Erik Novales

Through a rather convoluted (but interesting) path, I came upon an Escapist article from earlier this year which trashes one of the whipping boys of game design, the escort mission. While I certainly wouldn’t disagree that there are tons of terrible escort missions in games, I think that escort missions don’t have to be terrible. [...]

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“Size is the Enemy” is a Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror) article that has made the rounds lately. It’s a response to a rambling rant by Steve Yegge about how large code bases are unwieldy, and how language choice affects the viability of software projects beyond a certain size. Early on, Jeff calls out a quote [...]

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There has been a bit of a brouhaha lately with regards to guitar compatibility between Rock Band and Guitar Hero III on the PS3. As of now, you can’t use the Les Paul guitar that comes with Guitar Hero III when playing Rock Band (on the PS3). Why? It’s not like they’re very different — [...]

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The gaming blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun recently ran an article mentioning the next project of the developers of the 2005 PC game Boiling Point. That upcoming game, however, is not the real focus of the article (nor of this one). There’s a bit of pointing and snickering at part of a bug fix list for [...]

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In furtherance of my recent Gamerscore binge, I decided to branch out a little bit and explore a new game genre for me — hunting games. I rented Cabela’s Big Game Hunter for the 360, and just got done getting all 1000 Gamerscore a little while ago. I have to say that I was fairly [...]

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Continuing my Gamerscore binge, I rented Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie, another (mouthful of a) title that is somewhat infamous in the 360 world for being a relatively easy 1000 points. I picked it up last night, but didn’t get a chance to play it until today. With the help [...]

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With Sandy out of town for a few more days, I decided to do something silly…namely, binge on Gamerscore points by getting a Blockbuster Game Pass and renting as many easy 1000-pointers as possible. The goal is to see how much I can pump up my score in a short period of time. In preparation, [...]

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Having constructed the Potemkin villages that are game environments, game developers just don’t see games the same way that the general public sees them. Every game developer I know has, at some point (and usually, often) sat around with co-workers, playing the latest and greatest game and critically ripping it apart for problems that are [...]

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Rock Band is awesome. I got it this morning and have been playing the drums for most of the day, driven by the desire to crack the top 1000 in the drum career mode, if only fleetingly. (I finally managed to do so a few minutes ago, peaking at #997. It’s tough, because there are [...]

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It can be found here. The biggest new features include integration with all SKUs of Visual Studio 2005, and support for Live on both Windows and the 360. The Visual Studio integration is huge, in my opinion, if only because it enables source control and add-in support for developers. I guess now you’re also able [...]

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