FK Zebra: Final Match on September 28

The filming for FK Zebra is coming to an end. It’s been a blast, I’ve gotten more excercise in these two months than in the entire previous year, met some cool people, did some fun stuff and played a lot of tough matches. The last match is on September 28th and he first episode will air on October 1st.

Sadly, our final match will not be at Ullevaal as planned. The grass is too worn out, they say, and I understand that the worldcup qualifications take priority over a bunch of nerds. So we’ll be playing on our home turf, at Haraløkka Idrettsanlegg. The event starts at 11 o’clock, the actual game at 14:00 sharp – I hope there will be a big group of supporters!

I’m going to be sad when this is all over, and I hope we can get together and play a bit more after we’ve all com down from the permanent high that these two months have been.

FK Zebra

FK Zebra Logo

For those of you who come here through a google search for “enno rehling zebra”: Yes, I’m the guy that’s on TV2’s new football show FK Zebra. For those who don’t know what that is, we’re 16 nerds who are learning to play football, and we’re being coached by Norway’s former national coach, Egil “Drillo” Olsen. This is a lot of fun for us, and because most of us have never played much football before, and we’re playing with some football legends, it will hopefully also make good television. If you’re in Norway, tune in to TV2 Zebra in October.

If you’re hoping for inside information about the show or match results then I have to disappoint: we’re not allowed to give away spoilers (games industry folks will be familiar with the concept of an NDA), so I probably won’t talk about anything that hasn’t already been shown on TV. If you want to see what’s been written about us other places, the Facebook group for our team.

Only you can see that

I made a shocking discovery today: Gamers don’t care about graphical quality. I was sitting together with a dozen other nerds looking at four of them play FIFA 08, and commented on how bad the lighting in that game is (a “where is the light source that is throwing those shadows?” sort of comment). When I explained why it couldn’t be the way it was, one of the guys said “only you would see something like that”.

To me, and everyone working in games, what looked like a cheap mix of shadow maps and stencil shadows was glaringly obvious, and we know the PS3 can probably do better. But to these guys, all with different backgrounds, it not only didn’t matter – they didn’t see it! Why are we spending bazillions of dollars on ever more refined tricks like AO (“look how the shadow in the corner of the room are very realistic – oooh!” when even simple shadows are something players don’t pay attention to?