WTF George

Review - Gareth Emery @ Ministry of Sound, London. 11th May 2012.

It’s not every day you get to meet one of your favourite artists, then watch them play one of the most unforgettable DJ sets you have ever heard.

DJ and (mostly) trance producer Gareth Emery played a 3-hour long set at the London club Ministry of Sound, making for possibly the best DJ set I have ever watched, rivalling my experience of trance legends Above & Beyond and Armin Van Buuren. 

Gareth Emery isn’t a newcomer to the DJ/Producer scene - he’s been around since 2002, creating tracks like Mistral and Nervous Breakdown, and releasing his debut album, the brilliant Northern Lights, in 2010. He is currently experiencing great success with recent track Concrete Angel (featuring Christina Novelli), and also created and owns record label Garuda, based in Manchester.

Starting off the show with the dreamy Soul Seek by Ashley Wallbridge, he quickly upped the pace, rolling off hit after hit with tracks like his recent Tokyo and the floor-filling Apex by Ben Gold and Tritonal, moving on to more vocal material such as VADA’s Neon Lights and the aforementioned Concrete Angel. 

Emery knows exactly how to work the crowd in a club into a euphoric frenzy, and this night was no different. Dropping unreleased tracks of his, D.U.I (a collaboration with Ashley Wallbridge), and The Saga (only announced today!), he gave generous helpings of new material mixed with familiar tunes such as Mansion, Kernkraft 400, even a Emery/Adele/Eurythmics mashup too!

Finishing with classics such as his mashup with Above & Beyond, On A Good Day (Metropolis), Exposure, and the new John O’Callaghan remix of Concrete Angel, coupled with his Sanctuary/Born Slippy bootleg and the legendary Cafe Del Mar, Emery left the crowd glowing with satisfaction (and probably glowing with heat from dancing so much!).

Overall, it was a great show, and well worth many times the cost of the ticket - Gareth Emery is truly a master of dance music - he may be in the ‘high-flyers’ of the DJ world, but he’s still going up!

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George Sale.

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Gareth Emery official artist website: http://www.garethemery.com/

Concrete Angel (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dFz10R529g

Garuda website: http://garethemery.com/garuda

Photo Gallery (Ministry of Sound Facebook page): http://on.fb.me/K8F40b

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Article Copyright © George Sale, 2012. Middle-left photo © George Sale, 2012. All others promo photos reproduced from Ministry of Sound Facebook page, linked above), or Gareth Emery website.

The cancellation of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, and ‘Survarium’

When GSC Game World announced that it was closing its doors just before Christmas last year, the reaction was shock, even from the game developers themselves. Fans were outraged, and the future of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 was uncertain. After producing three successful games set in post-apocalyptic Chernobyl, and the next game deep into development, how could this happen?

A reprieve came a week or so after - Joe Mullin, the community manager for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, confirmed that after Christmas, the team would resume work on the series. However, the team has now confirmed on their Facebook page that the next game is cancelled and that the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise is no more. The reason for this apparently was because new investors couldn’t secure the rights to the highly successful series. 

However, after this sad announcement, there may be a light in the dark. The development team has started on a new game - ‘Survarium’. It isn’t S.T.A.L.K.E.R., but it’s set in a post-apocalyptic world, and will be a free-to-play, online multiplayer, first-person shooter, released at the end of 2013. 

However, this leaves me concerned. While I wish the team the best of luck in their endeavours and the success of Survarium, some particulars leave me feeling somewhat underwhelmed. While the promotional image (above) looks brilliant, there are some deeper flaws in this plan. 

Firstly, it’s free-to-play. How will the game make money here? Persistent advertisements? Annoying in-game items to buy? Who knows. While I love free stuff, I just don’t see this working well in implementation. 

