Sep 9, 2008
Right now there is a revolt going on in the gaming world. Literally thousands of people have given Spore a 1 star rating on Amazon because of the DRM it carries. I love it!
But, I also hate it. Spore is the type of game the industry needs - innovative, fresh, and well polished. It’s a damn shame that publishers care more about pirating software than the fidelity of the gaming experience.
I hope this revolt affects EA’s bottom dollar so much that they realize that pissing off your customers with computer-destroying DRM is much, much more damaging than underground software pirating. I personally will never install this game on my computer - I can’t stand hidden processes, can’t stand spyware, and can’t stand the audacity of some publisher who thinks they can get away with this trash on my computer.
Sorry to all the people who poured their creative effort into what appears to be an amazing game.
Aug 17, 2008
Found this via joystiq, via mudron’s comic. I love the music in Braid, and it has the rare quality of being nice to listen to outside of the game context, unlike other game soundtracks I really love.
Braid Soundtrack on iTunes
Jul 5, 2008
Location based gaming isn’t anything new. Take a look at the wikipedia page for location-based game to see a wide variety of games dating back to around the turn of this century. But, what are all these games missing? Hint: it starts with an i and rhymes with dry scone.
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Jun 20, 2008
In a previous post I mentioned an article about using erlang to write multiplayer servers. The author of the article referes to an open source project he created called OpenPoker which he released under dual licenses - GPL, Commercial. Unfortunately, he later decided to stop supporting the GPL version of the project and removed all references to his source, but a simple google search for openpoker turns up the source code in the first few results as of this writing.
Besides being a good lesson in how nothing really every dissappears from the internet, I mention it because studying the source has given me a lot of insight on how to approach a multplayer server in erlang. I highly recommend checking it out, even if you don’t use a single line of code from it. At the very least it’s a great working example of how to implement gen_server.
Also here’s a good primer on gen_server.
May 30, 2008
The buzzword this year for gaming is probably going to be the same buzzword in the Web 2.0/Silicon Valley world - Cloud computing and storage. Valve just dipped their hat in with Steam Cloud.
May 21, 2008
Just grabbed the new Penny Arcade game off xbox live and I have to say that it’s a lot better than I though it would be. The animation and asthetics are great, the dialog is witty, just as you’d expect from PA, and the pacing seems nice a quick so far. I look forward to playing the rest of it.
If you’re not an xbox live-er, you go grab the game at greenhouse games. I want to say they have it available for PC, Mac, and Linux but I’m not sure and too lazy to follow my own link.
I highly recommend checking this out. On XBLA it’s 1600 points but well worth it.
