger Ebert’s criticism, but instead we need to take it as a challenge and use our medium to make our audience more “cultured, civilized and empathetic”. By doing so we elevate video games as a whole into the realm of high art. Games are a young form of media and in the years to come we will be given the opportunity to answer our critics and gain the respect of the mainstream, let us not waste it.

Conclusion
We are at a crossroads and must confront the self-imposed limitations we have placed on ourselves and start viewing video games as something more than mere escapist fare. It as a challenge to our industry as a whole to produce games that tackle difficult themes and strive for more than simple “fun.” Video games have boundless possibilities and are uniquely suited to surpass any other mediums that currently exist because there is a level of connectivity through open-ended and collaborative interactivity that no other media can hope to match. If we are willing to take head-on serious societal themes and not shirk our responsibilities, I believe we will see the day that the video game is looked upon as more than a way to mindlessly pass time, but as deeply important and socially relevant.

I would like to thank Amadeo Plaza for our discussions on this topic.

Crayon Physics Indie Game Released Today and 9 Theatrical Movie and Short Film

Tony Huynh — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 02:56:23 +0000

I wanted to let you guys know that a great indie game came out today called Crayon Physics. Crayon Physics was created by one-man developer Petri Purho of Kloonigames. He is famous for developing games on his own in the very tight deadline of one month. I saw him give a talk at GDC 2007 and he showed off a lot of his indie games that are available for free download. They were very simple games that were fascinating and a lot of them could have easily been expanded into full games if given more time. Well he has done just that with Crayon Physics. The game is a much larger project than the usual fare from Kloonigames and will set you back $20. Check out the videos of the gameplay.

Crayon Physics Video 1

Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo.

Crayon Physics Video 2

Crayon Physics Deluxe trailer 2 from Petri Purho on Vimeo.

If you like the soundtrack of Crayon Physics it is available for free download.

You can buy Crayon Physics here.

9

On another note I was talking with a co-worker and we started to discuss what books or movies would make a great game. He told me about Shane Acker’s 9. 9 is a short film that was getting a full length theatrical release and is being produced by Tim Burton.

9 Official Theatrical Trailer

9 Short Film
This is the original award winning short film.

Does that beg for a game or what?

2 Months: Star Wars Vs. Star Trek, Super Mario Level Mod and Flash Game Sonny

Tony Huynh — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 04:51:56 +0000

So today marks the second month since the resurgence of LimitlessUnits.com. I continue to enjoy writing and working on the website and I am learning something new almost daily by doing so. You can look forward to a lot more from LimitlessUnits.com in the next month. Over the next week or so I’ll be traveling to visit family and the site may not be updated as often, but I’ll continue writing on the trip and hopefully build up a backlog in which to draw from. For now I’ve got some movies and a couple of flash games that you shouldn’t miss.

I know this is a little older, but if there’s a chance you haven’t see it yet, it’s pretty awesome.

Star Wars Versus Star Trek

This is another old video, but again if you haven’t seen it it’s great. The commentary by the player is the best. This is a great showcase for using the player’s expectations against them and what not to do in game design taken to the extreme.

Most Difficult Super Mario Level Mod Ever Part 1

This is a link to the rapid share for the mod if you want to play it yourself.
http://rapidshare.com/files/58627199/Mario.rar

As promised I bring you one of the best flash games I’ve ever played and one that is so intentionally bad it wraps back around on the scale. The first one is Sonny, a surprisingly deep flash RPG where you play as a super zombie, who has lost his memory. The best part about Sonny is that it is free. So what have you got to lose?

Sonny Free Flash RPG Game

This is the intentionally bad flash game. The game is called The Worst Game Ever and its tag line is “where spare time goes to die.”

The Worst Flash Game Ever

My Student Films 2: EverQuest Documentary and Guilty Gear Isuka Trailer

Tony Huynh — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 21:18:46 +0000

As promised in my first “My Student Films” entry here are some more of my student films.

This EverQuest documentary was created about a friend of mine a number of years ago. This video was originally shot right after the release of the first expansion for EverQuest, Ruins of Kunark, which places it around September of 2000. He is a charismatic and very intelligent guy (these qualities come across on the screen), who dropped out of high school due to his addiction to the MMORPG Everquest. Please forgive the awful camera work. This was one of my first videos that I had ever shot. I learned a lot in its creation.

Land of EverQuest – Student Film MMORPG documentary

This is a video that I worked on along with a few others while at Sammy Studios for the Guilty Gear Isuka game for the PS2.

Guilty Gear Isuka PS2 Trailer – Sammy Studios

My Student Films

Tony Huynh — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 02:44:54 +0000

I have never really uploaded any videos to youtube before. So I decided to dig up some of the videos I made during film school a number of years back and set about uploading.

Lifted
Lifted is a car chase digital video shot with a few friends of mine over the course of a few weekends. It almost serves as a Ford commercial with both a Ford Focus as well as a Ford Mustang participating. The shoot took place on the freeways and streets of San Diego. Enjoy!

Tripod
Tripod is a group student film that we made over a few days of shooting. It was shot on 16mm film and was an attempt at telling an entire story from the perspective of feet.

I’ve got a few other self-made videos I can share still so I’ll occasionally upload some more and post them here in the future.