Erik Novales

Last night we went to see Supergrass in concert, which was a decent show. Standing near us was a guy wearing a promo T-shirt for a game — I had the same shirt, from an E3 several years ago. The game was "Seed," and was apparently shut down a few months after its release. As [...]

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Oasis frontman links videogames to knife violence: "If kids are sitting up all night smoking super skunk [cannabis] and they come so desensitised to crime because they’re playing these videogames, it’s really, really scary." * "sudden expertism" being a bit of Ticket lingo describing people who insist that they are an authority on any subject [...]

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We bought Ticket to Ride on XBLA the other day, and Sandy has pretty much owned me in our (decidedly non-combative) matches. I was 0-9 before I eked out a victory last night. I feel like I have a pretty decent grasp on appropriate strategy for the game (card and route selection), but it never [...]

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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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