So there’s a Bowie studio album at number one. How very 1993/1984/1983/1980/1974/1973/1973.

Time to reminisce.

As a young and impressional youth, my first single was “Are ‘friends’ electric?” by Tubeway Army. By today’s standards, judging by the fetuses screaming for Justin Bieber, I was a later starter at 13. There had been a brief error of judgement with a David Soul single, but I discount that as due to my adoration of Starsky and Hutch (that’s the excellent original TV series, not the lame recent film). I also don’t tell anyone about that, even though I still have the 7″ single…whoops.

Tubeway Army of course led to Gary Numan, the Human League, Bauhaus, even early Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran. Around this time my brother moved back in with us for a while. He’s twenty years my senior, and so as a small child he was almost like an uncle, being at work and getting married and all that grown up stuff. But he was wise and cool. He drove an Alfa Romeo, knew all there was to know about football and had a job that took him to America. He was also a massive Bowie fan.

I can remember being so dismissive when he drew comparisons between Bowie and the stuff I was listening too. How could they not be completely original, these masters of the synth and studio?

He knew how to win me over. He played me some of the first record of the double album Stage. A highly polished ‘live’ album that is a wall of synthesisers and catchy tunes mixed with doom-laden anthems. He was so right, Bowie had done it all before. I didn’t disown my previous heroes, but I certainly looked upon them in a new light.

Then of course Scary Monsters came out. Game over. He’d out played them all, and roped Steve Strange into his video. Genius. To the record store to blow all the pennies I’d saved for the next Human League album to buy Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Heroes, Low…the list went on. How long had he been churning out this stuff?

Enough of his previous work and my devotion to it. What of the new album?

Well there’s not an original note on it. It’s derivative. It’s reusing old ideas and reselling them to both the new and old generations.

But it’s reusing HIS old ideas. There are hints of so many previous Bowie songs it’s hard to keep count. It’s like meeting an old friend after years apart, sharing a pint and finding that you still have the same sense of humour. 

It’s a great album. He is a still a genius.

Looking forward to the next number one album in 2033.

After waiting eagerly for the PS4 announcement last night, what can I say?

No really, what can I say that won’t sound like I’m just not bothered?

Besides the disappointment of the Dual Shock 4 controller (yep, it really does look like an old controller with a touch pad and light gaffer-taped on), and the fact that we didn’t actually see the beast (my bet is it looks like a PC at the moment BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT IT IS), the demos were mind numbing. Pretty, but mind numbing.

We had ‘Knack’, which looks like Kameo on steroids. Cute, but no game changer. We had another Killzone, which looked pretty, but is just another FPS judging by what was shown, and worse that that the opening scene was SO clichéd it was beyond parody. We had Drive Club, a Gran Turismo replacement launch game to show off shiny cars.

OK, Media Molecule has some wacky sculpting and puppetry tools that looked fun, and Second Son looked like a well put together demo, but what’s new?

There was a lot of talk about ’emotion’ again (hasn’t there always been at a PS launch?), and nothing getting between the player and the game. It seems to me that Sony’s willingness to take risks and truly push gaming is long gone. The recognition that their unique console architectures are just too expensive and hard to programme and reverting to a PC-like architecture seems like an admission of defeat. And the nervous, stumbling presentations didn’t have the swagger and humour of previous launches (I still talk about the ‘rubber duck’ demo for the PS3).

The graphic power is clearly up there, with some nice character demos etc. but that’s not really enough any more is it?

The bit they started with, the ability to share video and your screen with some nice quick compression/decompression seemed to be their only attempt at a ‘USP’. And would that make be buy a new console?

This could be the first Playstation I don’t buy. Which given the happy hours that I spent the One, Two and Three I find a bit sad.

Tuesday, after popping over to the LSx Open Cafe (the first time in 5 years of invitations, and well worth finally getting there), it was off to Media City in Salford for the BBC Future Media ‘open evening’.

It was a good chance to chat to some of the team who work on some really nice projects such as the new Tivo ‘connected Red Button‘ and the iPlayer apps for various platforms. We also saw some of the tech that’s being developed for multiscreen viewing and some ‘proper’ engineering for sync’ing HD signals over using standard ethernet connections. They’ve been doing a lot of work about using IP networks for everything, which will cut costs in terms of specialised distribution hardware. They were preparing for the first live trial of the their ‘halfRF‘ project that squeezes HD signals into a tiny bit of RF spectrum making wireless cameras much more viable. For the real geeks out there, there’s some more about halfRF here.

It was also good fun to play with the Xbox Kinect interface to the iPlayer.

This has been out for a while, but I hadn’t played with it before. It’s not quite ready to replace the remote yet in my opinion, but it’s a nice toy to impress folk if you want that Minority Report look. Of course, I’ll be mostly using the Tivo and the new Red Button to get to iPlayer, so I can’t see myself booting up the Xbox very often just to use the iPlayer. Maybe I should move the Xbox to a different room…

After the demos, there was a chance to attend some talks by some of the staff and developers there.

