Erik Novales

Looks like it was just posted this evening. I had coincidentally decided to check to see if it had finally been released, and came across this lengthy forum thread of frustrated phone users where the release of the update was eventually discovered. I haven’t installed it yet, but I’m curious about the changes and improvements [...]

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I mentioned recently that I got an HD-DVD player for my 360. Today I decided to do a quick visual comparison between the DVD and HD-DVD versions of Hot Fuzz (which conveniently come on two sides of the same disc), to try and see the difference in image quality for myself. First, I watched the [...]

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There has been quite the deluge of FPS releases and demo releases lately, and it’s been hard to keep up with all of them. I noticed that the single-player demo for Crysis had been released, so after a lengthy download, I sat down to give it a shot. To give a frame of reference for [...]

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I recently took the plunge and bought the Xbox 360 HD DVD Player. There was a great deal at Best Buy that allowed me to get all of the following for $179.99 plus tax: The drive itself (which comes with King Kong) Two free movies of my choice (for which I chose Hot Fuzz and [...]

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I read an e-mail thread recently on the sweng-gamedev mailing list which jogged my memory about one of my most hated development clichés — “proven technology.” Why do I hate this phrase so much? The phrase implies a certain obvious correctness — nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, right? It conveniently ignores any facts [...]

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And happy. We saw the wildfires from the plane last night — it was really crazy to see from that far up, and to realize how big they actually were. The whole region appears to be under a cloud of smoke, although today is a little better than last night. Everyone is hoping for a [...]

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Me and Sandy are getting married this weekend in Vegas.

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I was at Target the other day, buying some household goods, when I decided to detour into the games section. What I found on the PC racks amazed me: That’s right — almost four years after it came out, I found three copies of the PC version of Secret Weapons Over Normandy on the shelf. [...]

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This is a great analysis of PS2 game sales and Metacritic scores for games released through December 2006. There are a few conclusions that I think can be drawn from this: For a game to truly reach blockbuster status, it must be good. There are many games that are good, but which don’t sell many [...]

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For some reason, my blog is banned in China, according to this testing tool. Or is it? Every address that I tried, including ones that are in the .cn domain, came back as rejected. They state, “This version, 1.0 may report sites as being ‘blocked’, while there are only technical reasons for their unavailability.” Hmm. [...]

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