Miriam wrote:

>Has anybody seen this multi-path Superman story Warner Bros have been
>working on for their Entertaindom site?
>
>http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,31849,00.html
    Pretty cool -- thanks, Miriam!  I was half-amused and half-annoyed 
by this line from the article:

...Peter Christy, vice president of the Internet Research Group, 
which tracks emerging technologies [said] "I'm skeptical about 
interactive endings. The nature of stories isn't that you sit around 
the campfire and ask your audience which way the plot ends."

Clearly someone who's never played a roleplaying game.  Sigh.

    As for the game itself (which I hadn't heard of before): requires 
you to download a viewer plugin, but that's pretty painless on a T1 
line.
    Good use of music and sound effects.  So-so 3D and animation -- 
nice facial structures, but not a high enough poly count to look 
really good (and the textures stretch across the meshes, looking 
weird).  Low on the interactivity scale -- there are a bunch of 
backstory bits you can view as interruptions to the main story, but 
no actual plot branches until episode 3.  The branches that are 
provided from then on aren't bad, but it's still more a 
Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story than anything else.  (And of course 
all the branches must re-collapse by the end of each episode.)
    My favorite bit is what happens if you make one particular wrong 
decision.  The bad guy wins almost immediately, and a message comes 
up saying:
    "The choices you have made have led to the ultimate destruction of 
this timeline.  Play again to save the world by making the right 
decisions."
    The amusing thing is that it's the "Try to find out more before 
attacking" option that leads to the destruction of the timeline... 
Thus, this story teaches the lesson "Always attack first and ask 
questions later."
    Fun graphics modes in the viewer -- can make the geometry go all 
woogly, can turn on disco lighting, and can switch to wireframe 
(which is pretty interesting in some parts, seeing how they achieved 
certain effects).
    Clearly a lot of time and effort went into this -- pretty 
sophisticated modeling and texturing, despite the flaws.  (The 
tearing gets pretty bad in places, though -- cars sliding through 
road surfaces and such.)  And the speed is good; the streaming works 
pretty well.  The Fast-Forward button is cool, though the rest of the 
navigation through the plot-branches could be better.
    The storyline is standard comicbooky stuff -- but written by 
Louise Simonson, an actual comic book writer, so that's no surprise. 
With the full DC universe to draw on, it has quite a lot more 
backstory than I'd expect from most Web adventures.
    Unfortunately, the viewer crashed on me several times, which 
required a couple minutes of zipping around through plot-branches to 
recover from.
    Overall, not bad.  Definitely a step in the right direction.  Cool beans.


--jed "I'll let the Metropolis Special Crimes Unit take care of you. 
They're specialists."

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