Gamer Blog

My friend finally got around to starting her Gamer blog. She had been talking about it for a while. But you know how it is. With school and family activities, who has time for blogging? Well I went over and checked out the blog. Yep. Just as I thought. She is playing a lot of games. Now that summer is here, there may be even more gameplay.

A while ago I saw Final Fantasy on sale for twenty bucks at Best Buy. Of course I picked it up. I remember Final Fantasy for the original NES platform. This time around I bought an XBox 360 version. However the latest Final Fantasy has gotten a lot more complicated than before. Battle control is not simply wait for you turn, pick an enemy, and then attack.

I did not get into this latest version of Final Fantasy. Maybe I should pull out the old NES versions and get busy. Those were good time. Anyone remember the Chocobos? I also think I was in love with Tifa Lockheart. Used to have a poster of her up in my house. Heheh.

Curiosity is Complete

I downloaded this app called Curiosity some time ago. It is a massive cube whose surface you need to click to expose what is underneath. The only redeeming quality about it was that the same cube was worked on by all people who downloaded the app. After clicking for a little while, I deleted the app from my phone.

Turns out the people still playing just finished clicking the last square. One person "won" the challenge. They got a personalized message from Peter Molyneux, the creator of Curiosity. What did this person win? Big time money? A vacation trip? No. They get to be a character in an upcoming game.

LOL. Is this an epic fail or what? All right. There is a little more than that. The person who one gets to make some decisions on how the new Godus game will work. They will also get some slice of profits from that game. I am glad I did not fall for this publicity stunt. Last time I listen to anything Molyneux says.

Humble Bundle Strikes Again

There is a Humble Bundle on sale once again. This is a charity event of sorts. A bunch of games are bundled together. You decide what you want to pay for the package. The games are downloadable. You also have the option to play the games on Steam. As usual, some games are only available if you donate a certain amount of money.

Often times the best games are locked behind a minimum donation. However this time around there are some good games available at any price. Sure one of the locked games has famous voice actors like Jack Black. But the base level games are tweaking my interest. I have not purchsed any humble bundles before. Got too many games as it is. But maybe I can make an exception this time around.

You Are Doing it Wrong

I play this online game Legend of Green Dragon about twice a day. When I do well, I want to see how I compare to other players. So I click a link that shows all warriors. It feels like most of the time I get the following message:

Too many accesses: Your subnet has accessed this page too many times in the last 24 hours. Sorry, but this page requires a huge amount of resources to generate, and we can't afford the resources to have people just crawling all over this page. Try again tomorrow. 

Ummm. This should not be too hard. You just need to show me a list of players ranked by level and experience. How hard could that be? If you are running some sort of mikey mouse database that cannot support this in real time, then cache the results and show me those results that are a little stale.

Heck. The base code for the game is open source. Might be time to take matters into my own hands. How hard can it be? I think the stuff is written in PHP.

Becoming a Game Programmer

I just read this article on determining whether you have what it takes to be a game programmer. Check out John Ratcliff's post and see what you think. It sounded very harsh. {retty much John sees that there are two feasible paths: software engineer and artist. They are both hard jobs to crack in the game industry. And you got to be one in a million to make it.

Furthermore, there is more bad news. You might hate it if you do get a job in the game industry. The hours are long. The pay is low. You might get canned as soon as you deliver the game. The only goo news about being a software engineer is that it translates to other better jobs.

Ack. What is a game developer to do? Code a game ont the side as a hobby. It is the only way to stay sane in the crazy world of commercial game devlepment.