inFamous

If you have a PS3, buy this game!

• Awesome character control. Incredible freedom of movement, esp. once you upgrade to the wire grind and power glide.
• Great platforming moments.
  
• I was never a fan of electricity powers...until this game! Satisfying powers and upgrades.
• Pretty decent narrative (enough to keep me going).
• Bottom line is the incredible feeling of being able to fluidly navigate through the city (something I was hoping Assassin's Creed would deliver...maybe in the second installment). In this game, I felt like I could grab onto anything that looked "grab-able".
  
• 9+ rating in my book (haven't played one of those in a while).
  

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Other honorable mentions that I've played recently:

Ninja Blade:

• Didn't get the best reviews, but I dug it.
  
• Play it for the ridiculously over the top quick-time events. I dug the boss battles too. Not a perfect game, but definitely entertaining (for me). Not for everyone (esp if you don't like quick-time events), but if you can enjoy some cheese sprinkled over some crazy action, give this game a go.
  

Wolverine:

• Definitely visceral. Repetive in some areas, but entertaining as a action slasher. Gotta love Wolvie's cyclone move and "psycho-crusher" drill (in the game).

Camera Rig

Hello everyone, I'm coming off of vacation and heading back to work tomorrow...I figured I'd post something before things get busy again.
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I found this shaker script a while back and decided to make a camera rig out of it. I find it useful for throwing in some quick camera shakes. Of course, if you have time, you should hand key a bit of the rotate channels as well.

HERE'S A QUICK RUN-THROUGH OF THE CAMERA RIG:

• Tilt the camera with the "up_CON" controller, the "tilt" attribute on "CAM_CON", or the Z rotate channel on the main controller.
  
• "Zoom" attribute actually trucks the camera in closer (doesn't affect focal length). It was added out of necessity. There were times when we wanted to experiment with different versions of a shot--bring the camera in close or keep if out further.
• "Frequency" regulates how fast the jitter is.
• "Ampitude" regulates how big each shake is.
• "Phase"--honestly, I've never use this.
• "Flash"--one of my cheap tricks to get a screen flash.
• Contrain the parent of "up_CON" or "aim_CON" if you want it to follow a target (I tend to not constrain, though...still experimenting).
• "CAM_noise" is keyable. For lack of a better name, it's to layer in extra camera "noise".
• Visiblity switch is found on "Master_VisibilityShape" node (select "CAM_CON" then look in channel box").
  

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WORD OF CAUTION:

I found that it may be difficult to "undo" in Maya once you press play with the camera rig in your scene. This is due to how to the shake feature is set-up.

Here's my work around:
I toggle the "Shake" expression on and off, depending if I'm working on the camera or not.

Use this mel to turn it off:

• expression -e -s "" -o noise_MD -ae 1 -uc all Shaker; print "Shake off!";
  

Use this mel to turn it on:

• expression -e -s "noise_MD.input1X = (noiseX.outColorR -.5) *.2;\r\nnoise_MD.input1Y = (noiseY.outColorR -.5) *.2;\r\nnoise_MD.input1Z = (noiseZ.outColorR -.5) *.2;\r\n\r\nfloat $valeur = `getAttr (\"CAM_CON.frequency\")` *2;\r\nfloat $phase = `getAttr (\"CAM_CON.phase\")`;\r\n$valeur += $phase;\r\nsetKeyframe -v $phase -at \"time\" -t 0sec CAM_shaker;\r\nsetKeyframe -v $valeur -at \"time\" -t 4sec CAM_shaker;\r\n\r\nnoiseX.time = CAM_shaker.time + 5;\r\nnoiseY.time = CAM_shaker.time + 10;\r\nnoiseZ.time = CAM_shaker.time + 20;" -o noise_MD -ae 1 -uc all Shaker; print "Shake on!";
  

Make shelf buttons for these commands or do what I do and make them buttons on your Picker.

Have fun, but don't holler if you cant undo in Maya cause you forgot to turn the "Shake" expression off! I had to learn the hard way:)