Secondly, it’s an multiplayer online first-person shooter. This market, while being a big market, it saturated already, and one of the things that made S.T.A.L.K.E.R really appealing was that it was a healthy mix of everything, not just shooting - exploring, artifact hunting, and a brilliant storyline, for example. While I think the developers can probably overcome this, we must look at past results. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. wasn’t famed for it’s multiplayer options - the general opinion being ‘solid, but boring’.  I can’t help but feeling apprehensive here. 

However, what I am comforted by is that the original team is working on this game, and in the past they have produced brilliant things. I hope to be swallowing my words at the end of 2013, and proclaiming how brilliant Survarium is. We shall see.

Article Copyright © George Sale, 2012

More info:

The video announcement: YouTube (link)

The Survarium Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Survarium (link)

The Survarium Website: http://survarium.com/en/

The Open Sauce Hackathon

Saturday 10th and Sunday 11th March saw the first Open Sauce Hackathon, hosted by Cardiff University School of Computer Science and Informatics. http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/hackathon/

The event, hosted over these two days, saw students competing to design a ‘hack’ -  a new ‘something’ designed in a very short amount of time. The event was organised by students Geraint Harries, Tom Ashworth, Joe Redfern, and Henry Hoggard.

These ‘somethings’ included:

Scarf in a Fruit Bowl put together a website that collected information about housing in Cardiff, by using information ‘scraped’ from traditional letting agency websites. Effectively, they designed a massive database of housing from many different sources, which could be sorted by different factors (size, price, etc), and could make searching for a house a lot easier.

Dreadful Fish worked on a text-expansion/text-reduction program. Ever had one of those essays where it just won’t go over the word count? No problem. Their program can automatically expand contractions (they borrowed the dictionary from an AI ChatBot called Alice). For example, can’t becomes can not, totting up the word count for that essay that’s just a bit too short. Furthermore, it could reduce the word count by doing the opposite! http://www.waltercarvalho.com/df/

Tom/Phuu worked on a program which could predict what you type based on what you’ve already written. This program used something called a Markov Chain, which actually was pretty complicated! So, when used, this program can try and predict what should happen - this could have great uses in helping to make scanning printed text into a computer a lot easier!

The team from Swansea University worked on a Twitter app, which lets users track ‘trends’ by location - for example, we could see people tweeting about #cfhack were almost exclusively based in Cardiff! This exciting project used the trends, combining them with geo-location information from the individual tweets, to display the results on a map.

Joseph/ j03 created a simple but effective website to help users ‘SSH’ into remote machines. This site took remembering various commands out of the equation and replaced them with a powerful and good-looking, easy-to-understand website. http://submarineduty.com/

Flax Capacitor designed a zombie-killing survival game using Java. Using all their own components, they designed from the ground up a game where the object is to survive the onslaught of zombies for as long as possible, making for a long, complicated project which they skilfully managed to produce a fun (but terrifying) game!

CreamSlop worked on a Last.fm visualisation web app for music heads. The app showed trends by music genre in easy-to-understand graphs, so the user can see interesting stats about what they’ve been listening to. Turn it up!

Motion Kitty worked on a Raspberry Pi/Motion-Detecting Cat mashup. Using a board very similar to the Raspberry Pi (it isn’t out yet!), they coded a program to stream music from Spotify to the device, and switch it on and off via the motion-detecting cat, creating a very cheap room-to-room music streaming system. 

26 Miles of Code invented a new type of content management site. Being unimpressed and dissatisfied with the current status quo of content management sites, they set to build a totally new system, with easy ways for users to see what they want, when they want, in a beautiful way, using a HTML5 website also using JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL. The most important features of this were design and usability, creating a beautiful and function content management system differing from the norm. 

Overall, the event was a great success and hopefully another one will be organised soon!

Time-lapse video: http://vimeo.com/38306487

360 view:  http://360.io/ZveYeX

Event was sponsored by Box UK (boxuk.com), Blazerline (blazerline.com) , and Cardiff University School of Computer Science and Informatics (cs.cf.ac.uk)

Photos by George Sale, Geraint Harries, and Henry Hoggard.

Report by George Sale, 2012. Please contact me for clarifications, mistakes and additions.