Archive for December, 2004

Navelgazing

December 31st, 2004 by peterb

I started this weblog last January. Originally, it was just meant to be a place for me to keep my notes on my Final Cut Pro projects. My “real writing” was meant to go on the (now defunct) Tea Leaves project of the Danampersanderic art collective. But that project somehow didn’t take off, and I found myself putting more and more content here. Before I knew it there were actually readers.

It was a month later that I published a document meant to summarize my philosophy of writing for this space. It’s still on the sidebar today. The quick summary is: longer, in-depth articles. No “hey, look at this neat link!” items. Keep confessional, overly intimate, or personal details about myself to a minimum, or better yet eliminate them completely. Lastly, and perhaps most significantly, no “blogging about blogging.” If you want to find a weblog where the authors incessantly talk about Movable Type vs. WordPress, or how great or stupid RSS is, or how blogging is going to change the world, you can go practically anywhere else. I find these topics intensely boring. I want to write about stuff. I don’t want to write about writing stuff.

All rules are made to be broken, on occasion. Since it is the end of 2004, this is a good point to suspend the “no blogging about blogging” rule, for one day. I’d like to take a moment to look back at how this space has grown in the past year, and how it will develop in 2005.
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10 Things I Like

December 30th, 2004 by psu

I have a reputation, perhaps deserved, of being generally grumpy and hateful. In the spirit of the Holiday Season, I thought I would try and dispel this notion by listing many things that I like, in no particular order.
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Grand Bereft Auto

December 29th, 2004 by peterb

Here are some things I hate about the Grand Theft Auto games, in no particular order.
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Thurston Searfoss Interview

December 28th, 2004 by peterb
thurston

Thurston Searfoss and Devoted Fan

Excerpts from an interview with Thurston Searfoss, author of The Lost Admiral Returns. We recently published a comprehensive review of the game.

peterb: “How long was the development cycle for the game?”

Thurston: “It’s been about 4 years, part time. I do a number of other different jobs. So a lot longer than I would have liked. I’m a part time developer, marketer — the whole works, for good or bad — so I have to switch to alternative tasks, and then I get very frustrated at how long it takes to do anything”

What development environment and tools did you use to create the game?

“For tools, the usual C++ environment. A lot of them are actually older, so I’m actually using fastpath for file formats, that kind of stuff. I’m having to use DirectX, of course. I evaluated a couple of 3D engines but rejected them in favor of building a 2D sprite system, where I’d have more control.”
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Signal To Noise

December 27th, 2004 by peterb

Today, I cancelled my satellite TV service. I have no more broadcast or cable TV.

I hate saying that, since I’ve met so many people who get so in-your-face about not watching TV. You know the type. All you have to do is mention that, say, you saw the football game last night, and wasn’t that a great interception, and these people will literally pounce from half a room away, rushing over to inform you, for the eighty-sixth goddamn time, they they wouldn’t know, because they don’t watch TV. They’re too busy reading books and doing macrame and yoga and running their own business selling homemade homeopathic herbal tea.

For me, the decision isn’t really being driven by some sense of cultural superiority, but simple economics.
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A Very Retro Christmas

December 25th, 2004 by peterb

The wonderful gift of the Atari Anthology (more on that tomorrow) inspired my relatives and I to talk about (and play) some other retro games on various emulators. When I fired up Richard Bannister’s Mugrat, I got the following splash screen…

Colecovision Easter Egg

…complete with animated snowflakes and “Winter Wonderland” playing in the background. Since I don’t think the Colecovision actually had a clock and battery, I can only assume this was Richard’s easter egg, specifically for mugrat. In which case: Thanks, Roger! Joyeux Noël to you, too.

And, since this is an entry about an obsolete 8-bit game console, it feels somehow appropriate to note that this is the 256th article on Tea Leaves. Thanks to everyone who both reads the site and writes for it, for keeping it interesting and fun for this entire year.

The Long Dark Hallway

December 24th, 2004 by psu

As I mentioned earlier I bought Half-Life 2 last week. Here is a short meditation on why the game is perhaps the perfect shooter.
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Part of the Problem

December 23rd, 2004 by peterb

This week Salon published an especially depressing The Year in Games article, full of various commentators saying obvious and, for the most part, untrue things.

My favorite had to be the “he’s usually smarter than that” Greg Costikyan talking about how there’s “no indie games industry.” I’d be willing to bet that any random game by Ambrosia software has sold more copies, than, say, any Nokia N-Gage game. Would it be accurate, therefore, for me to say “there’s no mobile gaming industry?” Or is the metric for whether an industry exists not whether you book any revenue, but just whether a company is spending money?

The other aspect of the article was how it’s pretty clear that pretty much none of the commentators — except for Costikyan — have ever played any game that wasn’t given to them by some PR flack as a freebie. Halo this, Half-Life that, and their version of being “edgy” was recommending Namco’s Katamari Damacy . And the guy who said the best game of the year was the unplayable — but oh so corporate — Ninja Gaiden made me weep bitter tears of blood.

Stop asking why games aren’t innovative. They are. It’s just that the games you’re choosing to play aren’t innovative.

And if you want to know why that is, just look in the mirror.

Christmas Update

December 22nd, 2004 by peterb

For those of you taking off for the holiday, have a great time doing whatever it is you’ll be doing. I plan on continuing to try to update regularly through to the New Year. If you’re travelling, drive safely, and please remember to drink only homemade egg nog, never the store-bought stuff. You have my permission to use pasteurized eggs, if you worry about that sort of thing.

Ask the Game Geek, Part 2

December 21st, 2004 by peterb

Here’s another game that I vividly remember playing, but could not recall the name of. A little research has helped me figure it out, however. (Yes, I’ve updated this article since last night, when I still didn’t know the name and was bemoaning my fate).

awacs

AWACS (Click to enlarge)

It was an Apple ][ game. My memory of it was as follows: The game was played on a map of Europe, with the Soviet Union on the east and West Germany and environs on the west. Soviet fighters and bombers would appear on the map, identified by little call signs (”Tu-26″ “Mi-25″ “Su-11″). The planes would begin flying towards their western targets. In response to this, the player’s job was to select an appropriate airbase and dispatch a fighter plane from that base to intercept a given Soviet plane.
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