Yeah, hum… I’m not calling it the XBox 2 anymore, and I even bought one a couple weeks after release. 🙂

– XBox Live Arcade positively rocks. I tried to approach it as a dumb user, and found that the menus are not simple, but they are consistent, so once you get the hang of them, anyone should be comfortable. The ability to download game demos, trailers and such is great, now all it needs is more more more content. The likes of Zuma, Geometry Wars and Bejeweled should provide tons of fun to anyone with a knack for classic gaming. On the other hand, the coin-op remakes (Gauntlet, Joust) were very unpolished and just not worth any price.

– Project Gotham Racing 3 is very good. Fast, fun and with many options. Not in the same league as Gran Turismo 3/4, but certainly "good enough" to satisfy your racing appetites.

– Quake 4 rocks just as much as on the PC. Framerate is not exactly silk smooth, but certainly better than your average "gaming" PC (which should cost 3-4x as much as the 360). Including Quake 2 is a very nice touch, although the controls are much better in Quake 4 (Q2 seems a straight port without much finetuning).

– Perfect Dark Zero is… hm… ok. It’s well done, but I found it terribly confusing (which, for a FPS game, is weird). The funniest part is, with the excellent atmosphere imbued in the game, anywhere from the intro movie to the menus and game itself, I found myself missing some more backstory (who am I, what is my purpose, etc). And I’m not one to pay attention to storylines in games, so the fact that I miss it is surprising. The first mission looks like a bad copy of Halo, the second mission begins stealth-style without enough guidance, and at that point I put it down.

– Kameo is very well done, looks good and… well, if you like that sort of game, it should be very fun. I found it too much a collection of predefined puzzles with a "gotcha" to solve them.

– Condemned is dark, creepy, and… I never liked Silent Hill, so this game bored me to tears. Others are loving it.

– Call of Duty 2 looked great, I haven’t sat down to play it yet.

Also got my first crash, while loading Quake 4’s 4th mission. Heh.

On another topic, are developers playing less games than ever? You can bet I have played less games this year. In fact, I play less games since I started playing MMORPGs about 3 years ago. But the biggest impact wasn’t the amount of games I played, it’s the amount of games I actually finished (or got near the end, I was never a 100% kind of dude). In 2005, the number is one. In 2004, it was two. In 2003, I think it was one again.

Another thing I realized is that, since developing Praetorians, I haven’t touched another RTS. I barely touched our very own Imperial Glory. Similarly, I stopped being a basketball and NBA addict after working on Microsoft NBA Inside Drive. Interesting, huh?

It’s great, useful and… I have always had some dark thoughts about it, which Penny-Arcade has pretty much summed up in their unique style:

"What you’ve proposed is a kind of quantum encyclopedia, where genuine data both exists and doesn’t exist depending on the precise moment I rely upon your discordant fucking mob for my information."

With the heated debates going on about its updated procedures, policies, goals and fundraising, it’s hard to see it growing in significance beyond what it currently offers.

Version 0.2 of the little C# game can be downloaded here. It has a little bit of AI, enough to make the game, if not truly challenging, at least much more interesting.

I have also included a Release version which shouldn’t require Visual Studio 2005 installed, and links to the necessary runtimes. I get reports that it still fails to run in some machines – I have no idea why. Can someone help with this?

Every now and then, I experiment with C# and the .NET Framework. For the most part, it’s an amazingly useful environment to develop on; you can crank up tools and interfaces in no time, and Visual Studio provides lots of helpers to improve productivity and general comfort. However, not all is rosy. Being a const-correctness fan, I dismayed when I found out about this.

To quote from one of the comments:

> Mort just wants to get his job done.
Yeah, and I have to clean up after mort.

Const-correctness is a fantastic way to develop more robust code, period. Seeing a system like .NET, which should be aimed at developing large-scale software, be weakened to appease the laziness of a bunch of hack-and-forget programmers is sad.

You can download a small mini-game done with C# and Managed DirectX here.

The December DirectX 9 SDK has been released. It apparently includes some DX10 tech previews requiring unreleased hardware and the latest beta of Windows Vista.

Ah, the joys of another version of the D3DX DLL…

Edit: Oh yes another buggy installer from your favourite Software giant! A few seconds into the installation, it halted with an error because it couldn’t find some "April 2005 SDK files". Then it started to rollback the installer, and then decided to continue installing anyway.

You might end up making a $250 million mistake.

Edit:Funnily enough, I made a typo in this topic’s subject line.

This, this and this, are some of the latest "horror stories" about retailers trying to abuse and screw their consumers.

Sometimes I think we deserve to be wiped out by a new and cataclismic Ice Age.

Due to popular demand (i.e. 3 of the 4 people who read this blog requested it, Trace being the last), I added a RSS 2.0 feed to the site. It can’t be viewed directly as XML in the browser because I don’t know how to make the server output that page typed as XML. Nothing serious I guess. I tested it with RSS Reader but I suppose people will complain that they want support for 0.9, or Atom, or whatever else.

Interesting bits of info: it only took 40 minutes from the point I said "ok let’s do it" to where the feed code was programmed, uploaded and running in the site; it worked correctly on first try. Google, PHP and XML are so nice sometimes. 🙂

I still need to get some proper publish dates for the entries, and maybe even some summary text, but… bah another day.

Edit: The RSS Feed now has the correct MIME type, proper dates, and is validated as correct by http://feedvalidator.org/

Damn, this is bad news! Stainless Steel brought us Empire Earth, Empires, and were working on the absolutely gorgeous Rise and Fall. Although not my personal favourite RTS games, they were very well done and showed all the technical and artistic talent of the SSSI crew. I had the pleasure to meet Rick Goodman a few times, and it was apparent he loved his job and cared for his employees.

Best wishes to Rick and all the SSSI developers, hope they land on their feet and deliver their talent in many top-notch games.

In completely unrelated news, this article on Sony’s future regarding digital formats is short and well written. I’ll highlight one sentence: "if you treat customers like criminals, you’ll turn them into criminals."

Edit: More anti-copyright opinions, this time from Ernest Adams.

Our official Games Industry Clown gets a nice slap in the face. Among other beauties: ‘Judge Moore stated that Thompson’s behaviour in court "suggests that he is unable to conduct himself in a manner befitting practice in this state.’"

Edit: JT didn’t like The Escapist’s take on him. Anything that makes him sad, makes me happy. Rejoice!