KontrolFreek Blog

More than two years later, Heavy Rain for PS3 still stands alone as the most unique and best interactive experience on any current generation console. You can disagree with me if you want, but you’re definitely wrong.

There have been some great experiences since then—Skyrim and Amnesia: The Dark Descent come to mind—but neither one of those is necessarily what I’d call “unique”. Are they both superb games? Yes. Are they both really fun to play? Yes, yes they are. Unique, though? Not really.

I won’t fully rehash my enduring love for Heavy Rain here, but if you’d like to read my review from back in 2010, feel free.

The reason I’m talking about old games is because last week at GDC 2012, Quantic Dream, creators of Heavy Rain, showed off a tech demo for the PlayStation 3’s real-time rendering capabilities and a new motion capture method called full-performance capture. The demo brings to life a female android named Kara. Kara is being assembled by robotic arms and running through her initialization sequence when a spark of independent thought prompts engineers to begin disassembling her for being “defective”. After begging for her life, Kara is warily put back together and joins the other androids, promising not to cause any further problems.

It’s a captivating and emotional piece that provokes the imagination. It reminds me that too many games today fail to incite emotion and makes me wish more developers would take chances with the games they make.

Though Quantic Dream denies that the demo is tied to a current project, I really hope to see more of Kara someday soon.

See that picture? That’s genuine mammoth marrow!

Science is cool—and a bunch scientists from the Sakha Republic’s mammoth museum in Russia and the Kinki University in Japan will set out in 2012 to successfully bring the species Mammuthus back to life in a matter of five years’ time.

In August of this year, a thigh bone of a mammoth was found in the Siberian permafrost containing marrow that’s possibly in good enough condition to use to clone the long extinct creature. The plan is—and please excuse the attempt at understanding a complex scientific process—to extract mammoth DNA to be placed in the nuclei of the egg cell of its closest living relative, the African elephant for gestation. The mammoth embryo will then be placed inside the womb of the elephant in hopes that a healthy mammoth calf will be born. Simple!

The problem is, it’s not at all simple… and even if they can successfully do the above, cloning (as we all know from South Park) is slippery slopes.