Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Video games to train military?

 

An explosion sends bits of the door flying inside. The men slide through the still-smoking opening, fanning to the right and left, guns up, safeties off, fingers on triggers. The live rounds start flying almost immediately. Bullets tear through the men standing inside the house, knocking them to the ground. One round hits a terrorist in the head, a bright red plume of blood splatters against the wall.
Special Forces don't usually play games, but for their Fort Bragg training they sometimes make an exception to that rule.
The Laser Shot Virtual Shoot House gives these specialized warriors a chance to blow in doors, fire live ammo and take out life-sized enemies, all in a real environment helped along by quite a bit of video game technology.
The soldiers are deadly serious about their training. The weapons and ammo they use very real. But their opponents are life-sized video game avatars, the blood virtual, the threat they pose imagined. And the walls these digital enemies stand in front of are actually high-tech video screens that can project images and automatically seal up after a round passes through them.
Based in Houston, Texas, Laser Shot has been around for about 10 years now, slowly designing more intricate, more realistic, more useful "firearms training solutions" for the military and police. But what's that mean?
It means they design, develop and deliver virtual kill houses: Entire bulletproof homes created to look like bases of operation for Al-Qaeda, gang bangers, hostage takers, bad guys. Inside these homes are rooms plated floor to ceiling in ballistic tiles and covered in special self-sealing screens. Above each screen is mounted a high-resolution projector designed to throw a moving image on a wall from a very short distance without creating shadows. The whole thing is tied into an intricate network of computers that serves as the brains for the many bad guys found in the kill house. These enemies, like real world ones, are programmed to think, to see, to react.



Military using "video games" to train? More likely then you'd think. At least its safe, and hell, who doesn't think laser tag is fun?

Bioshock movie?



Hollywood is working on a big screen version of underwater opus BioShock. There have been stops and starts, but the game's designer Ken Levine assures the film adaption is being "actively" worked on.
"I will say that it is still an active thing," Levine tells DC radio station 106.7. "And it is something we are actively talking about and actively working on."
That doesn't mean that filming of the project is 100 percent certain. "I can't tell you whether — you know, the movie business is complicated — I can't tell you whether it's going to happen for sure or it's not going to happen for sure," Levin adds. "But it's something we are actively discussing, quite actively, and actively working on."
Levine also discussed the challenges of bringing BioShock to live in cinema. In the game, protagonist Jack is a non-entity. "You can't really do that in a movie," Levin says. "That's your guy, that's the guy you are following through."
The trick is to stay true to the game and also round out the character "so he's not literally a hand with a gun" and "so he's actually a person who is going through some sort of progression through his life."
Honoring the source material and making it work as a film is, as Levine notes, a "super, super challenge".
Gore Verbinski, the director behind the Pirates of the Caribbean flicks, was originally going to helm the project. But after budget snags, he switched to producing. He is currently working on a handful of projects.
In his place, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (Intacto, 28 Weeks Later) has signed on to direct the movie version of BioShock. Verbinski has stated that the film version needs to be R-rated — a "hard R" — and not PG-13.





Now, this sounds like a great idea. I personally think a movie in an FPS view would be a nice change, interesting at that. Let's see how they stay true to the material in the future. It's swell they're not wanting to make a movie just for the money, and actually want it to be decent.

Monday, August 30, 2010

That's right! Remember this fun game right here? This is what will be taking up a majority of my time tonight. Aww yeah SSX 3 you are so much fun.
I've recently gotten into vanilla Street Fighter 4. I know I'm a bit late, but I own no console to play the newer edition. I'm loving the game so far, as its the first fighter I've gotten into. Won my first random online match last night, but as you can see, everyone has absolutely horrid connections, so its hard to find a Ranked match, or even a Normal match!

Original Content

This will be my blog that I talk about video games I play or new games coming out that look interesting and entertaining. I hope to create a decent blog people will come to for news and the like. Let's hope it all works out as planned. See ya around!