Wonderful article (in Spanish) by Sergio Garcés, in Designostic.

Think about the code you might have to write, but write only the code you know you have to write.

Wow, the final details on Nintendo Wii’s launch came out this week, and the gaming world seems to be less than impressed. Every final number is at the high end of the bracket people were considering "reasonable". In Europe:

– 250 euros for the console (Wii Sports included)
– 40e for extra wiimote + 20e for extra nunchuck
– games priced between 50e and 60e
– release in December so if the console is a success you might have trouble getting one for xmas.

All this crap about 1 US$ = 1 euro, plus a funny argument between Nintendo of America and Nintendo UK on whether games will, might, or won’t be region-coded. Meh. I’ll probably still buy one, but I’m no longer excited about it.

Enough about Wii; time will tell.

Finally sat down and played some Prey on the PC, after having mildly enjoyed the 360 demo. Hm. One and a half hours later I saved and quit, unsure if I’ll continue playing it (but I will). I was feeling a bit dizzy with all the gravity bending that goes on, but the worst part is, I was simply bored with the game. I only remember two different kinds of scenery: narrow metal hallway, and narrow sphincter-like hallway. Considering that I loved both Doom 3 and Quake 4, my accusing Prey of being repetitive must be something serious. 🙂

The puzzles are clever but too frequent for my taste. The shooting is just ok. Enemy creature designs are uninspired at best. The storyline cutscenes and writing are terrible. The overall flow of scenery doesn’t have any sense of connection or purpose. The gimmicks of gravity bending and portalling are technically impressive, but not enough to support a well produced but otherwise forgettable game.

I have Joel on Software linked on the sidebar list but, if you are like most people, you have ignored it. However, if you are a software developer of any kind, there is a recent series of articles that you simply can not afford to miss:

– Finding Great Developers

– A Field Guide to Developers

– Sorting Resumes

He spoke at the BAFTA in UK, and Functional Autonomy has posted a writeup of it.

The folks over at shmup-dev have started a new competition to develop a 2D shooter with the rule that there must be some form of weapon autofire. Considering that this feature is extremely common, it’s safe to say that pretty much any shooter you could come up with qualifies for the competition. I hope many entries will take the opportunity to do something interesting with the autofire concept.