Mark Danks

Once again, I am flying over an ocean heading home.  DevStation, the Eurpean PS3 developers conference, just ended.  I was over for a week to meet with my counterparts in SCEE, as well as attend DevStation.   Lots of good meetings, lots of good informal discussions, and lots of good food.  The dinner I had at Nobu was definitely one of the highlights for me, although random pints in pubs throughout the week was also a lot of fun as well.  I sensed many of the same things from developers which I felt at the US DevCon last month.  General consensus is that the PS3 is hard, but once you wrap your head around it and stop treating it like a PC (or like another “unnamed console”), then there is a lot of power.  The SPUs are so much flexible than a vertex shader, but since people have been focused on GPU shader programming, it takes some retraining.  I had some conversations with some developers which planted some seeds in my head for some very cool tools.  Hopefully they will come to something.

The first movie on the flight just ended, so only about 8 more hours to go (it is an 11 hour flight from London to San Francisco).  This time, it was Children of Men, which ends on a positive note, although it certainly is not a happy movie..  On the way out, I saw Stranger Than Fiction which was also pretty good.  It is rare that I actually end up with movies that I like on flights…probably a combination of bad choices and my finicky tastes.  Hopefully I can get some sleep soon so that the jet lag does not pound me into the ground on Sunday.

On the game playing front, I finished Okami a couple of months ago.  This is an accomplishment, since it took me 45 hours to do.  I needed a break from video games after that one, so I did not play much for a little while.  On my Mexico vacation, I picked up my PSP again and cranked through both Daxter and Rachet and Clank: Size Matters.  One would hope that I would stick with the shorter games for a while, but not even close.  I am currently 15 hours into Final Fantasy XII on my PS2…and on this trip I started Final Fantasy III on my DS.  Maybe in a few months I can finally get to God of War 2, but by then I am sure that something else I want will have come out.

Something cool…I mentioned MapMyRun.com a little while ago.  My hotel was right near Oxford Circus, a prime location right next to the SCEE offices.  I did a bunch of running leaving my hotel then heading around Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens.  It was really cool to log the runs on MapMyRun.com and get the exact distances (6.19 miles) without figuring it out on a map with a piece of string like the old days.

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