Erik Novales

When I haven’t been playing GTA IV, I’ve been trying to whack another game off of my backlog — the original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. I finished it today, having played the series somewhat out of order — 2, 3, 4 (aka Apollo Justice), then finally the first game. While having played the series out-of-order [...]

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I am currently playing the crap out of Grand Theft Auto IV. To get this out of the way immediately — it is not a 10/10 game, it isn’t perfect. It isn’t even close. That said, the middle third of the game is pretty excellent, and the game every now and then does something quite [...]

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I’ve had to use InstallShield to create installers a couple of times. These were fairly unpleasant experiences — while InstallShield is indeed a pretty flexible tool, it also takes a lot of work to get anything accomplished. Their habit of releasing new versions of the package every year (and completely abandoning the previous versions) makes [...]

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A former coworker of mine passed along a link to a pretty good read — a "Let’s Play" thread going through Knights of the Old Republic II (a game produced by my former employer, Obsidian Entertainment). If you’re not familiar with the "Let’s Play" concept, it is essentially a running commentary (with screenshots or video) [...]

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Last night, I finally plowed through to the end of Culdcept Saga. I discovered, via GameFaqs, the concept of the “symbol deck” — one that has absolutely no items or creatures in it, and instead focuses on spending as much money as possible through the symbol system, and controlling the board and pace of the [...]

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Amongst the pirates, that is, with 1,893 people leeching it at the time of the survey. Not sure how to take that…

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It’s a really great game, in my opinion, held back a little bit by some technical and usability issues. To get those out of the way first: There’s some slowdown on certain maps when a lot of creatures are deployed, which doesn’t seem justified given the perceived GPU load. There’s also some visible tearing at [...]

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While I was cleaning out and throwing away some old junk, I came across some old promotional stuff for iSmell scent technology which I guess I picked up at the 2000 GDC. I saved it for humor value. The company (Digiscents) met its demise in June 2001, to no one’s surprise. I thought I picked [...]

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We recently bought Culdcept Saga for the Xbox 360, and have been having a lot of fun with it. It’s essentially a cross between Monopoly and Magic: The Gathering — you roll a die and move your piece around the board, claiming (or contesting) territory with monsters that you cast out of your hand of [...]

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I saw on Rock Paper Shotgun that Capcom has released a free Flash demo of the upcoming Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney game. As someone who recently played Phoenix Wright: Justice for All (my introduction to the series — I haven’t yet played the other two installments), I find this demo interesting for a few reasons: [...]

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