There were some really good sessions,and it was a shame that they overalapped and each one only ran once, which meant missing on some of them. I particularly enjoyed the Behaviour Driven Development from Jack Palfrey and Agile project management from Craig Pointon. Andy Wilson was also there talking about training at the BBC, including the MSc in Software Engineering & Internet Architecture that we’re working on with them, but due to clashes I missed that talk (sorry Andy).

All in all, half a day well spent. Looking forward to the next one!

What a festival! I guess it may just be because I managed to make it to more sessions than in recent years, but I thought this year’s BAF was one of the finest. The quality of the sessions and the variety of the subjects covered made it a fascinating week. I made it to most of BAF Game for a change, and a few of the main festival down at the Museum. So here are some of my highlights.

The festival kicked off with Stewart Gilraytalking about resurrecting the Oddworld brand. Abe’s Oddyssee was one of my all time favourites on the original Playstation. The charaterisation was superb and I had real empathy with the character, to the extent of getting very upset when there was a particularly nasty plant that kept eating Abe!

The reworking looks superb, and it was pleasing to hear that they were shying away from producing a touchscreen edition for tablets as the control system doesn’t suit. I can understand the desire to produce tablet and phone versions for a lot of classics (not least to make some money, but also as a challenge), but unless you revise some substantial parts of the interface, they just don’t work. Yes, GTA is playable on an iPad, but it’s nowhere near as easy or fun to play as on a console. It was also fun to hear that there were five games in the original vision, each of which added a new character to those of previous games, resulting in five playable in the last one. Let’s hope they all come into existance!

Either way, the re-imagining of Abe’s Oddysee, Nice ‘n’ Tasty, looks ace.

Jennifer Schneidereit and Philip Tossell from Nyamyam talked about Tengami, a beautiful Japanese-inspired game that has its game mechanic based on the ‘pop-up’ book.

This has some really original ideas in what was basically a platform/adventure cross-over, and the design tools that they demonstrated showed some creative problem solving to get this game into a playable state. Whilst the game looked great, and the playable sections they showed were great, I guess my question is longevity. How do you keep up the wonder of the the initial ‘page-turn’ with the pop-up mechanice, and how do you keep it from becoming repetitive? It’s clearly aimed at touchscreen devices, and games for these tend to be a bit more cerebral than action-based, so I’m sure it will find a market, but I’d want to play more before handing over my cash I think.

The ‘pop-up’ book metphor continued into the next talk from Joel Smith from Sony. He talked about the harry Potter Book of Spells game that uses the Sony Eye and Wonderbook to create an augmented reality game that changes the ‘Wonderbook’ into the Book of Spells from the Harry Potter stories. Players then take on the role of apprentice wizards and use the Move contollers as wands to cast spells, etc.This looked like a great deal of fun, I just need to find an excuse to get this as I’m not exactly in the target age group! It will be interesting to see how well the interface works, the children in the demo that they showed seemed to be engaged with it, but I guess they wouldn’t be shown otherwise.

Busy, busy, busy. Good job Nicki’s not about to have our second child any day (oh, hang on…).

First of was a trip to Bournemouth for the Media Education Summit, which helpfully dovetailed rather nicely with the Bridging the Gap conference, rather well summarised in this video yes, I know it says Teesside University, and they did indeed organise it, but it was held in Bournemouth).

http://www.youtube.com/embed/GLL2aWSxfN4

Both events were blessed with some great speakers, from Ian Livingstone once more extolling the virtues of a good education in coding to the Guardian’s Paul Lewis giving an insight into the new connected world of journalism and how social media has radically altered the role.

We were there to present the Media Working Academy at Bridging the Gap, specifically a case study of how some of our students (with some valuable guidance and input from Darren Bristow from Quba) helped GfK try out some ideas for their e-magazine and produced a tablet version of a paper-based publication. The best thing about this project (besides the nice things that GfK’s Aoife McArdle said about the work) was that the students have gone on to work for GfK. You can’t get a better recommendation of quality than that!

Once that was fully absorbed, it was off the the BBC Trust for the Audience Council England meeting. It’s the start of a ‘new year’ for this, so it was mainly to catch up on what the pattern of work will be over the next year, but it was interesting to hear how Ben Cooper‘s decision to replace Chris Moyles with Nick Grimshaw would hopefully stop old fogies like me listening to the Breakfast Show and get that average age of the listener back where it should be! Ralph Rivera and Andy Conroy gave an insight into Future Media at the BBC, and suffice to say there’s some exciting stuff coming off the back of the excellent developments across all four screens for the Olympics. It’s one of the few parts of the BBC that has escaped relatively unscathed from DQF, and although (as Anthony Lilley said at Bridging the Gap) the iPlayer “isn’t enough”, there’ll be more things in the pipeline that will made similar step changes in the way people consume the BBC’s outputs. Watch that Red Button!

Finally it was over to Media City to kick off the Audience Council part of the Trust’s review of the BBC online provision. We again heard from Andy Conroy, this time abley supported by Laura Ellis (Head of English Regions New Media) and Saul Nasse (Controller of BBC Learning). It will be intersting to see how this goes, with such a diverse spread of content and users covered by the generic term ‘online’.